User:LFStokols

It was the nerdiest summer of my life. I can’t say for sure why I surrendered four months of my life to this endeavor: partly to prove I could, partly because I thought it would help me later, partly because I had heard the teacher was mean, and partly because it was something I wanted to do anyway. For whatever reason, I decided to skip Algebra 2. That would let me go straight to Pre-Calculus as a sophomore, and all I had to do was teach myself the material and pass both final exams at the end of the summer. I started working in the last few months of my freshman year. Since I didn’t really need to pay attention in Geometry, I used that time to study. Each day I skimmed through the lesson, did the homework, and then worked on algebra. I still knew the answer whenever Ms. Williams called on me, so she didn’t care. But when the bell, rang I couldn’t stop reading. I would bump into people in the hallway, trying to reach a good stopping place. I had often gotten this engrossed in my science classes—at the time I wanted to become a physicist—but I had never been so enchanted by math. I was good at it and that was all. Scouring a section on synthetic division as I climbed the stairs to my next class was the first time I considered mathematics as something I could love. That summer my family went to San Diego for a week, as we do every summer. The previous year I sat by the pool reading fantasy novels; this year I had only the textbook with me everywhere I went. Once, on the verge of epiphany but without any paper, I scribbled my diagrams and equations across the bathroom mirror with soap. I then wrote “Do Not Erase” in large letters across the top. My mom walked in on the maid staring at it, bewildered. My aunt Sindi, who teaches algebra at a community college, was also in San Diego; I went to her with a plethora of questions, listing every sentence in the book that hadn’t made perfect sense. She told me that no one would ever be expected to know most of my questions, but still I wanted to. Back at home, I lay on my floor thinking about polynomials. I wasn’t working on a specific problem, merely collecting all I knew about them. I saw how each property was inherently related to the others and how they could be viewed from different perspectives, all of which were actually the same. I understood why they were important and why mathematicians had studied them all these centuries, and all this with uninterrupted cogency. Though I had always been good at physics, had even won the State Science Fair in seventh grade, there were always a few concepts I could just barely grasp. Not so here. At that moment, the concepts were transparent and I could see their inner workings. And I thought, “There are a lot of things I am good at, but math is one thing I can understand to the point that I can create. I can not only learn what others have found, but I can actually become an asset. I get math, on every level. I am going to be a mathematician.” I went on a Baltic cruise later that summer, and I spent most of the time on board reading while my cousins swam and relaxed. I searched the whole ship for a compass so I could work on constructions. Luckily, I brought a marker this time. No more soap. A few days before the tests, Bioshock came out, a game I had been awaiting for more than a year, and it was painful to hear my brothers talk about how great it was, but I had to review. When I had told the Dean of Education four months earlier that I wanted to challenge Algebra 2 without having taken the course elsewhere, he had laughed. I showed him.

I expected skipping Algebra 2 would affect my high school math career, but it ended up effecting it. It was the catalyst for the mathematical mind I have been cultivating ever since. Every mind-bogglingly profound or breath-takingly beautiful theorem that I have learned, every moment of frustration and every moment of triumph, I owe to that one extremely nerdy summer.