The Bates economics department is testing my patience. For some inane inexplicable reason, the department refuses to teach economics with true numerical analysis. It frightens me to think the College will grant someone a bachelor's degree in economics without requiring that same person to have taken anything beyond calculus of a single variable.

Trying to do numerical problems in my economics courses without the aid of such useful tools as demand and supply functions, differentiation, and integration drives me crazy. I feel like I have a learning disability because I struggle to understand the bizarre overly vulgarized "economic formulas" provided by my economics professors. People of all ages deserve to know that the price-point elasticity of supply or demand is simply the product of the ratio of the price and the quantity demanded or supplied at that price, and the derivative of the demand or supply function at that point. It's easier, more accurate and it makes so much more sense!

Not that I blame my professors for my misery. Every member of our economics faculty — or at least every member of our economics faculty I've met — is incredibly intelligent, and, for that matter, probably reasonably good at very high-level mathematics.

Rather, I blame our society's general fear or stigmatization of mathematics for my current predicament. For whatever other inane and inexplicable reasons, people generally seem to possess a strong aversion to math. I had to exercise extreme self-restraint the other day when a fellow student expressed her intention to major in economics and never take another math course again. I would call that course of action moronic, to put it mildly.

I only wish our economics department would ditch its soft math requirements and pile on the prerequisites for economics courses. If some students have to become philosophy majors, so be it. Economics and mathematics go together like garlic and butter.