Back to the Blackboard: Revisiting Tests in Patience

14 Jul, 2024

Well I’ll be damned if Simone Weil doesn’t continue to pop up every now and then to shed her weird light on any number of my boring routines—run-of-the mill stuff that might take up far too much of my own emotional energy while not even meriting mention in the outside world.

This time, that stuff is math, or rather, the struggle with it. I’ve come to accept and even not be all that bad at job-related things like making budgets—but I’ve long assumed I’d sealed up and consigned to bygone times the fraught years between, say, seventh grade and the end of high school, when my long-suffering father displayed remarkable equanimity in the face of the uncomprehending harpy he was burdened with helping with math homework.

Not so; the flashbacks have been coming fast and vivid ever since I decided to get in shape for a meteorology program I’ll probably start by the end of the year. As the math placement exam looms, I’ve been watching review videos and reading and puzzling over problem after problem, elated when it seems I understand what all the wizzes are demonstrating, deflated when my solutions just aren’t working out.

But what’s more frustrating than those instances involving a true lack of understanding is the fact that 80% of the time or more, my errors are careless ones, the results of my own impatience. And even while I recognize the presence of that particular problem, I’ve apparently no ability to make myself slow down and do something right the first time rather than go over the same calculation over and over only to realize early on that I’d claimed the square root of 64 was 6, and consequently screwed up what otherwise would have been a perfect proof. My understanding of how to determine the length of the hypotenuse (or even a square root) wasn’t flawed—but you’d never know it, based on the nitpicky miss that made all the difference.

In addition to causing me to wonder if that lack of discipline was really my teenage self’s problem all along, this extended bout of fighting with figures on paper also has Weil’s idealistic but (mostly) not insane assertions about the value of study—including practice problems—floating around in my mind. To contemporary secular ears, she sounds more than a bit cracked to propose that “school exercises…. are extremely effective in increasing the power of attention that will be available at the time of prayer.” Whatever the subject, “all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.”¹

Well, OK: setting aside her aspirations to commune with the divine, I’ll allege Weil’s spot-on. Sitting there in my pile of pencil shavings and eraser nubs, if I don’t somehow learn to get into the undiluted math zone—shedding the need for speed and the unwillingness to dwell with the basics—I can watch all the review videos I want, and even memorize a textbook. But I won’t be able to find the volume of a cone, much less be able to accurately warn anyone about the path a writhing cone-like structure, otherwise known as a tornado, will be taking. Sorry, Peoria; I forgot to carry the 1. I’ll do better next time.

The thing is, even with my inherent lack of patience, I don’t think I’m alone here—and I’ll also bet that that inborn tendency to rush has been encouraged by the culture I live in and the educational system it’s produced. After all, what are we told in the US is the value of an education? Its ability to get us a good job. What are the college-bound among us encouraged to do but get the highest grades possible and test out of as many subjects as possible, the better to get your degree in as short a time as possible? Taking those shortcuts is important for at least a couple of reasons. For one, education is viewed not as something inherently valuable in itself—the proverbial journey, as opposed to the destination—but as a box to be checked off so that we can get to the point of it all: a better paycheck. For another, our national dogma of do-it-yourself, no-help-allowed combines with that devaluation of the educational experience, so that we as a society definitely won’t pay for anyone, much less everyone, to take the necessary time and develop the attention needed to master a subject, much less the ability to interact with and learn with and among other human beings.

Weil was already attuned to these sorts of dangers in the 1940s. Her lamentation in The Need for Roots that something more than a technical education is assumed to be out of reach for and irrelevant to “the masses” or “peasants” was connected to her condemnation of French schools for what she saw as their lip service to moral philosophy—their lack of interest in teaching children how to consider whether, for example, France “in the course of her growth… hasn’t brought about destruction.”² When interest in school amounts to the social cred you can gain with it—“for the peasant who dreams of having a schoolteacher son, or the schoolteacher who dreams of having a son at the École Normale Supérieure”—students end up not being interested in their subject matter or the process of learning or growing into a fuller, more intellectually capable person, but (as I was as a high schooler) “as much obsessed by their examinations as our workmen engaged in piecework are by their paychecks.”³ It’s not the capacity for attention, then, that anyone cares about, or even, really, the value of your subject itself; it’s where it can get you on the social and/or professional ladder.

It’s true: being able to function within a society, or a profession within that society—possible thanks to a (good) education—is hardly to be derided; my own current math adventures are part not just of a fascination with a particular subject, but also with an attempt to move out of a professional dead end, the hope that I might be able to earn my keep at some point in a more interesting way. But when education gets boiled down merely to the acquisition of skills, we’re in real trouble. (If you need a good example of my claim, spend ten minutes listening to the news broadcast of your choice, where the experts and anchors and panelists, whether of good will or not, all seem unable to see their way past, much less get out of, one discourse or another that’s been imposed on them, one [stance on a] story they’re expected to spin, just because everyone else is doing it.)

