Math Kept Me from Going Insane
I like to joke that math hunted me down, took me home, and made me its pet. Math stole me from its rival - language arts.
I never set out to teach math. In fact, had you told my first year teacher self that I would finish out my tenth year of teaching in a mathematics classroom (a junior high level at that), I'm sure I would've asked you for the name of your pharmaceuticals dealer. My rationale for teaching math was not even a selfless one. I started teaching math right when I could no longer tolerate spending my evenings reading the self-righteous drivel written by kids. And, I'm sorry, but that's what they were -- children. Some a year out from voting age; some old enough to give a fu@k but who couldn't muster up the courage necessary to really give a fu@k. Anyway.
I have one of those brains. I can read a billboard at high speed and recite the phone number. I see patterns in license plates. I'm probably one complex breakdown away from being the guy in that Gwyneth Paltrow movie, Proof. And for most of my life, I hid how my brain works. I hid how much stuff I really knew so that I wouldn't be perceived as brilliant. It sounded too big; it carried an unnamed responsibility. Brilliant meant that I would have to be that smart all the time. It doesn't work that way, though.
The first time I heard someone call me brilliant, I cringed. A girl a few years behind me in high school was looking at her friend's senior yearbook. Mike and the girl were going page by page in the yearbook seeing which friends they had in common. The girl told me that when he got to my picture, he said, "that's Diana; she's brilliant!" The girl would eventually know me through a guy we would both date (me first, then her). When her boyfriend mentioned me in conversation, she said, "hey, that's that brilliant girl Mike knows." I know this because she showed up at the photography studio I was working at in college, convinced my boss that she knew me so he would let her into the back studio, and proceeded to tell me, "my boyfriend said you were really smart, but I was hoping you wouldn't be pretty, too." She found out I was both. :)
I know for a fact that I love math. I love that the patterns work every.single.time. I love that when I "had my crazy" (my way of explaining much of 2010 and 2011), I always had math to keep me grounded. Math always strives to outsmart you, to make you question your own capabilities, to make you wonder if the answer is even a pursuit worth pursuing. I can say for a fact that every math formula I taught during that year of crazy kept me tethered to reality. It offered me some of the only truths I could find when I was filing for the divorce. It kept me sane.


