I had a friend who was "Math anxiety personified". She did not take high school math, and was convinced that she was not mathematically inclined, as are most women in our culture.

Intimidated by a certain administrator who spouted impressive sounding stats all the time at meetings , and we used to back off and give in. Eventually other evidence convinced us that said individual was a certified idiot. So, my math anxious friend sat down and went through this clown's report one night, math text in one hand, report in other and found about 12 errors in first page.

At next meeting, she called him on it, and we win our first battle with this idiot. From then on we won all our battles with him and my friend said, "You know, this math stuff is really hard, except for these few things I had to read to nail this clown. That stuff was all pretty straight forward."

To make a long story short, she is currently finishing her Ph.D. in statistics.

Moral of this story is, if you don't let yourself be intimidated -- and if you can just add, subtract, multiply and divide -- you can do 90% of the math you need to out talk any administrator, parent, or salesman alive.