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Friday, June 16, 2006

Math

I'm heading off shortly to another meeting on the dreaded "bath" department controversy. I hate them. It's enough to make me want to stop buying soap. And to make our bathrooms into shrines to some obscure cult-like divine figure.

Actually, when you get down to it, I'm in favor of bathing; it's the math assholes that irritate me.

I was good in math in high school. I attended high school in Georgia and in that great state, in the summer before one's junior or senior year, it was possible to be nominated to go to a sort-of geek summer camp called Governor's Honors. I REALLY wanted to go to Governor's Honors. I wanted to go in English or social studies. The school wanted to nominate the strongest people in each area. We had to write essays, take math tests, do science experiments, and take history quizzes. I got all the problems right on the math test and my semi-rival wrote a better essay than I did in English. They decided to nominate us both. My heart wasn't in it. I didn't want to spend the summer thinking about math. AT all. I was good in math because I had a crush on my math teacher. She was lovely. I didn't know I had a crush on her then. I do now.

I didn't get into Governor's Honors. (Several years later my brother did. We still call him "sock stud" because he had a shirt that said that. Score one for him). English nominee didn't either. It was the first year in a long time our high school didn't send anyone. I should note that my high school class was also the only class never to win the homecoming float contest.

Anyway, math teacher decided that I could skip junior math and go straight into calculus as a junior. I was up for it, because she would be teaching it. Yea!

Late the summer before my junior year, she took me to dinner to tell me that she had gotten another job offer and wouldn't be coming back in the fall. I cried and never saw her again.

The guy they hired to teach calculus was this German dude who said sinus and cosinus instead of sine and cosine. Mrs. R made sine and cosine seem nifty with her warm Southern accent. We sniffed in class every time German dude said sinus or cosinus. It was all ok though, sort of, because by this time I had fallen into infatuation with the girl who was the valedictorian of the senior class. She sat in front of me in calculus. The drama that followed is a story for another time.

When I was a senior in high school, I walked across the street to Agnes Scott College every afternoon to take college calculus. I loved going over to Agnes Scott. It's a spectacularly beautiful campus and, at first, I thought my math interests were renewed. The professor was a lovely woman from South Africa named Myrtle Lewin (great name then, still a great name). When we got to imaginary numbers (the square roots of negative numbers), she lost me. I sort of understood what she was talking about, but the world had shifted.

I went off to college the next year and never took another math class. I didn't have to and I didn't want to.

In an hour, when I'm staring across the table at the math people, I won't think of Mrs. R or Dr. Lewin or the valedictorian. I'll think, instead, of the imaginary places in my mind. They're much more interesting than any imaginary number could ever hope to be.

8 comments:

Slangred said...

Yeah, I know that finding out about "i=√-1" can bring a great sense of betrayal, but for me it was more a heady awakening to another dimension, one higher and more complex--because of the contradictions set up by years of being taught such a thing was impossible--it was like being accepted into a select group who were mature or even creative enough to handle the bigger truth...

I had my all-time hands-down best teacher ever for Algebra I/II in 8th/9th grades (shout-out to Mr. Burr!!!). While I didn't have a crush on him, I adored him for the gift he gave me of being excited and enchanted by math.

Baths, I like okay. I prefer showers.

sporksforall said...

I didn't feel betrayed about the imaginary numbers. It is true they lied, but people lie. It was more that the secrets these women (Mrs. R and Dr. Lewin) knew were different than the secrets I wanted to know.

bryduck said...

Imaginary numbers are the freaks of the world. Yeesh. As one who stunned the world of Richard Montgomery High by not taking Calculus along with the rest of my "invite-only" cohort, I applaud your decision to never having taken another math class. I took Probability and Statistics (2 classes) for Non-Math majors--take that, engineer Dad!--at college, and had to take Stats again to get into library school, aced them all with little to no effort, and never gave a single thought to resuming my obvious genetically-ordained path. Go team!

Slangred said...

Jeez, bryduck, what did the little guys ever do to you? Except describe the world and most everything in it in a straightforward, orderly way...

For me, math is like a philosophical language that can only speak truths. It reduces huge, chaotic ideas (like the "foreverness" of the universe) into simple, elegant symbols and sentences (like ∞). I always appreciated the ability to articulate the ideas and questions that one could spend years struggling to fully understand.

Unknown said...

I had to take basic algebra 3, count 'em, 3 times:

* The first time, in jr. high, I got what Mr. Flaherty, who had a fondness for my quirkiness despite my ineptitude, called a "courtesy D."

* The second time, in high school, I don't recall much but I think I got a "C." I do recall getting sent to the principal's office for reading a volume of Neal Simon plays during Geometry.

* By the third time, in jr. college, something must have registered in my subconscious from the previous two tries because I managed to get an "A" despite napping through most of the classes. The reason I had to take it the third time was that I froze up during the college math placement test and wrote a poem instead of doing the actual test. I remember having to ask permission to keep my "notes" upon leaving the test site so I could keep the poem.

Teresa said...

A "sort-of-geek" scholastic summer camp? Not possible.

Weren't you on the homecoming float committee a time or three?

I crapped out of math sooner than any of y'all did, in trigonometry. In college I took something called Math for Humanities Majors in which, sure, we worked some problems, but we also each wrote an essay about an important mathematics figure. I did Galileo.

sporksforall said...

Treecup: I want to read the poem.

Scout: The float building was at my house, but I was never on the committee. For which I am still grateful.

Unknown said...

I don't remember all of it, but I do recall that it involved a woman who "descended the stairs in all her algebraic finery" or something like that.