The Math Story, A Saturday State of Mind

The Quaker Diner, as depicted on Yelp.

I believed I was bad at math for many years, perhaps because, in comparison to my experience of language, well. I couldn't simply inhale and memorize math on a ribbon of feeling, as I could with new words. 

Almost every “big” word I’ve learned, I remember where I was standing or seated, who taught me the word, and how I felt when I received it.

For example, crying on the way to high school, in the passenger seat of our Honda, unable to name the terrible morning dread and heavy heartedness or to assign it a reason, my mother sighed compassionately and counseled, “This is called Weltschmerz.” And I felt a bit better, because at least the Germans had already had this feeling. 

Algebra was a brief respite from math because it felt like words, and in fact, I was surprised anyone called it math because it felt good. Geometry, however, was definitely math, as were parabolas. Movement in space and time was frankly impossible to predict. And also, who cared? Things would get where they were going in whatever time they pleased, so why fret about these trains at these speeds and trying to guess when they might arrive, collide, or dump their chemical waste into a river?

It was news to me when my mother was informed, when I was in sixth grade, that I was slightly rotting my brain in the standard math class and needed to be moved up to honors math. I had not consciously noted that the class was too easy for me, but I had noticed, with some alarm, that the other Jewish kids, and the children of immigrants were all in the other class. I had looked around one day and noticed that I’d somehow been separated from the tribe, wandered off in the desert and found myself assimilated into this room of mostly gentiles, in a standard math class.

I'd have been ashamed, as a native speaker of this and only this language, to find myself in standard-placement English class, but math was just busy work. I had no affinity for it, so my ego was disengaged. But it turned out that advanced math was calling. My mom gave me the news, and since academic achievement thrilled her and all forms of praise enticed me, I agreed that I would do it. I'd take the test for honors math class on the recommendation of my beleaguered, but vigilant, math teacher and to the delight of my mother. 

The morning of the test my mom and I went early to Quaker Diner, which had then, and 27 years later probably still has, broad, light green paper place mats, open and blank, ideal for scrawling out equations. I don't know how my mother knew what was going to be on the honors math placement test for sixth grade, but she proceeded to, in what I think must have been 30 to 40 minutes (absolute maximum 40 minutes) cover a year's worth of math curriculum. 

We did area, perimeter, diameter, radius, circumference and she explained it all so fast and so much better than my teacher who was up on all the latest teaching techniques and bored me tremendously by covering one thing at a time so slowly that you forgot, by the time you'd reached the supposed climax of the lesson, all of its conjugate parts. My mom taught the way I learned, volleying entire concepts to me at once, her dominant left hand flying around the place mat, making tidy markings in her prim penmanship. We reviewed algebra. We looked over the Pythagorean theorem.

I was never better at math than I was that half hour of a morning at Quaker Diner, my mom proving how easy and fluent these concepts were, how native to us both. 

I took the test that day, my head for once not stuffed with tiny, methodical units of manufactured thought, the infernal ‘show your work’ credo of the time. It was all intuitive and my right hand flew across the test. I was never better than when I guessed, when I learned my own way, our own way, and I showed no work except the right answers. I switched to advanced math and it was indeed nice to be in class with my friends, whose ancestors fled Egypt to be my friends. Prophecy fulfilled.

I did well so long as we stuck with algebra. I don't remember struggling terribly, but I do remember feeling inferior, that I had somehow squeaked my way in or cheated. The feeling, though unsubstantiated, could not be shaken.

But one day, another novel math event occurred, and it was again difficult for me to gain purchase on the belief that I was not good at it. 

We took a test fully of word problems. It was a pop quiz, and what was unique about this one is that it was comprised of 12 questions, entirely of random material. There was nothing on it that we were studying. 

The things we studied had oppressive, meticulous, arbitrary rules that everyone had to follow the same way, but this pop quiz came with no directive except: Do your best for the entire class period. Don't have to show your work. Do whatever you want and try to get it right. 

I suspect, being an adult now myself, that our teacher needed the day to grade homework, or to get over a breakup, or to do her taxes. She left us to our own devices and the 12 word problems laid out before me brimmed with uncharted possibility. 

This wouldn't affect our grade. It was purely for a state of wonder and I set myself to it with alacrity, this elan I can harness when I know that the task at hand doesn't matter: A Saturday state of mind. 

We turned the quizzes in and I thought little of it except how challenging it had been, how much I'd guessed my way through it, and I imagined, briefly, how much higher the scores would be of a few of the boys in the class who were notoriously quick and showy with their right answers. 

Then a miraculous thing happened.

The pop quizzes were returned the following day. Of the 12 answers, many kids had gotten 9 or 10 correct, but I alone had gotten 11 out of the 12. I had the highest score. This was unfathomable. I was in no way at the top of this math class in skill level. I couldn't square this result with anything I knew of myself. 

I can’t recall now, but if that 12th question had been in any way, even obliquely, about train speeds, I suspect I skipped it.

Profoundly surprised, I rationalized my top score as: “No one cared about the test because it didn't count toward anything. So I was the only one who actually tried,” and I believed this story without question, because it was comfortable and non-disruptive. My one time getting the highest score out of 25 kids better at math than me. 

I believed this story for 27 years, that my score had been highest because ‘I alone had tried and no one else had,’ but recently (splitting a bill at the end of dinner, probably, because that's the only time I use math now that I’ve given up counting calories), I found myself reflexively saying, ‘Ugh, I'm not good at math.’

And for reasons of maturation, self-acceptance, some urgent change recently effectuated by encroaching middle age, the old refrain rankled me this time and I saw my strong, little sixth grade legs carrying me up to the front of the class to receive my highest scoring 11 out of 12 word-problem pop quiz. 

I realized in my Uber home from dinner, suddenly affronted, “That's not possible(!), that in a room full of intensely competitive children, in a cutthroat school system, surrounded by strivers of all stripes — it simply isn't the case that I was the only 11-year-old who desired to do the best on a pop quiz.”

The idea that I might be good at math made me itchy with wind exposure. Letting go of the old story felt denuding. 

But today, I mean, I'm not good at math.

Same as I'm not good at locksmithing, archery, being a midwife or a shoe cobbler. I simply never use it. Why would I? I don't need to. But do I have the aptitude? Well, I just may. I might have made a very good medicine woman in some other place and time: titrating tinctures, intuitively concocting my wolfsbane serums, NEVER showing my work.

What I'm good at, really good at, is creating my own rules where there are none and following them through driving winds of shame and self-flagellation, perpetual mortification that never seems to abate, groping and guessing my way through haze and shadow to the right, my only, answer. 

I can't believe it took me so long to see it. That I still barely see it. But it's the only way I get the top score on a test I take alone. It has been easier to forget over and over than to remember: This is how I win. 

I get dizzy thinking of the many fictions I’m living under today. I have to lie down and erase. Build a constellation of new truths because lies will always form like cobwebs if you’re not cleaning your mind. Taking the back end of a broom up into the rafters to shake the water bugs down. 

What other moldy myths fester up there, awaiting disruption?

Mostly no one — likes a pop quiz, but that is usually how you find out.