I Am An Idiot
2007
August
13
I am rarely content with my current state of affairs. I constantly seek change. Whether it is the orientation of my living room furniture, the quantity of cats in my house, or my current career, the grass is always greener on the other side. While I generally enjoy my existing job, I often conjure ideas of how grand it would be to work in a different industry. And almost every week, my delusion is something different. One week, I might want to be a train engineer. The next week, an Egyptologist. Rarely does one obsession prevail through time. With a few exceptions.
One thing I have always been passionate about is math. I love everything logical, quantifiable, and ordered. I even went to math camp when I was in middle school. And the summer before I started college, my boyfriend (now husband) taught me calculus while we waited in line for rides at King’s Dominion. (I know, how erotic!) However, just because I like math, that does not mean that I am good at math.
I started college as a math major with the plan that I would become a math teacher. I had a few great math teachers in middle school and in high school that inspired me. In geometry class in particular, the class where I would sit in the front row with a view out the classroom door so I could watch this one especially cute guy walk by on his way to lunch every day (the guy that I met later that year and is now my husband), my teacher, Mrs. Lasswell, told the best math jokes. My favorite? She would ask us, “What did the acorn say when he grew up?” and after a few seconds of sustaining her goofy grin, she would extend her skinny arms out to either side of her body like limbs, wiggle her fingers like leaves, and say, “Gee, I’m a tree!” Ge-om-e-try. Get it?
Well, I didn’t do so well in my first year of college as a math major. I moved out of my parents’ house when I was only sixteen years old, left my high school friends behind (they were still in high school), and had difficulty meeting people. I didn’t even have a roommate because one of the perks of being in the Honors program was getting a private dorm room. That turned out to be my ruination. This was also the year that I broke up with Eric for one month because, well, I was lonely and depressed. Eric was still in college in a town four hours away.
My grades suffered and by the end of my second semester, I had lost my half-scholarship as well as my status in the Honors program. I moved back home, Eric graduated and came back to Richmond, and I started getting my life back together. After considering several majors to pursue including French and art history, I discovered something called urban planning. I had never heard about it before, but the Dean of the department convinced me that it was important, so that is where I am today. But sometimes, I still have feelings for my first love, math.
Today, I was sitting in a faculty meeting at a school in Mississippi that my coworkers and I helped create a master plan for and I was admiring all of the math teachers, huddled in a corner like they were some kind of gang – the cool kids – when I started yearning to have my own classroom, adorned with posters of the Fibonacci series and xkcd comics. Unfortunately, that daydream ended abruptly when I made an embarrassing math error.
The Head of School was making a speech to new faculty members about how fast the school is growing, referencing last year’s student population – 1,145 – to this year’s – 1,211. I did the simple subtraction in my head, trying to determine how many new students our master plan would need to accommodate. Approximately 800.
Obviously, that is 734 students too many. But I was daydreaming about decorating my classroom and impressing my students with hilarious math jokes, so I wasn’t completely focused at the time. My excuse? I thought 1,211 was actually 2,111. In my head, it seemed right.
Luckily, only two people heard my miscalculation and I recovered gracefully. However, my hopes of ever becoming a math teacher are now tainted with this shameful memory. I think I will stick with urban planning.
