About Me: An English Teacher's Encounter with Math That Changed Her Forever

☆ Last year, I did not know what I was doing with my life. I was between jobs, working odds and ends. At the time, my brother in law was managing a small construction project for a residential kitchen. He offered to train me. Me, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature and a work history toting the likes of Starbucks, tutoring, and Trader Joe's.... But I was desperate for work. So I agreed.  What began was six months of 10 hour days and silent, hands on, physically exhausting work. It was just the two of us, 6am to 6pm, tearing up floors, hammering down walls, rewiring the electrical system, sanding doorframes, tiling the backsplash -- anything you can think of for a complete kitchen remodel. At the time, I saw myself as a septum-pierced girly-girl, not as someone capable or strong. Even though I got some weird looks from the couple of other guys that would visit the site to do plumbing or a junkyard run, when it came to the work itself -- to the tearing and sawing and wiring and sanding and tiling and installing and building -- I loved it. (I think I listened to Johnny Cash's American VI: Ain't No Grave album one million times when sanding door frames. And New Jeans's "Super Shy" EP when scraping floors.)

Early progress

"Satisfied Mind" by Johnny Cash LISTEN

​Electrical was frustrating and I often worried if I was doing it right. The difficult parts mostly involved threading long wires through rough wooden holes inside the kitchen's gutted walls and manipulating the shapes of small things into small spaces. At one point, as I was standing on top of a counter slab in order to connect an overhead light, an intense shock traveled through my hand down into the heart of my elbow. The bolt had its own sense of self, its own agency and consciousness. I was totally at its promethean mercy. And it was my fault -- I forgot to test the wire. There was really no other word for it: I was shocked.  Physically and emotionally. It woke me up, took my breath away, and made me cry a little. ​It reminded me of reading. 

Never in my life had I experienced such a craving for mathematical knowledge as when I was listening to my brother in law explain basic circuitry as it applied to our electrical work that day. In hindsight, this is what we in the teaching profession might call a "transformative learning experience," a phrase I would learn in my teaching credential program a year later. A phrase I use and think about all the time now. Without realizing it at that time, my mind was busy building a schema. ​

Ironically, it was my latent encounter with math that reignited my interest in learning and literacy after years of post-grad and "post"-covid burnout. I picked up Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics and found my dad's 1981 college textbook The Mathematical Experience. New treasure, new mystery. New life!! 

In fact, "Math," in its Old English root, mæð, literally means "what is gathered from mowing, a cutting of grass." Funnily enough, while exploring these textbooks I had also picked up Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Consider this line from her book:

“Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.” -- Robin Wall Kimmerer.

As I was reading this, I was also learning in Crest of the Peacock that "algebra" in its original Arabic root, al-jabr, means "to reunite, to restore; the reunion of broken parts" and that "calculus" in its original latin means "small pebble." I felt a sense of poetic unity with what I previously thought was a dull, unimaginative subject to the organic, musical quality of earth, art, and storytelling. It turns out there is a linguistic edge to engineering, and an engineering edge to language. Both are in the business of reciprocity.

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There were so many similarities between math and writing. I couldn't overlook it. I wish this connection had been made when I was in school. But for some reason, the poetry and philosophy of life was lost on me amidst the process of learning.

​What if we could restore it? What would education look like if we created more intentional through lines between all subjects? 

• "Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world." -- Robin Wall Kimmerer

I had to know more. But what I was being led to was something beyond math or language, it was the question underlying both I truly believe caught in my elbow from that bolt of electricity:

Where does knowledge itself come from? ​And how do we cultivate it?  ​

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There is a fig tree in my backyard. Fig trees bloom in late summer / early fall, enduring a long winter of bare branches, sprouting its earliest leaves in March or April. I remember waking up one late March morning and looking out my window to see the first springtime sprout. That was the morning I received my acceptance letter to High Tech High's Teaching Residency program.  🌺

September figs

The Mathematical Experience (1981)

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"I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky—that's all it is. It's not a matter of intellect or logic, it's loving with one's inside, with one's stomach. I think everyone should love life regardless of logic as you say, it must be regardless of logic, and it's only then one will understand the meaning of it."

​​— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov