Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of reading about math and mathematicians, and a lot of thinking about my young, quasi-mathematical self. (Please pardon me if I go over some of the same ground I have travelled before. That’s kind of how my thoughts are these days — wandering, returning, and rethinking. I’ll follow the thoughts and we’ll see if they take me somewhere worth visiting.)
If you knew me from any part of my life before my high school graduation, you’d probably agree that I was a kind of geeky kid and teenager. I liked mostly books and solitary activities, cycled over 1000 miles before college, wrote stories, wandered through the woods, and played nerdy games like Mastermind and Scrabble. I frequently read books that were too old for me. When I was little I had a Spirograph set and I probably played with it until I ran out of paper. As a teenager I had trouble falling asleep and would get out of bed and play hand after hand after hand of Solitaire on the hardwood floor. After a while I established some sort of point system for the finished games, and I kept a running tally. (Somewhere there’s a tiny, meaningless notebook slowly degrading in a landfill. It’s okay, little one; you served your purpose.)
This was a kid who thought maybe they’d be a research scientist working deep in a lab. Or maybe an inventor: I stood at my basement “workshop” for quite a while wondering what to invent, and how inventors got started. Or maybe a world famous author, I thought as I banged away on my manual typewriter in the private office I had constructed inside my closet. Or maybe a meteorologist. Or maybe….
This was a kid who went to science camp, and learned to program computers (and convert Microsoft BASIC into Apple BASIC so the Eliza program would run on a //e). They went to math contests and snuck out to another school to take the SAT. This kid read Irving Wallace novels and Stephen King novels and wrote stories about zombie cats (perhaps Mr. King was slightly more influential) and won ribbons at the county fair for their short stories. And, shamefully, this kid read James Clavell novels in Algebra I class, wrote poetry in Geometry class, re-read Jane Eyre in Life Science, and tried to read Wuthering Heights in Biology.
This kid was torn. By the time I graduated from high school I had been told that I could do anything I wanted to do. I just had no idea what that was. Should I write? Should I do math?
About a week and a half ago I was chatting with a math professor (okay, technically an Associate Professor of Mathematics) and I mentioned some of they math-y things I had done and liked in high school. Leon asked me, “So, why didn’t you do math?”
And I had to think about it. It really boiled down to the fact that…nobody asked me to. Despite the fact that I had done well in all of my math classes, despite my performances in math competitions, despite my attendance at math camp, despite my SAT scores, despite my love of coding, despite my curiosity and creativity – nobody asked me to. When I got to my college registration session and signed up for classes, English was there and recommended a path for me. The Honors program was there and invited me in. The Math department didn’t show up.
I really can’t blame the Math Department. They had plenty of better students to pick from, and I didn’t seek them out. But if they had asked me, I think I would have tried to be a good math student. I might have found people who could have appreciated what I had to offer, and pushed me to excel in ways I still cannot imagine.
There is a huge focus on STEM classes and careers right now, and STEAM classes and careers (LET STEM = STEM + A [arts]). That’s great; I think everyone should be encouraged to do what they do best. Some people are not going to work in those fields. I think we’re happiest when we are aligned with what we are good at and what interests us. And most times, that’s kind of easy to figure out. You probably know someone who was born to fix engines, or be a veterinarian or a pediatric nurse or a farmer or a cop. They see their future ahead of them like a route in Google Maps, and they never need to recalculate.
But what if you don’t know?
One kid picked an English major specializing in creative writing. Later they added a second major in English Literature. But along the way, they added and dropped a minor in Systems Analysis because they were tired of reading books and short stories and not doing anything tangible, active, real. The secretaries who added the minor didn’t understand why they were adding it. When the minor was dropped they said, “That’s okay, honey.” They didn’t think it would stick anyway.
But, just as I met my people when I went to math camp after 8th grade, I met my people in the SAN program and MUBBS (the Miami University Bulletin Board System). Oh, children, this was in the days before campus email addresses. I hung out with the geeky boys who excelled at COBOL and cruised through Assembler. They coded their own freaking discussion board and I was a part of it. I moderated the Religion forum (of all things) and kept an eye on people like Aaron who needed my support. I combined calculation and expression, but didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t ask for help. Didn’t ask for guidance.
“You know what you were trying to do,” Peter stated in the late 80s or early 90s. “You were trying to be a MTSC.” He was referring to Miami’s new graduate program, the Master’s in Technical and Scientific Communication, and he was right. I was trying to combine written expression and computer language at the undergraduate level. I thought that the only way to do that was by way of technical documentation. But what I wasn’t able to do through my coursework I found another way to do.
I have some more options now, more ways to combine the two sides of my brain, but I wonder what would have happened to the kid who had continued on the math path. Would she have found a different set of “her people” in the Math department instead of the English department? Would she have found someone to encourage and inspire her, to show her that there could be a place for her in mathematics without being a math teacher?
What happened to the other kid? Where would she be now, and what would she be doing? What would she have achieved? Who would she be?
Knitwise, I did some work on the one-row scarf last week while attending a Webex meeting. I added a couple of inches to the work. Some of the yarn was so compressed that it looked like an entirely different type of fiber, but I think it might fluff up in the wash. I have a long way to go before I get there, but I’ll get there. Maybe the other kid will, too.
Chocolate Sheep 