Math Facts

The Worst Kind of Marker

“This is really, really important. I want you all to remember this,” Ms. Cook said at the end of that day’s Algebra 1 class. She turned to the whiteboard and uncapped a green marker, and began to write, but nothing came out except a little squeak—dry friction. “I hate green markers!!!” she exclaimed, tossing the worthless thing across the room in the direction of the gray plastic trash can. She turned back around towards the board and picked up a blue marker. Who knows what was written with that.

The Best Kind of Teacher

Mr. Walker taught Discrete Math. His first name was Luke, and we were all disappointed that he was one syllable away from a Star Wars character, but still amused that he was quite close. Us girls were more interested in his looks, which were much better than Mark Hamill’s anyway. Whitney (indiscreetly) could never stop staring at his butt.

Flying by the Seat of His Pants

On one of our last exams, my friend (and crush), Trevor, didn’t know how to do the sixth free response problem—a chi-square test. His first instinct, rather than to give the problem a go, was to draw that shrug emoji that’s supposed to be typed out with the slashes and parentheses and the Japanese character in the middle for the face. A few years ago, I learned through Facebook that he signed with Delta to be an airline pilot.

A Good Strategy

There’s a category called “Math Terms” on one of the lists in Scattergories, the most competitive non-card game at my family functions. So when I heard “orthogonal vector” in Advanced Geometry, I put a few stars next to it in my notes. At Christmas, if we rolled an O for List 16, I would know exactly what to do.

When Not to Sing

Hailey and Emily were both in Girls Chorus, the official youth choir of the city, each a different type of soprano. The three of us had been allowed relocate to the hallway from our algebra classroom make corrections on our recently handed back tests. We sat criss-cross-applesauce with our backs against the teal middle school lockers, and although it was nowhere near wintertime, the two of them began to sing Carol of the Bells. When it was applicable, I joined in with the “da-na-na-na, da-na-na-na, da-na-na-na, da-na-na-na” as I redid some linear equations. After our teacher had had enough of this, she poked her head out of the classroom and said, with a voice that rasped with cigarette smoke, “this is not choir class.”

The Right Way to Write a Zero

Once a week in fourth grade, we had to take a multiplication tables quiz. There were one-hundred problems per page and we only got one minute, which didn’t seem fair. Per second, you’d have to be able to do… well, we couldn’t divide yet (we were still working on multiplying!), but we knew it was too many. After that impossible minute, we’d trade papers for peer grading. One day Jenna was my peer, and she marked my 6x0 = 0 wrong with red pen. “I put zero,” I said, pushing the sheet towards her. “But you crossed it out,” she said. I’d seen adults write zeros with a diagonal through them and must have thought it was much more professional than a silly, simple circle. “No, that can be how a zero is!” I argued. “Well, maybe you should write it without the slash through it next time,” she said, sliding my paper back across the laminate wood table, the zero sadly bearing its two clashing slashes.

The Wrong Way to Write an A

“4a + 2 = 12a,” I wrote on the blue lined paper. Back then, the way I liked to write my As was with a hook on top, over the small bubble body of the A. I idolized Emma Watson and that’s how she wrote them, though I’m not sure how I could know that. Mom observed my hasty problem solving over my shoulder and said, “Why do you write your little As like that? We are not a typewriter.”

Peer Pressure

“Do it! Please please please.” Gavin, Austin, and Nick, who sat at my table of four, had been whisper-pleading with me for weeks. I grinned and bugged out my eyes at them in resistance and turned my attention back to Mrs. Gay, who was drawing colorful integrals on the board. “It’s not like it’s a bad word,” Austin said. Of course, I knew that, but it was more the principle of making them wait, seeing their stupid desperation. The three boys said the word to me together, overenunciating it like fathers trying to get their baby to say “dada” before “mama.” I decided that it might finally be time. “Yeet,” I said, and they celebrated with each other, miming cheers.

The Deal with 0.9

My Algebra 2 class never met our teacher, Mrs. Powell. At least not that semester when she was pregnant, having a baby, and then taking maternity leave. Mr. O’Connor, the assistant golf coach, was our substitute. He liked challenging us with golf word problems, which made the topics exponentially more difficult to understand. But his favorite exercise was deviating from Mrs. Powell’s provided lesson plans. He spent an entire class scrawling on the chalkboard, explaining that since 0.9 goes off to infinity, it’s really 1.0 and not 0.9 after all. Someone asked if 0.8 was actually 0.9 and also why did we even have 0.9 if it was just 1.0? I checked the clock to calculate how much time we had left in the period. Like 0.9, it seemed to be infinite.