Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Fluxions

It was a real freshman move, one that no one with any experience or wisdom would have made.  The class met three times a week at eight o’clock in the aching empty a. of m.  Plus, it was way the hell out at DRL, a drab, cold building east of 33rd street, clear over on the other side of campus.  Plus, it was calculus – a class which the university required me to take and pass, but one in which I had no actual interest and for which I had only the merest aptitude. These conditions, in combination, served as a powerful disincentive to my regular and prompt attendance.

But the final straw came with the first lecture.  We arrayed ourselves, callow and obedient, in the old hall, equidistantly spread in fixed ranks of wooden chairs with fold-up desklets, perhaps 100 of us on musty old risers.  The professor walked in and presented himself to us, sucking confidence in his pedagogy out of the room like oxygen from a plummeting aircraft.  He was youthful in appearance, even childlike, with rosy downy cheeks and wispy sandy hair.  His jeans were unfashionably faded and his polo shirt appeared to have an embroidered “nerd” emblem over the breast.  A profound lack of charisma settled like a pall around him. 

He began to introduce himself in a quavering voice, offering the barest motes of useful information, most of which were already available to us in the syllabus and course description.  He had trouble projecting his voice to the back of the room.  He acted like he wanted to pee, or perhaps had just done so while standing there before us.  He didn’t seem comfortable, and soon, neither were we.

He began his lecture and, if I really concentrated, I could hear him and sort of keep up.  I’d better be able to - it was the first session of the first class of my college career.  I was treating it as a test of my mettle. 

Without wasting much time he quickly filled an entire blackboard with notations and equations.  He needed more room but he didn’t want to erase any of what he’d already written.  He looked up at a second blackboard, mounted on the wall above the first, unsullied and virginal in pristine slate-green.  It was housed on runners, seemed designed to trade places with the lower board.  He wanted it.

We watched as he lamely leapt up a few inches, trying to pull it down.  His fingers flailed at its lower ledge but it didn’t budge.  He grabbed for it again.  Nada.  He stood with his back to us, looking up at the boards, cogitating.  He pushed up on the bottom chalkboard.  It was unmoved.  His shoulders hove, then hunched forward.  When he turned back to us, his face was getting red and puffy.

“I can’t make it work,” he told us with a quavering voice.  He was actually whining.  He shifted his weight impotently from foot to foot.  We were caught uncomfortably between impatience and embarrassment.  He started to hyperventilate, clutching his chalk protectively before him.

A burly guy stood up from his desklet and walked down to the left side of the chalkboards at the front of the room, where a small control box was bolted to the wall.  He hit one of two buttons and a circuit kicked in.  The blackboards solemnly, gracefully changed places with a low electric hum.  Once the upper had become the lower, taking its place with a satisfying click, the student released the button and, wordlessly, without a glance at the lecturer, returned to his hard, cramped seat with the rest of us. 

The lecturer mumbled humiliated thanks and returned to his lesson.  I’d already learned my lesson, though: this guy was incompetent.  Math skills notwithstanding, he was no teacher.  He’d have to show me something very special if he was going to convince me to shlep all the way down to the river three times a week at the asscrack of dawn to endure his discomfiture.  I had better things to do.  Like holding down my mattress with my unconscious body, for example. 

I stuck with it for two more lectures, completing my first week of classes.  Then I quit going.  I didn’t drop the class – I needed it to graduate, and I had no interest in enduring it for any longer than absolutely necessary.  Instead, I put my faith in my ability to cram – intellectual bulimia, if you will.  Dumber folk than me learn calculus.  I didn’t need a semester’s worth of lectures to pick it up.  Instead of attending class, then, I used the time to homeschool myself – mostly, in hangover remediation. 

Four tests would comprise my entire calculus grade.  Before each of those three midterms and the final, I cloistered myself with crib sheets, got a few pointers from a roommate who was a math major, and got myself up to speed on the syllabus.  By doing so, I somehow passed all my examinations, an interloper mouthing unintelligible tongues with sufficient fluency to put me at the peak of the bell curve, though without any actual understanding of what I was saying. 

I still have the bluebook in which I wrote my final exam.  It’s a surreal artifact, filled with greek letters, relational markers, and arcane conclusions.  I got a C on it, as I had on all the prior tests.  How I did so, remains a mystery to me.  I can’t even understand the questions I answered, much less how I answered them.  However, the fact that I got through the damn thing at all, has given me the strength to confront any number of unintelligibilities since then.  I may not know calculus, but I know I can figure stuff out.  Just don’t ask me to explain any of it twenty years later.