Just Do the Math
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
By David Williamson
In the beginning, words and numbers are the same. We count, we name things. Three clues on Blue’s Clues to solve the mystery, and three paragraphs in your New Years’ Resolution essay. Nine blocks to grandma’s house, down the hill and around the corner. Twelve Scooby-Doo episodes on DVD, and a secret number thirteen. One hundred days of school, which is ten groups of ten pencils tied up with rubber bands, two hundred walks over the hill, twenty friends to invite to your birthday party, which becomes ten, then seven the year after, three colds, one hamster funeral, one thousand pieces of candy left over from Halloween, or maybe one kazillion.
Numbers and words are all related, and can come together in the most wonderful ways. There are adjectives and addends, and antonyms and synonyms, and homophones and homonyms and hexagons, the best shape of all. You get one hundred percent on your math test, one hundred percent on your spelling test, and one hundred percent on your book report, and those all mean perfect. The new red car is like the old green car is like the old silver car, which they had to tow away. The new pink bedroom paint is the color of strawberry ice cream, but the smell makes you sick so play in the backyard until it dries. Two weeks and three days until your neighbor’s birthday party, which is two times seven plus three equals seventeen more days. There will be water balloons, and video games until midnight, and you’ll come in second place in the All-Star Homerun Derby. The difference between the neon green and purple hamster cages is fifteen dollars, which is seventy minus fifty-five, but we can get it anyway, it’s not worth crying over. You can eat a pair of pears but not a pair of shoes. You laugh at that one and write it down in your notebook.
And all at once, we can break the rules, in even more wonderful ways. The ballpark cotton candy is a cloud, even though it isn’t floating, or ginormous, or butterfly-shaped, and that’s called a metaphor. You don’t need to go to church anymore if you don’t believe, and you don’t need to play soccer if you can’t run in cleats. Sometimes you start a story in the middle in medias res, or personify the platypus to make it talk, or place the lion’s den in a tree, and that’s not a literary device, but that makes everyone laugh. Hundreds of pitchers, thousands of games, hundreds of thousands of pitches and you happen to be there to see the first no-hitter in thirty-three years and watch your dad pound the carpet in joy and that’s called probability - even the unlikeliest events will happen, given infinite time. Show, don’t tell, but sometimes telling is better, when you need to move the story along. Numbers can be negative, fractions can be greater than one, long division can go on forever, if you are a computer or never get tired.
But no, there still are rules, they are just complex, and endless, and the students who can remember them the best and fastest are the smartest. Your memoir about stage fright is a masterpiece, and it’s read out to all the English classes. You come second place in the spelling bee three years in a row. Guarantee has a ‘u,’ but you can’t remember where. You skip Math Seven and Pre-Algebra, hide from the eighth-grade boys who whisper mean things about the girls and teachers. Some friends will be a year behind you in math forever, and some friends will be ahead of you, but move away to the East Coast. The whole factoring unit is a joke if you know the quadratic formula, and the district diagnostic test is a joke if you memorized the root words. Grandpa could have helped with your math homework, if you had needed it, because he used to be a whiz back in the Army. But maybe the math was different then, and he hasn’t been the same since the stroke. You devour forty books over the summer, so you must be a strong reader, but Great Expectations becomes a jumble of letters in freshman language arts. For the first time, you need study guides and online forums to understand. It’s around now your right side begins to hurt, all the way down to your fingers, so you leave the Algebra Two textbook in your locker and complete all the problems under the awning at lunch. The book is too heavy to carry home.
But don’t worry, the rules are there, just waiting to be learned. X and Y Cartesian coordinates are inferior to polar coordinates for graphing cardioids, and inferior to parametric coordinates for modeling projectile motion. A stroke of genius, or brute force algebra, will force an infinite series to converge, and you’ll discover a closed formula for the sum, often one of the trigonometric functions. Missing one question on the math SAT subtracts forty points from your score, but this has something to do with normal distributions and weighted averages. Sixty minutes a day of dumbbells and resistance bands and half planks while watching your team win World Series after World Series, and you can use your arm again to write. Your Frankenstein essay can blow past the word count, and if you scrape page by page, you can find textual evidence that proves Victor could have stopped the bloodshed whenever he felt like it. The death of The Great Gatsby, and the Death of a Salesman, were remarkably similar deaths, lonely, and dreadful, and predictable. Personifying every stain in the carpet is corny, and you can’t manufacture sadness in a story, and you have command of the language but no heart behind it, and you can still join the creative writing club to learn from your peers.
But really, in the cracks between the rules, there is some hand-waving. The sample size for a confidence interval should be at least forty subjects, or at least two hundred, or at least one thousand, or maybe it’s never big enough, depending on whether you’re an economist, or a sociologist, or an engineer, or a mathematician. A proof by cases, or worse yet, a proof by contradiction, always seems to work, your wrist screaming for sleep at one in the morning, but they don’t reveal the deeper connections between the complex plane and the prime numbers. There are quartic formulas and Siefert surfaces and Laplace transformations and Galois fields and they all have applications in some corner of this universe that you may never study long enough to see. Academia could really use your mind, particularly in the field of Number Theory, and you always were curious about the Theory of Quadratic Reciprocity. Your creative writing succeeds, and fails, nowhere in between. You can write a memoir about a heartbreak in second person, and every reader will picture themselves in the parking lot in the dead of night. You can conjure up a maniacal professor with prophetical hallucinations and it can make readers want to laugh or vomit, or maybe both. You can’t bring a cutthroat assistant principal to life if the Rubik’s Cube he keeps on the corner of his desk holds too much weight as an extended metaphor. Your poem, something about drowning in a pool, is crude, rigid, nonsensical, and you should spit out whatever it was you were trying to communicate. You’ll need to increase your caloric intake to thirty-five hundred calories a day if you want to gain some weight before the jaw surgery. The jaw malocclusion is a genetic mutation, nothing you could have prevented, and that is called probability.
