I am considering doing something very scary on Thursday afternoon.

I am considering walking into Sophie’s parent/teacher conference and asking her teacher to let my kid ditch math, permanently.

Ditch? Did I mean to use such a strong word? Well, yeah. Sort of.

As I’ve written before, Sophie can’t do the math. She can’t do the math the “low group” in her fourth grade class is doing. She can’t even do the math below what the low group is doing. This morning her long-time physical therapist read over some of the special ed teacher’s weekly progress notes about multiplication and word problems and asked, “Is Sophie able to do any of this?”

No, I admitted. She’s not.

Dorcas has been Sophie’s physical therapist since she was 3 months old. She almost never offers her unsolicited opinion. But when she does, it’s always solid. Last month I admitted to her that I never did get Sophie’s AIMS test (Arizona’s standardized test) results in the mail.

“Do you really want to see the results?” she asked.

Well, no. I admitted. I guess not. Good point.

(Some background: You need to know that I can’t think of anyone who pushes Sophie harder, who has higher expectations for my kid, and who’s prouder of her. The first nine months Dorcas worked with Sophie, the baby sobbed through every session. “Want to quit yet?” I’d ask Dorcas when she emerged at the end of an hour. “No,” she’d say serenely, wheeling her suitcase of therapy toys out the door. And one day, Sophie stopped crying; now she cries when Dorcas cancels. Dorcas taught Sophie to walk. And a lot more.)

Now I stood and watched Dorcas try to bite her tongue. Finally she burst out: “You know, if she was my kid, I’d tell them to show her how to use a calculator on the iPad and teach her about money. Why bother with the rest?”

To be honest, I’d been thinking the same thing for a while. The last time I wrote about Sophie and math, I got an amazing gift, in the form of a comment from my friend Elaine, who is so wise that when she leaves comments on my blog, people swoon. (Me included.) Here’s what she wrote:

Oh, Amy. As someone who likes math, here’s what I think: math is useful the way poetry is useful. That is to say, there are people who couldn’t live without it. And there are plenty who don’t ever need it at all. Math is worth studying for the same reasons poetry is worth studying: it’s beautiful and it’s empowering. You may never have seen the beauty, so you’re going to have to trust me on this one, math is an elegant system of logic, it’s this gorgeous architecture of theorems, it’s actually related to the swirls in a pineapple and the sounds in a musical scale…. But it you miss all that? No biggie. As long as Sophie knows that she is getting the right change, and that a $20 off sale is not the same as a 20% off sale, well, then, she’s probably okay. It sounds like you probably missed out on some of the beauty and empowerment of math (so many people do), and you turned out more than fine.

So yeah, I’d been thinking about it for a while, about telling the school to ditch math. But it’s scary. It would be the biggest step I’ve taken so far — even bigger than demanding an aide, bigger than agreeing each year to more time in the “resource room” — toward admitting Sophie can’t keep up. Won’t ever keep up. Is falling behind.

“If I ask for this, can’t they just tell me she doesn’t belong there?” I asked.

“No,” Dorcas said. “They are supposed to give her work she can do.”

Okay. So maybe I’ll bring it up Thursday.

Trouble is, I have a bad feeling that math will turn out being the easiest problem to solve. Even during a year that, by all accounts, is going very, very well.