Follows The Sun

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about math, my struggles with it, and my propensity for hanging out with people who are really good at it. I seemed to proclaim that my wishy-washy, right-brained, listening-to-feelings skills were what I had going for me instead of technical skills like, say, creating intricate models of complex functions. Or playing an instrument. Or skating backwards.

Then I talked to some folks and I thought about stuff and I came to some different conclusions. The basics are: This is not about being bad at math. It’s about becoming a generalist rather than choosing to focus on a specific passion, about my continued struggle to get comfy with gender, and my frustration with a way in which I feel that public education let me down, math-wise.

The truth is I am what I set out to be. I like poking my nose into things. I have always gone for breadth of knowledge over depth. I’m curious, but a little flighty. I move about. And that’s true and I sort of like and appreciate it in myself – it’s nice to be able to chat with a lot of different people on a lot of different subjects, at least enough to ask smart questions. But I do envy people their masteries; things they’ve poured ten thousand hours and more into. My friend the novelist, my friend the composer, my friend the machinist, my friends the scientists and mathematicians.

Subpoint to this: it’s not like there’s nothing I can do to help it. I am not incapable of acquiring these skills. I just need to, you know – do it. And when I care, I do. It has been pointed out to me that I’m a rather decent cook.

Secondary subpoint: I’m also doing darned well making the generalist thing work for me. I’ve created a spot for myself in the world that allows me to use a whole variety of skills, including the ability to quickly pick up a wide range of stuff.

Still, in this way, my feelings have to do with specialization-envy, not math at all.

But math was certainly a part of it; and there my feeling is that public education done me wrong. When I was in elementary school, I loved science. I loved looking at things and finding out about things and asking questions. When science-fair time came I didn’t do a report with a fancy display board, or choose to demonstrate a known effect; I did an experiment (seeing what sort of material burned fastest under a magnifying glass). I found out something new. It was great.

Grown-ups would tell me that science and math would go together one day, but I just refused to believe them. Science was all about discovery, math was all about sums. Frequently we played competitive math games, racing to the end of problems on the board.

I hated those games.

If anybody had shown me, really taken the time and shown me, why math is a science, when I was young, maybe I wouldn’t have set my teeth against it so early. I might have believed it, and maybe I would have been a scientist.

And I guess I’d sort of like to be a scientist. I never set out that way, so there’s no reason for me to have ended up there. It’s just a little odd to be such a staunch supporter of women in maths and sciences, and to be myself a writer of poems and reader of history and cooker of meals. Struggling with math reminds me of the ways in which I struggle with gender roles and presentations, and with the ways in which the person I am overlaps and overruns the person that I hope to be.

I don’t know if mathematicians should be teaching math to high school students. Accountancy-style math skills are necessary to work your way though the world; we need to learn them sometime. But I do think that it might be a good idea to have mathematicians teach math to elementary students, even middle school students. Get them while they’re young. Show them how cool the universe can be. Pair up with the physics department. Start poaching the cool, weird kids away from art and poetry and drama. Blow something up. Graph it.

And for christ’s sake, “Donald in Mathmagic Land” should be required viewing, at least once every other school year.

Of that there should be no question.