3rd Grade Math - 04/04/11

I hardly recognize
The old school division sign
The x we used to use
To multiply
They’ve all been replaced by
More neatly spaced
Symbology
The new cryptography
For me to decipher

And whatever happened to 3rd grade math?
Well, I can tell you,
It’s a thing of the past,
Because my little brother,
7 time 2 years old
Can’t divide.
And when I heard that
Something in me died,
Because I remember when I first learned
That 5 time 5
Is the area of a square
With a 5 cm side
Something clicked inside.

See, I like math
Because I like my world to make sense
Because I like to understand
And the surest
Purest
Truest way I can see to do that
Is to add, subtract, multiply and divide
I like to integrate and differentiate
So I can explicitly calculate
The persistent existence of
e and pi.

Or tau,
For those of you who may think it’s more accurate
And who may not hold
The same sentimental value
As I do on that number.

I remember the first veil
Lifting when I was eight
As I learned how to calculate
Combinations and permutations
Although I did not quite yet
Experience the sensation
Of fully understanding
Those implications.
That came later.

But each small step
Has been a building block
To this big picture
To where I can see the world
In equations
And if I know the luscious curve
That built your head,
Why, I could find the area of your face

So maybe you can almost understand
How my reactions
Can sometimes get out of hand
When I realize
That my little brother,
7 time 2 years old,
Can’t divide.

But, then,
There’s this girl,
Who is also 7 time 2 years old
Who is at the same level of math
As others in my class
With a calculator in her brain
Able to instantaneously retain
Any combination of numbers
Add, subtract, multiply, divide


I am in love
With the beautiful, sweeping S
Of the limit sun,
With the big wide curves
Next to their skinny little tangent lines.
With the singsong quotient rule
I repeat when I’m stressed,
I repeat when working on homework
That is boring
Or when I wish is was sleeping
But am instead up so late repeating
The singsong quotient rule,
So that makes it alright.

Sometimes, I wish that
The more strange
And more easily changed
And constantly rearranged
Classes, like English and physics,
Were all purely math

And I like long math problems
Tangles of numbers, letters, and signs
That stretch a whole page,
And pull me in
To a half hour
Of scrambling through its maze
And then, upon reaching the finish
That exquisite exhale
Of complete knowledge,
Perfect understanding,
Supreme control
Of the universe
That is governed by those
Long lines of numbers, letters, and symbols.

So you who speak a different language
Like English,
Let me say, as clearly as I can,
That I love mathematics.
And for you how do speak my first language:
M times A to the power of TH,
Is equal to the integral of
e to the x times y.