And here’s where I can go back to Weil’s understanding of education as a spiritual undertaking, even if not to some of the particular results she’s hoping that undertaking will produce. For her, all this attention, this “trying to solve a problem of geometry” where “at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning,” is hardly worthless; keep at it, take the time you need to get it, let it germinate, and one day, even if it won’t turn you into a math genius, it might give you insight into something totally unrelated; her example is “be[ing] able to grasp the beauty of a line of Racine.”⁴ Fine—but letting that process work requires believing in its worth in the first place, even before you have any proof that all this effort will lead anywhere at all. “Faith,” she says, “is the indispensable condition.”⁵ And part of that faith, though she doesn’t explicitly state it that way, is patience. As a yoga instructor often said, knowing a student would probably be too eager to twist himself in knots before his muscles were ready, “Trust in the process.” Learn to step away when you need time; though you have to practice, you can’t force yourself by sheer willpower to understand something. Weil’s assertion that “We no longer know how to receive grace” is an overtly religious statement—but it also sounds pretty wise when it’s 3 a.m. and you’re still trying to cram for an exam the next day.⁶ Get some sleep, trust that you know as much as you’re going to know, let what you know do its thing when called upon, take it and do better next time.

That process, as “do better next time” has it, involves figuring out where you’ve gone wrong, especially with those careless fumbles. Weil’s mode of expressing it wouldn’t fly today, but she seems to think catching ourselves at those small mistakes might be even more valuable than a grand exclamation of general failure, as in “I’m just not good at math.” Here’s her reasoning: “it is perhaps even more useful to contemplate our stupidity than our sin. Consciousness of sin gives us the feeling that we are evil, and a kind of pride sometimes finds a place in it [cf. “I’m not good at math” and the flashy t-shirts so often made for girls].” But when we make ourselves take a hard look at “a school exercise in which we have failed through sheer stupidity, a sense of our mediocrity is borne in upon us with irresistible evidence.”⁷ Nothing like zooming ahead with the very unglamorous (sad, even) assumption that 6 is the square root of 64 to keep you from getting a big head. Weil’s celebration of the way education can instill in students a healthy dose of humility only hints here at the predictably unhealthy lengths she takes the concept elsewhere—for example, her definition of it in The Need for Roots as “the freely accepted movement toward the bottom.”⁸ But if we take humility not as an overblown tendency to claim ourselves unworthy doormats in general, but as a simple understanding and acceptance of our limits, we might just be more able to have patience with the limitations of others.

Weil makes this connection, too, by way of saying it’s because we’ve learned to focus our attention on schoolwork, and via schoolwork on God, that we can easily focus our attention on the people around us. “Not only,” she says, “does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance…. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” Attention, in other words, involves a hell of a lot more than feeling sorry for someone and moving on, even if you do give them a pat on the back before fleeing the scene. “Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.”⁹ You have to know how to pay attention to the particulars to know and care what a particular person is going through—and only then will you be able to attend to that person in any way that matters. But you first have to have learned how to pay attention, period.

If we’d been learning to do that in school along with the skills meant to make us self-supporting, we might be less invested in, say, shouting each other down or cutting off ties with each other because of our respective political investments. But that’s a giant and thorny situation that requires more than my limited attention to solve it. For the moment, what I can do is get back to the word problems and the practice tests, study the best I can, take the test, and then accept the results. And if in the end I need to take a review class before they’ll let me into calculus, what’s the big deal, other than a little time and admittedly some money? Nothing’s at stake here other than mastery of a subject in which I’m extremely interested. And at this point in my life, another semester, even two, isn’t going to make that much difference. What I should be hoping for above all else is that all this training in mathematical humility will have thickened my skin a bit, the better to leave me ready to confront a roomful of eighteen-year-old colleagues who don’t give a rat’s ass about my Gen-X’er wisdom or my PhD or any of my thoughts on the spiritual value of homework. Squeezed there into my desk-chair combo, I’ll be doing great, I think, if I can attend to my own stupidities, and let the learning do its work.

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<sup>1. Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (London: Moyer Bell, 1977), 44–45.↩
2. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, transl. Arthur Wills (New York: Harper Colophon, 1952), 138. ↩
3. Weil, The Need for Roots, 46. ↩
4. Weil, “Reflections,” 45. ↩
5. Weil, “Reflections,” 46. ↩
6. Weil, quoted in George A. Panichas, “Introduction,” in Simone Weil Reader, xxix. ↩
7. Weil, “Reflections,” 47. ↩
8. Weil, The Need for Roots, 141. ↩
9. This and the quotation in the previous sentence are from Weil, “Reflections,” 51. ↩</sup>