As Syd Field teaches us, every good hero needs a good villain. Holmes had Moriarty. Kirk had Khan. Science has the GOP. And Kirk had Khan. Still, some of you may be wondering: Kitty, just what did math do to you?
Show us on Stimpy where math touched you.
No, you will find no math hate here. I will always be first in line to champion math and those who would ride Her. Indeed, all that separates our modern world with its gleaming theaters of surgery and war from the ancient world of base superstition and war is the Harsh Mistress. Panta rhei may look swell on a Grecian urn, but it's really not a tool for making antibiotics and moon landings. Those required mathematics. For all of Newton's faux humility about standing on the backs of turtles, calculus was the incarnate prerequisite for Laplace's famous prediction that the future of all the world could be known through application of mathematics. A dragon dream eventually undone by the one-two punch of Heisenberg and Lorenz, but that dream stood for more than a hundred years.
So, what, then?
Alas, the psychological well-spring of my playful carping is the savagery I've suffered at the hands of many a math teacher, be it in-person at the ole Alma Mater ( The Island of Misfit Faculty , Zagets called it) or in spectral form. I, laboring to draw forth meaning from between the lines of some math treatise like drawing forth venom from a snakebite. Author, playing some cruel parlor game like a demented older brother. Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?There's a reason the covers of so many math textbooks are blood-red: it's to hide the blood red.
But the horrors were mostly in the flesh, as is usually the case in academics. We dewy students, sitting row upon row in the classroom, faces freshly scrubbed, eager to get our think boxes tongue-punched. For a moment, all is hopeful. But the act of opening the syllabus brings a change. The room lighting shifts. Dry ice fog. Spooky music. Additional '80s budget SFX. Then: a cenobite enters stage left . Gaunt. Vicious. Soulless. Tenured. It strides to the blackboard. Out come the hooks. By the time the course was over, our minds and bodies were forever altered.
Scar, rinse, repeat. In retrospect, the sensible thing to do would have been to transfer to a more welcoming major or a different university. But when you're neck-deep in the swamp, you assume the gator attacks have to stop eventually. Logic demands they'll run out of gators. The math classes can't all be this bad, ...can they? Then again, I have also suffered horrid dating experiences and that has yet to put me off heterosexuality. Like Jack Black, I am nothing if not tenacious.
So here I stand. Bloodied but unbowed. Each step up the cramponed ice crag of knowledge all the more triumphant, each drop of learning nectar extracted all the sweeter for the agony of having to translate modem-handshake screeching into the plain-spoken explanation that might have been proffered from the get-go if a certain someone had simply put in the effort. And above all else, left with short patience for what Einstein called those Göttingen types. Faculty more concerned with their own inscrutableness and job security than with a lucid explanation of nature and nature's god. Sort of like the clergy before Luther and the printing press brought inscrutableness to the masses (well, the masses who could read. And weren't getting slaughtered by Frederick. Or the Calvinists. Or the plague. But I digress).
Hate the obfuscation, love the obfuscator I suppose Gandhi would say were he here. The bitter, the broken, the phoning it in. Green graduate students given courses to teach so the math department could save a few bucks. Jaded tenured faculty going through the motions. One so aggressively hateful students threatened a lawsuit to have him removed. The alumni newsletter informs me he retired just this past year, an ocean of broken spirits left in his wake.
From there began the long road that led to here. Heutzutage, LabKitty lights the way forward with the Gleaming Sword of Truth . It is my gift, my curse. The task assigned to me. And if I cannot carry it, then the chunky fellow who came with gets a turn.
For as long as I am able, I will stick that sword into the dark places, the hearts and minds and other squishy parts that need sticking. Call it illumination. Call it enlightenment. Call it therapy. For those of you long absent your sacred mission, call it justice. Judge, and prepare thyself to be judged. Because the University is all that stands between us and the forces of darkness. This very day you may choose to stiffen another pikeman on the line, add another archer to the parapets. Or, you can deem it not worth your time, attention, or effort. Be damned, and damn the rest of us as well.
The bad apples give everyone a bad name.
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