This Modern Writer: The Year I Lost Math by Art Edwards

At the end of my freshman first semester at Northern Illinois University, I was shocked to receive my first ever D on a report card.

I’d flirted with Ds a little during high school. There was the typing class in 10^th grade where I never really learned to type with more than two fingers. There was the gym class in 11^th that seemed to require a sadistic number of pull-ups. There was the physics class in 12^th where our teacher decided on the last day to curve our grades, pushing my futile attempts at proving physical theories into the C category. I’d come to believe there was a force field between me and the 60-69th percentile. My sister didn’t get Ds, I didn’t get Ds. They didn’t run in our family.

The really odd thing about this D was that it was in Trigonometry. Before college, I was something of a math whiz. In grade school, I was the king of Around the World, a game that involved going head to head with other students and trying to be the first to get the answer to a multiplication problem. I glided easily from desk to desk, barking answers and leaving each classmate in a pique of frustration. In high school, I was in accelerated math, taking Algebra and Trig well before others and getting A’s along the way. I’d gotten into Trig in my first semester at N.I.U. because I’d pre-tested well. All the other freshman on my dorm floor were in a catch-all class called finite mathematics.

I’d spent that semester at N.I.U. either ignoring or taking haphazard stabs at my Trig assignments. Despite having aced the subject in high school, I wasn’t getting some of the basics, and I didn’t know how to ask for help. The class was early in the morning, three days a week, in an auditorium-like room with 100 other students. I wasn’t great about making it to every session.

Annoyingly, everyone on my dorm floor couldn’t stop talking about how easy finite math was. “We barely have to study,” my roommate Felix said, giving me this incredulous look that made me want to punch him.

The D knocked my whole intellectual self-image askew. I’d always relied on my math skills for a certain amount of my identity. I’d given up sports in junior high when it was clear I’d never excel at any of them. I was a musician but, to that point, undistinguished. There were plenty of people smarter and stronger and more talented than me at my high school. Math was my way of maintaining dignity in a world that seemed to value little else of me. It didn’t matter that my GPA for my freshman semester at N.I.U. was a stomachable 2.4. Math was my lowest grade. Something was wrong.

This poor showing, combined with flubbing my financial aid for my entire freshman year, combined with wanting to punch my roommate, led me back with my tail between my legs to my hometown of Moline, Illinois. I would attend Black Hawk Junior College, where I would have to finish my two-year degree before venturing out into the real college world again. This was a blow for me, not so much because I had to go to junior college–which actually suited me better at the time–but because I had to go back to my hometown, which was a fate worse than death.

Ever since Laverne and Shirley had moved from the cold Midwestern climes of Milwaukee to Los Angeles, I knew I would someday follow a similar path out of Moline. I’d disliked my hometown since I was five. All of the Moline adults worked at places like John Deere and International Harvester, and they complained non-stop about their jobs and their lives. I always wanted to ask them, “Why don’t you move? Haven’t you seen Laverne & Shirley?” But I never did. I just knew I would move, and as soon as possible.

So after finally making it a pitiful two hours outside of Moline to Dekalb and N.I.U., I was forced back home, and with a D no less, fumbling through Black Hawk’s schedule for the winter of 1988, trying to figure out what classes to take.

I couldn’t believe it when I came across finite mathematics in the catalog. If I’d had finite math my first semester, I might have managed to stay out of Moline, maybe becoming just another N.I.U. student on my way to a cushy computer science degree, which I could’ve taken to Silicon Valley and made millions. I signed up for finite math at Black Hawk because I wanted somehow to right this wrong, and I wanted the easy A.

I also came upon an English course called “Introduction to Mode.” The title meant nothing to me, but the class required the reading of eight novels. To that point in my life, I wasn’t much of a reader. Sure, I read school assignments, and I faked my way through Huckleberry Finn and A Tale of Two Cities in high school, but no one ever mistook me for bookish. I read a little for recreation, mostly music magazines and a few rock bios like Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga; No one here gets out Alive: The Biography of Jim Morrison; and ‘Scuse me While I kiss the Sky. As a kid, when Sunday NFL wasn’t enough for me to get my Walter Payton fix, I went to my grade school library and found a couple of books on him. I also, for reasons I can’t explain now, read the entire Beverly Cleary oeuvre, sitting in the library and flipping through the pages during what must’ve been rainy recesses. I’ll never forget, in The Mouse and the Motorcycle, that half ping-pong ball used for the mouse’s crash helmet.

