Math
always came easy for me so I had been on the accelerated path though
the available maths until I reached the top of what was left in my
senior year the great big baddy of the high school math classes –
calculus. It turned out to be easier for me than the previous class
because the teacher was just really good and there was a girl who sat
by me who was really smart and not averse to sharing homework. She
was also cute so I will not let it be said that I was attracted to
her purely for her amazing grasp of quantitative reasoning. I did
fine on tests without having to do any homework because it just came
to me so I would often be goofing off in class while other kids were
trying to learn. Inconsiderate right? You are right but where is your
proof? <-Math joke. If you thought that was funny I may have bad
news about how cool you are. One day I was particularly euphoric and
free wheeling and I got a bad case of downward spiraling laughter. I
laughed so hard that it started being funny to me that I was laughing
and the typically long suffering teacher told me to knock it off or
leave. I tried to knock it off but I had not stern English nanny to
bring me down off the roof, so to speak. He told em to come up to the
front and solve a problem on the board or I would get zero credit for
the section. That calmed me down because I took math as performance
art very seriously. He wrote out the hardest problem he could find in
the section and I went right to work solving the equation. It didn't
take me long which I think disappointed him a little because he
wanted it to be an object lesson on the need to pay attention. When I
finished he said it was correct and that I should go sit down and
shut up. I did and then I felt bad for disrupting his class because
he was actually a pretty cool guy and the best math teacher I had
ever had. I stopped goofing off in his class and it got harder as the
year went on and I was required by pure necessity to pay attention.
It was a good thing too because in college they expect you to know
some of that stuff.
