The Language I Borrowed

I used to joke with my students that English teachers never stop working. We go home and read for fun, underline sentences in library books, play with poems the way other people play with crossword puzzles. Sometimes I wondered if math teachers did the same thing.

Math always made me cry. Usually in private.

I never understood it in high school. I passed algebra because my teacher liked me, not because I learned anything. By the time I reached college, I had to take remedial math—baby math, the kind that assumes you are already behind. The problem wasn’t effort. I didn’t understand the language.

Numbers arrived without narrative. They didn’t tell me where they came from or where they were going. They didn’t explain why one thing followed another. They sat there, cold, daring me to recognize them.

In college, a tutor once told me that if he could sit inside my head, he could figure out how to make math make sense to me. One day, almost by accident, I turned a problem into a story. I pictured the parentheses as a crib and the numbers as children gathered around it. The one closest had to be held first. Once I saw it that way, the order wasn’t mysterious anymore. It was care. One thing at a time.

The equation didn’t change.
The language did.

For the first time, the numbers had a place to stand.

I never became good at math in the traditional sense. I learned that I understand things only after I can picture them.

Years later, my brother tried to explain string theory to me. I read about it too—how the smallest parts of the universe might not be particles at all, but vibrations, known only by the patterns they leave behind. I didn’t understand the math, but I recognized the shape of the idea immediately. I understood it the only way I ever do: through story. Through the sense that unseen things can still organize a life.

I’ve spent much of my life translating systems that did not come naturally to me. I used to think that meant something was wrong with me. Now I think it means I learn by connection—by sequence, by image, by seeing how one thing leads to the next.

I’m still doing what I did in that tutoring room years ago: looking for the language that lets me understand.

I think intelligence lives in translation.

—Tonya Snyder