Part I
When I was in elementary school, none of my teachers were perceptive enough to realize that I could not see.
They thought I was just inattentive. It was true that I often enclosed myself in the bubble of my own dreams, but being nearsighted made the bubble physical. The close things inside it were vibrantly clear, but faraway things were indistinct and unreal.
Inside my bubble, I wrote stories and drew. I thought, imagined, and felt. But I missed a lot that went on around me.
My world had blurred so gradually, I forgot what it was like to see distant objects clearly. I assumed faraway objects were supposedto be hard to see. I estimate that for at least three elementary school years, my world was a blurry mess. And no one ever thought to give me an eye exam.
Daydreaming and poor vision conspired to make me a terrible math student.
A humiliating memory: I was in sixth grade. I quickly cupped my hand over my achievement test score. The girl who had been staring at me leaned forward and snatched it from my desk. As she scanned my test she smiled, then passed it to her friends. My face burned. \”Look.\” she pointed at me. \”Look at her mathscore.\”
I was not until the eighth grade that I took an eye exam given by my school. The woman testing me shook her head. \”You are blind young lady.\” A few of my classmates laughed. \”How can you see to walk?\”
I was stunned, but it all made sense: why for many years I had struggled to find the kickball bases; why the blackboard always had a \”glare;\” why I preferred staring at the floor to the view ahead.
Putting on eyeglasses was like stepping onto an alien planet. So thiswas how things were supposed to look? Distant edges did not have to be fuzzy? Objects could occupy spaces of tunneling depth? Faraway shadows had boundaries? The world looks so three-dimensional, I thought.
Contact lenses were even better: magical teardrops of clarity, glare-free, weightless.
By the time I entered my tenth grade algebra class, my grades had improved, but my math background was still shaky. I wanted to reverse the damage. I was in a mode of challenging old assumptions, and I had an exciting and radical theory: that I was not really \”bad at math.\” To prove it, I had decided to make my first A in a math class.
However, I had picked the worst environment possible for improving my math grades.
My algebra I class was full of rowdy freshmen boys, who acted like reckless, overgrown puppies. And the teacher could not control the class. She had only recently graduated and had not even passed her certification exam. Everyone was talking. Kids walked around. Desks were skewed. Textbooks lay scattered on the floor.
Whenever the teacher spoke, a tide of voices and shrill laughter swept her voice away. She avoided facing the class and instead focused on the blackboard, as if seeking refuge from the unruly students behind her.
Every few minutes, she stopped, turned, and sighed. \”Okay, people. You need to stop talking and listen. Okay?\” She would stare bravely for a moment and wait for obedience. When it never came, she would turn to the blackboard and chalk new equations.
I was the only one trying to listen. I could make out the sharp edges of the numbers on the board. As I sat quietly amid the chaos and copied notes, I drew glares. Why was I not taking advantage of the anarchy?
Thunk. A kick to the back of my desk jolted me. I turned around to face the offender, but he was looking elsewhere. \”Stop kicking my chair,\” I said.
\”Who, me?\” The boy shrugged. \”I didn\’t do anything.\” He looked around, then at the ceiling, as if searching for the real culprit there.
The teacher scolded the class and chalked more numbers on the board. \”You kicked my desk,\” I said. \”Don\’t do it again.\”
He rolled his eyes. \”Wasn\’t me,\” he said. Thunk.\”You must have imagined it.\”
I faced forward and scanned the room. The seats were arranged alphabetically and all the other desks were occupied. The teacher teetered on the edge of a nervous breakdown. She was not going to help me. Not with him. Not with math. Not with anything.
At home, I carried my math book to my brother and asked him to explain my homework. He deciphered the textbook examples, then drilled me with questions. \”Okay, so we moved X over here. What do I do next?\”
I made wrong guesses and he corrected me until I had a grasp of the material. This teaching style worked, but I hated being wrong before I could be right. And he was often hard to catch. I hated depending on people who were in transit.
So when alone, I did what he did: I read the examples. I expected it to be like reading a different language. I thought anyone who was \”bad at math\” needed a teacher. But I made sense of the examples on the first try. Each step flowed logically into the next. It was easy.
In class I had always missed steps because my attention wandered. By the time it returned, the teacher had moved on to a new step. But with a textbook, if I had to, I could return to the previous step to see what I had missed.
I was astounded. All my life I had been plagued with poor attention during math classes, and everything had been clearly laid out in the textbooks. Why had I not read the examples long ago? Why did we even need math teachers?
When the teacher gave the next test, the questions were short and straightforward. I was on top of math now. I was making an A without even doing the homework. Everything was going well.
Until the teacher flunked her certification exam and was fired.
Part 2
We were not without a new teacher for long.
