A student memoir

College should be a place for students to explore and reflect on ideas that they might not otherwise. I am always impressed by the neat things our students can do (and the way our faculty can get them to do it). Had a chance to read a student memoir -- assigned by Dr. Dan Martin. It seems like a very simple exercise and not a long paper, but professor Martin gets much more than you might expect.

For example, here is how the memoir I got to read (printed here with permission) starts:

When I was five I could breathe life into a paperclip. I could make it sentient; I believed it spoke to me. In a variety of ordinary objects I glimpsed a potential playmate. Children have the ability to gaze at the framework of everyday life and see through to the world beyond—great and frightening and spectacular. As teenagers we lose this ability, and by the time we are adults we have forgotten it. Some of us search for it and regain bits and pieces, but the innocence and immediate acceptance of the extraordinary is never recovered. Our second sight is, at best, intentional.
The oddest things trigger rediscovery of this bygone experience. In my case, it was college mathematics.
For as long as I can remember, from my earliest experiences with the standard operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—I’ve hated math. First the numbers held no beauty for me, no principles of organization. They confused me. I never could remember multiplication tables, and I never really cared to until I needed to call them to mind for a timed test. Then, in algebra, I developed an instant terror at the sight of x and y. What was this odd language before me, these sentences of numerals and variables? Half the symbols were frustrating, punctuation marks like plus and minus that tended to get lost in translation, while others were near blasphemous. I hated seeing things I loved, parentheses and periods-turned-decimal-points, in the midst of what I abhorred and feared. It occurred to me as I grew older that the problem was mine, not that of the discipline. So many others could read these expressions in the same way I read a sentence, glorying in the nuances of each detail. I grew to believe that this was a world only some people could inhabit. I would content myself to drown in words and leave the numbers to those who embraced them.
Throughout high school, I didn’t want to go to college. I had decided that once I graduated I would become a novelist, and for years I fostered the delusion that by the time I was seventeen I would be a published writer. In many ways I think this fantasy helped me. For those years I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. I became a better writer because, in my mind, I had already decided I would succeed. Upon waking up from this dream in my last year of high school, when all my friends started applying to various colleges, I began to form more concrete plans. Higher education is a cultural expectation these days. And with the vast, unknown territory of university education sprawled before me, I had to come to grips with one of my greatest fears: taking one, final mathematics class . . .

To be continued in my next post.