Dear Readers:
The boredom and the horror and glory! Number 45.
It’s been so long since my last newsletter because I’ve been trying to write about math. That made this document almost impossible to open, because I knew that every time I opened it, I’d be opening something that was about math.
When students at the high school where I work start to say something about math, sometimes I keep myself awake by interrupting them and saying, “I hate math.”
In math in ninth grade, we had to make a “creative project.” That made me angry, because she didn’t really mean it. She was expecting an equation, the language I hate. Actual, real hate, with all its aggression and sense of being trapped. The course required us to know or think in some way I was supposed to have learned but I hadn’t. There was no going back to that place where I had lost the thread—they had gone too far without me, and I didn’t know when or where I had lost it. One girl’s project was a block of wood with MATH written on it in Sharpie. I admired that so much. It was like she was saying, here’s your fucking creative project, you…you…math teacher. I can’t remember what I turned in for the project, if I turned in anything at all. As soon as we were even vaguely allowed by the state of Illinois to stop taking math, I did.
When I taught at Case Western Reserve, I was a “lecturer in the School of Engineering,” because the writing class I taught was for engineers only. I loved saying my job title, like, haha, guess who’s a “math teacher” now? And after awhile I found I loved engineers. They frustrated me intensely, because their incessant criticisms about my teaching and the material I was giving them were always right. These criticisms could be categorized as a single question: why are we doing this? When they did this, I felt that old familiar hate. They were speaking from a place of fluency in that language I don’t know, the language of logic that has no room for me. And anyway, I was supposed to be the kind of creative, wild person, who asks unnerving questions, not them. When they asked their whys—whys about pieces of Lucy gospel like freewriting, or semicolons—they were exposing me, and exposing to me the huge swaths of the world I had never asked why about, and that I didn’t know how to ask why about.
By being this annoying way, they taught me how to teach. Now I always add a “because” clause to every sentence in which I introduce material. By doing that, I give students a reason to try, which is the absolute baseline of what they deserve. My engineering students demanded no less.
When I was teaching creative writing at Heidelberg University in Ohio a few years later, we had a faculty development session about the scholarship of teaching and learning, and the person who delivered it told us about a study where they tried all sorts of different things to enable first-generation college students to achieve at the same levels as students whose parents had gone to college. They tried individual counseling, academic coaching, unlimited writing center appointments, and clustering first-generation students in study groups and dorm groups. None of this changed anything. The only thing that created a meaningful positive effect on first-generation students’ achievement was adding a line at the top of assignment sheets that said what the purpose of the assignment was. But I already knew that. My Case students had taught it to me.
Once when I was at Case, Emily Grosholz came to speak. Somehow she is a math professor, a creative writing professor, and a professor African American studies at Penn State. She read a beautiful poem about being pregnant: “I’m his roof, his walls, his musty cellar.” She talked about the sense of power and happiness at being pregnant at 40 and then again at 45. She told a long confusing thing about math that I can’t remember at all and I felt I understood it!
“So it’s like this?” I said.
“No, it’s not like that.”
“Then is it like this?”
“No, it’s like that either.”
This exchange went on for a few more rounds. I could tell how uncomfortable the people at the seminar table were getting. Nothing I could think of ended up having anything to do with the math she was talking about, but I was compelled to keep trying, maybe because she was a poet, too. But to the realm her mind had gone, when it had left poetry, my mind couldn’t travel.
She never said, “oh, yeah, maybe…” or “sort of.” She just kept saying no. The thing I hate most about math is that you can’t be a little bit right. You’re always just wrong. What’s the point of me doing it, when I’m always wrong?
I read this gorgeous page-turner of a math novel When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut, that I can’t recommend enough but also can’t explain or really even finds the words talk about. Something about Einstein being really frustrated, something about Heisenberg being right all along and convincing Neils Bohr, and now we’ve built a world based on their rightness, even though we don’t understand why it’s right or hardly anything about it at all.
The other day I was talking to a student about his experiences in math. He’s such a good math writer and I guess a good math-doer. He was talking about the strange and sad feeling that you could devote your life to pure mathematics and never come up with anything that other people haven’t already thought of. You could spend your life working on problems people have already solved, or attempting to solve problems that you know you won’t solve. But, he said, that might be okay. I saw how beautifully he was really trying to mean that.
It made me think of an interview with Mark Halliday at the end of the great poet Frank Bidart’s book In the Western Night. (Some people think isn’t a real interview, Bidart just wrote it on his own, and the characteristic ellipses and italics and caps here do seem to suggest that. In the quote below, this is exactly how the interview is written; the ellipses are his.) Talking about his early development as a poet, Bidart says,
So let me describe this period in terms of “problems.” First, I felt how literary, how “wanting to be like other writers”—particularly like the modernists, and the “post-modernists”—the animating impulses behind my poems were. I said to myself (I remember this very clearly): “If what fills your attention are the great works that have been written—Four Quartets and Ulysses and “The Tower” and Life Studies and Howl (yes, Howl) and The Cantos—nothing is left to be done. You couldn’t possibly make anything as inventive or sophisticated or complex. But if you turn from them, and what you look at is your life: NOTHING is figured out; NOTHING is understood….Ulysses doesn’t describe your life. It doesn’t teach you how to lead your life. You don’t know what love is; or hate; or birth; or death; or good; or evil. If what you look at is your life, EVERYTHING remains to be figured out, ordered; EVERYTHING remains to be done…”
I told the student I wanted to know more about math, and he said something that filled me with excitement and joy. Foolish excitement and joy, but stronger, for at least a moment, than my annoyance and anger at math, at schools in general, at this school in particular. He said,
“You’re at a school, aren’t you?”
Sincerely,
Lucy
Now I will always say "because."
so nice to read. Smiled at the end.