Mrs. Heritage swept into the classroom and took charge. In her early forties, she wore polyester pants with an elastic waistband. She forced the desks into neat rows and outlined a strict code of behavior.
She announced that the class was so far behind in lessons, she would have to breeze through the next few chapters by giving us a few notes as a foundation. Our homework would then skip ahead to the advanced chapters.
She wrote her list of rules for behavior on a free-standing white board and discussed each one in detail.
But the students, though more subdued, clung to old habits. They still talked during lessons, and my desk chair received a daily battering from the boy behind me.
The code of conduct was only a beginning. Mrs. Heritage had a better way of enforcing control, which would soon stun everyone into docile silence. The first week she gave a ten question test. I was happy when I saw it: just a page with a few equations on it. A short, simple easy test.
I was mistaken. Worked out, problem one would not fit on the test sheet. I switched to notebook paper. The problem became a tangled mess, and it filled the entire page. After I finished it, I took a deep breath. Nine more to go! To finish, I had to stay after class. When I was done I had eight pages of eraser-smudged notebook paper.
By the time I laid the test on the front desk, I was exhausted.
I learned the next day I had passed – but only barely. Unlike the previous teacher, Mrs. Heritage did not give partial credit. With only ten questions, each wrong answer meant being dropped by a letter grade.
Most of the class had failed.
Mrs. Heritage had the full attention of the students now. After receiving failing grades, my terrified classmates clung to her every word.
Except for me. I was still learning everything from the textbook. My problem was not an inability to comprehend.
When I looked through my test, I saw where my treacherous hand had copied numbers wrong. In other places, I had subtracted 5 from 10 and gotten 15; confused X for Y; copied fractions upside down; forgotten decimal points.
These were not \”careless errors.\” They were lapses of attention lasting a second, places where my mind had blinked, where mental static had moved in and replaced thought.
To make an A now, I would have to make a lot of hundreds. I had thought understanding the material was enough. Now I had to do everything perfectly; otherwise, I would get no credit for understanding.
I bound myself to my math book and spent hours practicing, trying to train my hands to obey my head, to banish the mental static. I spent my weekends doing problems as the sunlight trickled into the window and blued into dusk.
I rarely got the problems right on the first try. I almost always missed them because of a mental glitch. To ease my frustration, I wrote praise in the margins when I got a problem right. Great! Smiley face. If I missed one, Great try. Keep going.
When test time came, I was painstakingly careful. Algebra was the last class of the day. I stayed an hour after class, checking, rechecking, looking for places where my mind had blinked or my hand betrayed me.
Each time the teacher handed back a test, my heartbeat quickened. Every time, I was almost certain I had failed. But my painstaking efforts had worked. My test grades came back as a nineties and hundreds.
Over half of the class was failing. I felt as if I was barely holding on. I continued my hours of studying and practicing, always feeling pressed for time, teetering on the precipice of failure.
One day after the last school quarter had begun, the principal came over the intercom and called a list of names, including mine, ordering students to report to the cafeteria. When I got there, I lined up behind ten other curious students and walked away with a rectangular card. It featured a cartoon of a delivery boy holding a pizza; it said, Good for one free pan-sized pizza at Little Caesars.Congratulations on your academic excellence.
When I returned to class, I held the card in my hand and I was suddenly the center of attention. A throng of freshman boys interrogated me. When I was seated, the boy who liked to kick my desk demanded to know why my name had been called. \”What did you do? Were you in trouble?\”
It was a satisfying moment. \”I made straight A\’s last quarter.\” I held up my card. \”So I got a coupon.\”
\”Let me see that,\” he said, making a grab for the card. He examined the coupon and his face changed. He shook his head. I held out my palm and he reluctantly returned the coupon.
\”So you made an \’A\’ in this class? No way. Not you.\” His eyes narrowed suspiciously. \”If you did, you cheated.\”
\”Think whatever you want. I\’m getting pizza. That\’s all that matters.\”
\”Give it back to me,\” he said. \”I like pizza. I\’m smart. I deserve pizza.\”
I did not give anyone a pizza. I went home and pasted the card into my scrapbook. I had proven I was not hopeless at math and for a time managed to keep my wayward mind from blinking.
But only for a time. Decades later, my mind still wanders. My outward attention fades in and out during movies and social gatherings. Absorbed in my thoughts, I sometimes I throw socks away or fill the cat dish too many times.
Maybe one day I will find extrovert glasses that will focus the world outsidemy head and the details will burst into perfect clarity. I will marvel at how different everything looks and be amazed at all I missed before.
For now, I still have a coupon – evidence of a year when I fought myself and won. Maybe one day I will remove it from my scrap book, take it to Little Caesars, and try – just for fun – to cash it in. But even if it never feeds me, it may have given me some peace.
My Algebra I desk chair remained unmolested by unruly feet for the rest my tenth grade year.