A Private Joy in Numbers
Thereâs to be no real discussion of weighty matters in this post. Rather, what follows is a simple, and probably too-personal-for-mass-interest, celebration of a small accomplishment.
Thanks among other things to having hit the limit of my math skills, I realized a while back that this will most likely be my last meteorology course. And last week was one that made me wonder if Iâd even be able to get all the way through itâbecause we were confronted with the demand to derive a few equations, complete with integrals and other concepts that sent me on over to old textbooks and Khan Academy for a calculus bootcamp.
I read, I watched videos, I reasoned, I thought I had itâbut something was still off, and I couldnât tell what or why. I assumed it was the demonic mental math barrier of old inserting itself, just to be nasty, right at the point where I thought I should find a solution, then leaving me hanging in the clueless cold about what had happened and why everything had come to a screeching halt. It turns out I wasnât the only one getting stumped, though, and apparently, so many questions had been asked about our problem set that we spent this last class period going over the derivations.
Hereâs the brilliant thing: none of us was quite getting it because none of the textbooks that deal with the problem bothers to truly go step by step through the derivations, instead making quite a few leaps, without telling you theyâre doing so, to churn out the solutions. So the instructor walked us step by step through the process, explaining that the point was getting us to ask questions about what we werenât being told or shown. When he finally reached the end of the demonstration, I actually had tears in my eyesânot because I was confused, but because for only the second time in approximately 49.8 years, I understood exactly how weâd gotten from a mathematical A to Z and why.
Although I donât remember how it came about, circa twenty years ago, a teaching partner and I were sitting around knitting, and fell into a conversation about math. She was one of those preternatural numbers whizzes, and when I told her about giving up astronomy in college because I could explain everything in narrative terms, but absolutely bombed when trying to do the same via formulae, she put down her needles, insisting that I was what They called an intuitive math learner. The problem, she said, is that no one knows how to teach us, and so we end up thinking weâre bad at mathâwhich is a lie.
I thought that was nice at the time, but what was I supposed to do with it? A few years later, staying with friends, one came home after a session of teaching refugees. When she said theyâd been working on binary numbers, I admitted Iâd never really gotten a handle on those. So she pulled out her whiteboard, and in under ten minutes had me zooming around in base-2 like Iâd been born into it.
Iâve thought more and more over the last few semesters about those conversations, as I feel a grasp of mathy things lingering just over the horizon, while still being unable to reach it. Until the other night, that is, when another discerning and patient soul finally took the time to lay out and explain each individual step in a number of problems. I donât know whether it was the insane victory party going on in my heart, or sheer thanks for good instructionâprobably bothâbut there was some odd feeling behind the tears that if I could still learn big new things this late in the game, the game wasnât yet over.
The joy lasted through the next day, when, trying on the phone to get a bank rep to explain something to me about how the institutionâs credit card worked, she said yeah, it really was as easy as âgirl math.â I almost choked, and managed to keep my mouth shut instead of barking back, âDid you just say girl math??!?â and launching into a useless missive about boob-and-vagina-bearing forebears fighting to be seen as capable individuals and so on and so forth. I donât think she would have understood my flood of emotion while sitting in an uninspiring classroom and realizing I was successfully engaging in a calculus venture. I also donât think it would have been helpful to anyone to allege that maybe sheâd get a promotion if sheâd ditch the idea of gendered math altogether and start hammering away at derivatives.
Like I said, it wouldnât have done anything but spread bad feeling to get into that sort of argument. Maybe no one had ever taken the time to tell her what an awful thing sheâd just said, or what it meant for her as a girl. Maybe no one had taken the time to demonstrate to her how great a showdown with math can sometimes make you feel about yourself. And it could also be that the universe I always thought was toying with me whenever formulas came around was just handing me, via that phone call, a useful sort of memento: call me bad at math, and I can figure out a way to disprove that allegation.