2 + 2
A former engineering student has written a really funny article speculating on why college students are leaving engineering programs in droves.
The United States contains a finite number of smart people, most of whom have options in life besides engineering. You will not produce thronging bevies of pocket-protector-wearing number-jockeys simply by handing out spiffy Space Shuttle patches at the local Science Fair. If you want more engineers in the United States, you must find a way for America’s engineering programs to retain students like, well, me: people smart enough to do the math and motivated enough to at least take a bite at the engineering apple, but turned off by the overwhelming coursework, low grades, and abysmal teaching.
Frankly, I’m surprised I made it through my computer science coursework without (a) throwing myself off a bridge, (b) going stark-raving mad, or (c) fleeing to the calm reassuring solace of the English department. For, unlike the author of that piece, I have absolutely no aptitude with numbers.
I remember the first equation I was confronted with: it was a two and two, with a sort of cross between them and two parallel lines after, followed by a question mark. It was on the blackboard.
My teacher was staring at me, expectantly. I looked at her, looked at the thing on the board, and said: “Forty Two?”
“No,” said my teacher, giving me the smile that doctors in white coats give to people whose forebrains they’ve just removed.
“Did you just say two plus two is forty-two?” whispered Jackhammer from the desk behind mine. Jackhammer was the bully the school had assigned me when I matriculated.
I was sweating. I said: “Could you rephrase the question?”
The teacher thought. “I don’t think so, no.”
“Could you phrase it in the form of an answer?”
Jackhammer tapped his pen idly on the back of my chair, whispering dark promises. I wondered what shallow body of water he’d be plunging my head into after class. I imagined it would be brackish and un-transparent, and thought that maybe, just maybe, if I answered this question correctly, he’d have mercy, because all bullies have a large and undying respect for mathematical proficiency.
“Well,” I said. “Let’s break this down. You have a two, and then you have another two. You have two twos.”
A pause. “Yes. That’s correct.”
“They’re obviously pretty close. I mean, they look the same, they act the same, they represent the same number of objects. They are, essentially, identical.”
My teacher sighed. “The answer is the same as four plus zero.”
“So you have two identical objects, both expression of the same Platonic form, if you will. Physical manifestations of a divine and unchanging absolute. They are the same thing. And when you put two of the same thing together, you get the same thing. The answer, therefore, is two.”
A silence, marked by scattered chuckles. The teacher looked at me. She said: “The answer is four.”
“Lies!” I said, bolting from my seat. “Lies and vile calumny!”
So you can imagine my horror when I walked into my first Calculus class, in college, and the professor, a small figure at the bottom of a great amphitheater, began to scrawl a series of cramped greek characters on the board, with accompanying graphs that featured curved lines that sloped toward, but never quite touched, the x axis. I was given to understand that the the area under these lines was very important, though I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why. I wrote down everything he wrote down, and listened to everything he said, then went back to my dorm room and extracted a ceremonial blade and sat in the lotus position and was on the point of committing ritual seppuku when my eye fell on one of the books for my next class. It was a something called Ridley Walker, by someone named Russell Hoban. The cover looked interesting, and, deciding to judge the book by it, I put down the sword and turned to the first page, which read:
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly been the last wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint lookin to see none agen. He didnt make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly.
I was captivated. I turned to the next page, and then the next. I went to class, and listened to my teacher talk about it, and the more she talked, the more I liked. I felt comfortable, suddenly. At home.
The next day, I went back to calculus. There were more graphs on the board now, great spidery criss-cross things with shaded areas and long equations that would haunt my nightmares that night and every night thereafter, unfolding like monsters and striking me down with the sheer power of their malign inscrutability.
But I had Ridley Walker, now, and all the books that came after it, so I survived. That’s the thing with great hardship; it doesn’t necessarily kill you, and it doesn’t necessarily make you stronger, but it does help you figure out what you love.
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