But now I was in college, and I realized that, if I were going to finish a degree, I was going to have to learn to read books, whole books, important books, and relatively quickly.

Also pushing me toward reading was a recently adopted love of the rock band REM, whom I’d discovered at N.I.U. I couldn’t get this Rolling Stone article out of my head that said, while photographers changed film during a photo shoot, Peter Buck took a paperback novel from his pocket and read until it was time to pose again. Something about this image stuck with me, and made it necessary that I try novels too.

So I signed up for “Introduction to Mode.” I wanted to be smart and cool, and the class would count as one of my general requirements.

My finite math class met twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, at a reasonable hour in the early afternoon. It was taught by tall, helpful Mr. Tompkins, who diligently worked with students until they got it, one-on-one after class if necessary. The material was “easy,” the class small. I should’ve had no complaints.

But as I started the first few weeks of the course, I was as befuddled by finite math as I’d been in Trig the semester before. I couldn’t follow the formulas as they were presented, and I couldn’t make myself focus on what the teacher was saying. I was confused when I did the homework, and completely lost when I took the tests. All of this led me to start skipping classes. It was college Trig all over again. Toward the end of the semester, right before the final, I learned that if I passed the final I would pass the class (another D), and if I failed the final I would fail the class. I asked Mr. Tompkins if he’d drop me from the course should I fail the final, to keep the F off my record. He agreed, and good thing, because I failed the final.

So in my first year of college math, I’d gotten a D and what was basically an F. Math as my best subject, and now, suddenly, my worst. What happened?

I can’t talk about any change in myself as an eighteen year old without talking about my relationship to rock music at the time. Rock had been at the center of my life since the summer of my fourteenth year, when I discovered Van Halen and bought a bass guitar from a friend’s older brother. The next five years took me on an ascending journey through glam metal bands like Def Leppard and Night Ranger, through more accomplished acts like Rush and Led Zeppelin, then through a brief flirtation with U2 and jazz fusion, and finally to REM.

This last shift was the most significant. All of the previous acts were filled with larger-than-life characters. Eddie Van Halen, who played ridiculously complicated riffs while doing scissor kicks; Geddy Lee, who casually strolled around the stage while playing impossible-to-replicate bass lines; Jaco Pastorius, the self-proclaimed “Jimi Hendrix of the bass”; even Bono, who seemed preternaturally inclined toward being a front man and entertainer. These people were “stars,” ten-feet-tall, otherworldly creatures. I liked them, was entertained by them, even mimicked them when I could, but it never crossed my mind I could be them.

Contrast this rock type with Michael Stipe. The first REM song I ever heard was “Gardening at Night,” the single from their first EP Chronic Town. On it, Stipe’s voice sounds small, childish, insecure, but somehow determined to do this, to sing with this band, to get his words out. With Stipe, singing and performing always seemed a way of willing himself out of his own doubts about his talent and worth. The desire to pull himself up through singing was his talent and worth. Starting with REM, rock people came down from mighty Olympus and shook hands with me, sheepishly asking me along on their journeys.

I was prepped by Michael Stipe–and the river of punk and post punk that led out from REM to acts like Hüsker Dü and the Sex Pistols–not to respect the absolutes of bands like Rush, Van Halen and U2. Those more mainstream bands were still pretty amazing, but somehow less real than before. Stars were fine to gaze upon at night, but on what planet did I live? And what did I want to do here besides stargaze?

I can’t help but see an analogous relationship between the progressive rock of my high school years and the math that came so naturally for me at the time. Math was also this untouchable absolute: numbers with perfect relationships; formulas that led to right answers; equations, when performed correctly, always making sense in the end. Listening to REM and other such bands didn’t answer questions, it asked questions, provocative ones. How much bigger is the range of expression than you ever knew? What does that mean to you as a musician? As a person?

The instructor of “Introduction to Mode” was Erskine Carter. Erskine was a big guy, and smart, and a little intimidating for a non-reader like me, and he had an unsettling way of sitting on top of the his desk when he addressed the class. Still, he was very forgiving of people who didn’t know the first thing about fiction, and he loved rock music, which from my perspective didn’t hurt.

