Poetic License

I was reading Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace for my language arts class when I realized that I had never stopped to wonder what it was that I was solving all the math problems for.  I never thought "53/14 whats?" and I had certainly never stopped to think about math as anymore than going through the motions.  Obviously, this is okay and most people do it, but really?  Has math become so compartmentalized and watered down that the doers can't even see it as real life and vital, beyond the train problems of course.

It was interesting, walking into my precalculus class the next day and seeing the fingerprints of great mathematicians throughout the simple exercises we were doing.  As my teacher explained the area under a curve idea and natural logarithims, much of Wallace was saying sort of made sense.  This just wasn't taking the derivative or sine or tangent for nothing.  This was math that could be applied, that could be lived, and it was kind of beautiful.

As the AP Language and Composition test looms, I can't help wishing that I had learned more formal grammar back in elementary school.  We learned the basics of "either/or, neither/nor" and all the parts of speech basics, but those were just enough to get by.  The clearest memory I have of a grammar discussion was when, in fourth grade, we discussed poetic license, and that doesn't count.  We didn't diagram sentences or memorize prepositions, and yet the world hasn't run out of writers.

The two subjects, math and writing, are in this respect oddly related.  Math continuously runs the risk of loosing its beauty and its wonder, especially in lower level math courses because it is sometimes reduced to basic steps instead of creative thinking and ingenuity.  With writing, the opposite has been happening.  Kids have to read to get better, have to expose themselves to wide ranges of styles, tones, difficulties, and ideas to even begin to write coherently.  There is a hunger in every student meant to write (as in every student meant to wrap his mind around advanced mathematics) to know, to learn, and to be the best at that particular subject.  No student who has a dominant, in-born talent for writing gives up reading early on because they were not clearly and concisely drilled with different types of sentence structure.  You can't escape your personality forever, and the change that will happen, that will overcome you is you coming to yourself.  There is no other way to put it.  As a person becomes more and more himself, ability and talent override training, which becomes irrelevant as the person excels and thirsts and discovers.

Sitting in math class right before lunch, my teacher told us to be patient with him, to just move our pencil how he tells us -- for now.  As the bell rang, he spoke over the din, saying, "You're just rookies now, but someday you'll be able to do real math."  Real math.  It sounds elusive and terrifying all at once.  It fills you with a sense of impatience and a knowing, a knowing of the change that undoubtedly will come with the advent of Real Math and Real Anything.