My greatest nemesis... math.

In our editing print and online media class the past few weeks, we've been talking about numbers... code for math.

Many journalism articles contain numbers and often, a new set of numbers acquired by a journalist need to be compared to a previous set of numbers to track changes and trends in patterns (particularly in business). Therefore, some math is required by the journalist to make these numbers relevant in a story and useful to the reader.

But math is my biggest crutch. It was my worst subject in grade 12, so I avoided it all through university. At Red River, we've barely had to deal with them. My brain just doesn't work that way.

So I am nervous to run into them in a work place scenario. There are a lot of people who can do math better than I can, so if I make a mistake, which is very possible, either my editor (hopefully) or my readers (even worse) would notice.

Furthermore, if I ever became an editor and have to be checking someone else's work, I could very well miss errors in numbers and math.

We've been discussing percent versus percentage point in class lately, and while I understand the difference between the two and why both are useful in a story, I have trouble actually doing the math to figure them out or check whether they are right.

So my goal for the next few years is to get better at math. In particular, the math that I will need to use most often in my stories. Starting with percentage points.