Forgiving? Yes. Easy? No. We were assigned eight novels to read over the sixteen-week semester, one every two weeks, and the longest, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, was first. I had to read fifty pages of it before our next meeting.

I picked up Tess during every spare moment of those two days, trying to get the fifty pages read in time. My mom almost lapsed into cardiac arrest when she saw me on the living room couch, television off, reading a book. I managed to get the assignment read for our next class, but more than that, I actually liked reading it. I was attracted to what I would later learn was the naturalism of the book, the idea that Tess was doomed from the beginning to her tragic fate, that no amount of effort on her part could have changed much of anything for her. This message ran so contrary to everything I’d learned to that point. You can be anything you want to be was the mantra of just about every cultural institution I’d been involved with, and here was a book saying the opposite: You’re going to be what the fates allow you to be. It struck me as shocking, revolutionary.

And I related–from my relatively safe working class/junior college vantage point–to the character of Tess. In retrospect, I also felt doomed to return to Moline after my first semester at N.I.U. I’d made a poor choice for a roommate. I’d spent too much time focused on things besides schoolwork, and I had no one around to snap me out of it. I can remember walking home drunk from a bar one night and thinking, “I can’t believe it’s no one’s job to keep tabs on me.” I was just floating along, enjoying college freshman life, relying on whatever brains and natural instincts had gotten me to that point. But the stakes were higher than I thought. My future was being mapped out for me by my college performance. In hindsight, it didn’t seem like I had much of a chance. No doubt Tess felt the same way on her Stonehenge altar, waiting for the mob to take her.

After reading those fifty pages, we were to come to class prepared to talk about theme. Erskine asked us, swinging his legs as he sat on top of his desk, “What do you think is the theme of the book?”

Someone raised their hand. “There’s a theme of love that runs–”

Erskine stopped her. “That’s not how we talk about theme in this class. In here, themes are complete thoughts. Try it again, and this time put it in the form of a sentence.”

After a few go-rounds with other students, I eventually said, “Love, while never feeling false, can lead to false hope.” This wasn’t brilliant, but I liked the way it felt trying to formulate it. It was like exercising a muscle I didn’t know I had. I thought, This is how smart people think.

Erskine also insisted that people not just say how they felt about elements of the books, but cite passages within them. Some classmate would start talking about a character in a conversational way–“I don’t like the way Tess is always complaining about how bad she has it”–and Erskine would stop him with a raise of his eyebrows, then motion to the copy of the book in his hand. This instructed the student to cite a passage that illuminated his thought. With such guidance, Erskine was teaching us to have an intelligent conversation about literature. Don’t regurgitate ideas like you would about some movie you’ve just seen; stay grounded in the text, and form your feelings into communicable thoughts.

After Tess we read 1984, with its scorchingly accurate portrait of the future; then Lord of the Flies, with its poignant dystopian worldview; then A Clockwork Orange, a book that had to invent an entire slang language to tell its story. Each book struck me as the endgame of one writer’s distinct experiential path, a train of thought followed as far as it could go and then communicated back to us through the pages. These books were rare, valuable. I felt lucky to get to read them. And that glossary at the back of A Clockwork Orange was more rock than any rock I’d heard in a long time.

I read every word of every one of those eight novels, and I tried to formulate sentences for the feelings they conjured in me. I wasn’t good at it, but being good at it wasn’t the point. Working at it was. What I’d learn wouldn’t be some trick I’d picked up somewhere and could take for granted. That semester, books became the new center of my intellectual and aesthetic life, filling the space left by the abandonment of math. I’ve been reading a book ever since.

So, where did my math go? Did it leave me forever? No, I still have it. I can still formulate answers in my head to mathematical questions others would need a pad and paper to do, but by the time I was in college I was ready for something else, something that didn’t purport to have all the answers, something more like life. In that sense, math was the easy stuff.

ART EDWARDS’s third novel, Badge (unpublished), was named a finalist in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association’s Literary Contest for 2011 in the Mainstream category. His second novel, Ghost Notes, released on his own imprint Defunct Press in 2008, won the 2009 PODBRAM Award for best work of contemporary fiction. His first novel, Stuck Outside of Phoenix, is being made into a feature film, which is scheduled for release in 2012. His writing has or will appear in The Writer and Writers’ Journal, and online at The Collagist, elimae, JMWW, The Rumpus, Girls with Insurance and writersdojo.org.