Wastewater 101’s Barbara Smith spent the day (March 3, 2016) in Kokomo, Indiana discussing Basic Wastewater Math.  Do you know how to convert lbs/day to cfs?  Or can you find the concentration if given the lbs/day and the flow?  Can you work an F/M or Sludge Age calculation quickly and efficiently without the computer?  Well take a look at nine people from the Kokomo Wastewater Treatment Plant who now can say yes to all those questions and more when it comes to “ciphering”.   For this course quite a bit of it consisted of completing the specific “design information” pages for the Kokomo plant – how to figure the cuft and gallons of the tanks, solids loading rates, etc.  Then we used Kokomo’s flows and general laboratory information to find the F/M ratio, the Sludge Age, MCRT and Wasting Rate at different flows.  When we started the course at 7:00 a.m. the mood was cold and gloomy (just as was the weather outside) by lunch there were a few who were feeling more comfortable with the course.  By the end I had more than one person say they actually understood how to work the formulas and one even said, “I got it and they can’t take it away from me”.  That of course was my crowning moment!!  Because it is so true, once you “get it” no one can take it away from you, math doesn’t have to be scary, for some they just need to have more of a visual perspective than just those formulas, numbers and words.