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.
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