You’ll graduate and realize your words, numbers, ideas don't matter, if you don’t have control. You look away, and your three-dimensional model of a cone will be smashed into pieces. You don’t ration out bathroom passes, so a bathroom trip becomes a thirty-minute excursion through the halls. Every routine, from entering the classroom, to sharpening a pencil, to raising a hand, to sharing about your weekend, to moving a desk, to checking out a computer, to using a stapler, must be practiced and perfected because the moment you let your guard down, someone will be hurt, something will be stolen, or a someone will whisper something vile because you didn’t have control. When a student looks you in the eyes and says you are a terrible teacher, they might be onto something, because some kids can’t multiply, so all this talk of multiplying the coefficients is wasting their time, and some learned systems of equations months ago with their tutor, so all this talk of multiplying the coefficients is wasting their time, and some kids don’t see how this relates to their lives, and you don’t either, frankly, so all this talk of multiplying the coefficients is wasting their time, and some kids have bigger things to worry about, hunger, and fear, and safety, and shelter, and the homecoming dance, and that English test, so maybe, just maybe, all this talk of multiplying the coefficients is wasting their time.
And it’s all because nothing you’ve learned, or ever will learn, seems to answer questions that matter. Slope and rise over run describe constant growth, but nothing in life grows at a constant rate, not trees or GDPs or social media followers or endangered species. Exponential growth and decay get a bit closer to the truth, but there are always withdrawal fees, inflation, variable rate returns, and pandemics that baffle all the experts and postpone your graduation indefinitely and so your models don’t model anything real at all. Confidence intervals assume you’ve selected a perfectly random sample where nobody opted in, or opted out, or misread a question, or lied, or changed their mind, and good luck getting those saints to respond to your survey in the first place. And if you’re not educating globally responsive, digital-savvy, self-sufficient, well-adjusted, perseverant, cooperative, creative mathematicians with a growth mindset then there was something from the readings you must have missed. Somebody will read, or maybe publish, memoir after memoir about some injury or some heartbreak, but whether it’s a series of flashbacks, or diary entries, whether it starts in media res or with a clever line of dialogue, whether you end face-first on the carpet with a torn labrum, with a hand hovering over the parking break as the fog refuses to settle in, or launching your glove in the air and embracing a teammate as the final out is made, maybe it was pointless to push all those tears out into the world.
Turn the page, and you find fifteen smiley faces scribbled on the back of a quiz, forming a perfect parabola. A whiteboard marker and a plastic sheet can reflect a triangle, or, you could just multiply the x-coordinate by negative 1, but I’ll let you figure that out on your own. An apathetic dad who trudges through mud to save a teddy bear is a little corny, sure, but he can work as a protagonist. Binomial multiplication goes by many names, FOIL, the box method, the tabular method, (or Steve, if you’re in third period), but what matters is that all the terms intermingle and simplify, and if you factor them, you can rip them back apart. Repeating the flavor of ramen over and over again while rain and the sky and hopes and dreams come crashing down somehow drains the reader’s hope and that was the very thing you had set out to do. And someone will say I’ve felt that way before, too. Rounding up everyone for an impromptu field trip when the fire alarm rings from another batch of popcorn, then having too little time afterwards to do anything but a quick round of karaoke, will turn out to be the best day of class we ever had. There will be time for scatter plots and histograms, sentence frames and word banks, assigned seats and desks in rows, tomorrow.
Thirty-one days until summer. Ten homework problems, sure, why not just nine. Describe this room using all five senses, add the angles up to one-hundred eighty degrees, and a sonnet, unless you want to break the rules, is fourteen lines. There will be one hundred-loss seasons and twenty-one percent rent hikes and twelve-hundred-seventy-three-dollar car services and forty-five more days of wearing this splint to hold your jaw together, but there will be one-hundred-seven-win seasons and ninety-seven thank you cards engulfing the walls, and countless French fries and escape rooms and hallway fist bumps and Scooby-Doo reruns. And, as always, joy - solving a prime number riddle on the back of a napkin, including “half-of-a-half-dead-mouse,” in a short story because that epiphanic detail was too stupid to erase, introducing the latus rectum or horizontal asymptote (and pausing for giggles), deducing the last digit in a Sudoku puzzle at the witching hour, flirting with an unreliable narrator, earning a sticker by calculating the number of jelly beans in that jar, learning that the best part of your class was when you forgot the word for yearbook eleven times, or allowing a curse word in class, just this once, from a student getting their first A in math.
David Williamson is a math teacher by day, writer by night. His short stories and essays have been featured in The First Line, Bellingham Review, The Twin Bill, and 50-Word Stories.
