I am an honors student. Not the kind that doesn’t have to open a book and gets a 3.9, the kind that busts her butt trying to memorize political theory and literary terms, the kind the does extra credit even when she has an A, just in case I lose 345 billion brain cells the night before the final and fail it, I’m the kind of student that writes a paper three days before it’s due, because I like writing papers, and I go back to it a 1000 times just to make sure that one tiny change in punctuation won’t make it better, I’m the kind of student that’s totally disappointed with a B.
So, you can imagine my disappointment three years ago when my freshmen placement test results reveal that I belong in Elementary Algebra, you know, the same class you took in 7th grade, and then again your freshman year of HIGH SCHOOL. As a result of this oh-so-shocking revelation, I dipped into a deep denial, well actually I just got really delusional, hoping that if I pushed taking the remedial class off until my senior year, the university would feel bad for me and tell me I didn’t really have to go through that… well, the university didn’t care very much, and now I am two months away from starting the first semester of my senior year, finishing a double major, and a double minor, with honors, and I am sitting in the same math class I took when I was 12. Excellent.
I understand it all just fine, it just doesn’t hold my attention, when I see X, I don’t imagine it equals 35, rather, I start a list in my head of all the words that start with X- xylophone, x-ray,xanadu, xenolith, xenophobic, xylem. I remember that once one of my teachers told us it was the 3rd least common letter in the alphabet, and I try to think of female character names that begin with X, and realize that I would never name a character any of those names because X names have something edgy and hi-tech about them and most of my characters aren’t very edgy or techy. When I see Y- it isn’t equal to 817, rather, it’s sometimes a vowel, and I start to wonder why all the inconsistency? Who decided Y didn’t deserve to be a vowel all of the time, or that it deserved to be a vowel at all?
I think words have much more power than numbers. Granted, we live in a world powered by numeric function, the stock market, money, statistics… that’s inevitable in a capitalist society, but the things we remember, they aren’t marked with dollar signs and numbers, they’re flagged by what people said, how they said it, the look on their face.
Our words are the most powerful thing we have. Whenever I’m analyzing literature, I find it so fascinating that authors will make a deliberate choice to go with one word, one tone, one form of punctuation over another- decisions like these create the context of our world, the context of our character, and narrative of our lives… it’s awesome how much power we yield in speech or writing- maybe it’s this passion- this crazy obsession with words and the way they work, that’s causing me to suffer through adding and subtracting integers again this summer. If I could become more well rounded I would, but there’s some things we just can’t control.
