The professor asks a question that I didn’t hear. The classroom screams in silence. Smart kid at the front answers the question, but no one really cares.
Every math class is exactly like this. Deafening boredom, scraping theorems off chalkboards, shoving equations in loose leaf that I’d rather use for paper airplanes. So apathetic that it is excruciating, trying to think of different ways to communicate, “I HATE THIS.”
By the end of the semester, I’ve attended on the lesser side of a quarter of my classes. Homework turned in, on time, every time, with “BULLSHIT” theoretically written all over. The professor gives me passing marks. I throw the graded problem sets away without checking to see if there are comments on my mistakes.
Going to math class is like getting courted by a porcupine. I expected the spiky quills, the odorous mucus, the wholly unromantic notion of the live, furry Libertarian election symbol coming in for the kill. What I did not expect was to be drenched in porcupine piss. And not just any porcupine piss, but “a high-speed projectile that launches drops of urine from one tree branch to another” type of piss.
Here’s the thing. My clothes are doused in math-porcupine’s ejaculate-piss. When I step outside the classroom, I’ll still be doused in ejaculate-piss. I will slouch home, strip, shower, and still smell a little bit like ejaculate-piss. Tomorrow, I’ll remember being pissed on. It is not possible for me to ignore the time and energy I reluctantly lent to mathematics. I have graduated as a math major, and anyone who knows will at least pretend to be impressed.
I’m not proud of my math major. I’m not proud of knowing what Lagrange multipliers are, because I don’t and would’ve forgotten if I did. I’m not proud of making it an entire 7 weeks into Matrix Groups before dropping out, sick of praying for the TA to give me answers. I’m not proud of being one of two or three women in every high level class, surrounded by people eager to waste their talent on actuarial analysis and investment banking (this is a separate topic, which we can talk about later…). Math was so hard and infuriating. Math was so lonely.
There’s no climax in this story. Somewhere in between, there’s a story about second generation Chinese Americans in relation to their immigrant family’s expectations. At some point, the pointless difficulty of the curriculum made me so angry that I became determined to finish it.
Undergrad is over. The privilege of higher education is oozing with fresh piss. I learned almost nothing directly useful to the industries and causes I care about, but at least my peers and I know “how to think” better. Inequality is deepened. Universities inculcate in us that the only way to succeed is to exacerbate the negative effects of capitalism. The piss fountain roars onward.
The Yellow Hankie 