Math Block
I was a “math block” kid. I’m not sure why, but I just didn’t get math easily. Maybe it was my seventh grade math teacher, who threw me up against a locker for reading a history book in her class. I can still feel the dial of the combination lock digging into the middle of my back. She was a mean old woman, in an era when teachers could do pretty much anything they wanted. And she thought she would teach me a lesson, not paying attention in her math class. She made me hand write the Constitution of the United States and turn it into her.
It was one of the best assignments I ever did, but old Mrs. Hibberd would have been better making me do one hundred math problems. I needed that work more than indulging the subject I already loved.
No Chance
My eighth grade teacher, Coach Weikert, did his best to revive my math skills, and since he was my track coach, I responded. But freshman year Algebra put me back into denial, and a sophomore Geometry teacher who licked chalk from the chalk tray (really) put the nail in the coffin.
By Algebra II, I was doomed. Then our teacher left in October, and we had a series of eight substitutes for the remainder of the year. I think everyone in the class got a B- or better; what else could the school do. But my math years were done.
Thank goodness my university considered the new “computer” class as a math class, programming the “mainframe” monster in the basement with punch cards in “Basic”. I enjoyed it, learned a lot about logic, and didn’t have to explore mathematics again for twenty years.
Statistics class required for my Masters degree almost tripped me up. But I took it in the summer, all by itself, and spent hours and hours struggling to grasp the concepts. I managed to survive, getting an “Education Major A” despite failing a quiz on standard deviation by subtracting 15 from 25 and getting 5 (25-15=5).
Arithmetic Dreams
So I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that last night I had a dream about NOT succeeding at math. In the dream I wanted to explore higher mathematics. To do so, I was presented with the backside of a shield of metal, full of bumps caused by dents on the other side. My assignment was to analyze just the bumps and valleys, interpret what caused the marks, and find patterns to predict what would happen next. That was “higher” math I was told, and if I didn’t get that instinctively, then I didn’t belong.
I don’t know if that’s really what higher math is about, but the concept does apply to something I know a lot more about, history.
Our National Shield
Our present time is the back of that shield, with bumps and ridges. We look at it, having a pretty good idea of what caused the marks. The bump of the Trump election, the ridge of the border wall crisis, the dip caused by our national division. And we hold it up against older, rusty shields from the past: the dusty shield from the Nixon era, the heavy worn and dented piece from the American Civil War. How does our new metal shield compare? Does the damage done by our current political crisis match up to the huge near-break of the Civil War? Does the height of the Nixon impeachment bump match the current Trump one?
Perhaps somewhere in the turkey-coma caused dream (it was Thanksgiving night) there was a message: that those shields didn’t really represent higher math, but national unity. Can our current crisis break the shield in two? Will the fever-dreams of the alt-right, of toting AR-15’s into a civil war to defend Trump, actually break holes in our national metal?
Out on the Internet, it says it takes steel ½” thick or more to stop the AR rounds; is our national unity now thinner than that?
Reading the Bumps
So we look at our current struggle, trying to read the “braille” patterns to predict what comes next. Here’s what I see. Our steel shield of national unity is thick in the middle. While it will be dinged and damaged, especially on the edges, the center remains strong. And that is the prediction, the sum of the pattern.
I remember sitting in seventh grade math class when they announced over the PA system that Richard Nixon was the new President of the United States. I remember being silent as most of my classmates at Van Buren Junior High in Kettering, Ohio, wildly cheered the news. My thought: how could our country make this mistake, and how would we survive? And it happened again in my junior year, though at Wyoming High School there was a lot less cheering. But our nation did survive Nixon: and we became stronger for it.
Stronger than We Think
We have survived the first three years of the Trump Administration. I dream that “this long national nightmare” will be over in 2020, and I’ll work to make that happen. But our nation is strong, strong enough even to withstand Donald Trump.
President Obama is fond of quoting Martin Luther King Jr. One of his favorites:
“…The arc of moral history is long, but it bends toward justice.”
It’s not an excuse. It doesn’t mean don’t try, that history is on our side. It means keep the faith. Or, as Barack Obama said:
“…Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.”
Dream of what can be: then work to make that dream happen.
That is the definition of hope.
