My first class every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday is Calculus II at 11:00AM with professor Mirollo in Campion 302.
It is noon on Saturday. The room is empty. The room is tranquil. The ratio of chairs to room size seems perfect now, but I know that with forty other students with forty backpacks crowding the narrow aisles between seats, navigating my way to the front of the room becomes a challenge. As I walk by, I am grateful that I do not have to worry about where I step. After a semester’s worth of practice dodging backpacks and avoiding bumping into people, I think I would make a decent tightrope artist. I walk freely down the aisles at my own pace a few times. When I walk by my friend Jess’s seat, I see her laughing with her friends at how poorly they performed on the exam. Jess and I went to high school together. While her friends see a confident, carefree, blue-eyed girl with a contagious smile, I still see the insecure ninth grader who is afraid to show anyone her smile because of her braces. I know she is laughing because she is nervous about her future, nervous that she is not worthy of being here. I tell her she is. She smiles and hugs me, but I know she does not believe me. As I continue walking, I see Sean still scrambling to copy down Jake’s answers to the homework that is due today. I see my roommate from orientation playing games on his phone. I see my desk–the only lefty desk in the room–looking especially empty.
Cracking the window open unleashes a Pandora’s Box of sounds. I can hear the high-pitched laughter of girls walking below, cars constantly stopping and going as people cross the street, and the various sounds of the power tools used by the construction workers whose task I still do not know. I close the window immediately. The events of the outside world taint the purity of this room. It is silent. It is the kind of silence that is so absent of sound that you can hear the room humming impatiently, as if it is waiting for something to happen.
I sit in my seat. The chalkboard has no writing on it, but it is evident from the eraser marks that it has been used recently. I take a long blink, and when I open my eyes, the professor is hurriedly writing down proofs of Riemann summation approximations of the area underneath a curve. Students are visibly confused but are too busy taking notes to think about asking for clarification. One brave soul stands up for all of us: “will we need to know this stuff for the exam?” The professor says that it is important for us to understand the reasoning behind these concepts, but he will not ask us to replicate this proof for the exam. Students stop taking notes. I look down to see the blue exam booklet on my desk. It is on everyone else’s desk as well now. Silence again. But this is not the absolute silence that I noticed before. This is fake silence. The kind where your ears do not pick anything up, but you can still hear the sounds of explosive emotions of other students in your head. Crying. Screaming. Rage. Despair. Agony. I close my eyes and come back to reality. I am alone, the chalkboard is empty but faded from use over the past couple of days, and there is absolute silence.
I start to think about what exactly about math appeals to me. Perhaps I like it because my father pushed it on me since I was a toddler. He was a math teacher for over twenty years. Throughout my entire academic career, he would be the one to introduce me to new topics that we have yet to cover in class. I would talk about negative numbers in kindergarten, imaginary numbers in middle school, and hypercomplex numbers in high school. Maybe I like math because there is no uncertainty or subjectivity in it. For any given question, you either know the answer or you do not. There is no “in between” or “it depends.” There is no bias in questions or answers. I can be certain of the effects of substituting equations, plugging in for variables, and crunching numbers. When I am unsure about how to approach a problem, nothing is preventing me from learning how to solve it. After some thought, I think I like math mostly because it is universally understood and applied. It is how humanity has made such tremendous technological and economical strides. I realize that it is the foundation for our society. This is when I see that math is simultaneously a way to separate from society.
Math is a break from the social complexity and uncertainty of everyday life. In a life when anything can happen, we are usually careful with our words around others and worried of how we are perceived by others. Unfortunately, we can never be certain of the impact of our actions and what other people think of us. In the worst case scenario, the consequences of this uncertainty are severe anxiety and depression. There is little we can do to satisfy our need, as humans, for a sense of security and clarity. For me, this is the purpose of math. One of my greatest insecurities in the beginning of college is my social life. I have made friends and can still make friends now, but I worry that it will be hard to make lasting, meaningful relationships with only semester long classes and with so many students on campus. I saw mostly the same people every day for four years in high school, which is plenty of time to make friends. These true friends are people I was fully comfortable with and could express my true self to without judgment. However, in college, I notice that I put on a facade during social interactions. To pretty much everybody I have met so far at Boston College, I deliberately change my personality in hopes that I will be more likeable. I’m worried that if I express my true, sarcastic, controversial self to others at this point, I will be rejected. Even now, I’m uncertain about where I stand socially. This is why I turn to math. While doing problems, there is no uncertainty. I know when I am doing something right or wrong, unlike when I am talking to people. While calculus may be a cause of anxiety for others, it is a treatment for me.
Even for those who are not particularly enthralled by math, it is important to have somewhere to go that has value and meaning to oneself. For someone else, literature is a critical component of everyday life. To another, snowboarding provides a sense of purpose in the world. We do not have to be limited by our own mentality. Jess is one of the most adventurous people I know. Some of her stories while hiking or living in Spain by herself are truly incredible. Lately, she seems to be stressed out over the amount of homework she has every night and the difficulty of the classes she is taking. I remember last year she was surprised when she saw that she was accepted to BC. I know she feels as though she does not deserve to be here. Somebody that climbs huge mountains on a regular basis and lived in a completely unfamiliar country without guidance is letting herself be held back by a biology lab. If she just remembers the mountains, she will realize that she has the capability to succeed here. I believe more of us need to find our mountains.
Growing as a Writer 