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.

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. It wasn’t that I wasn’t trying. 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 just sat there on the page, flat and certain, as if I should already know 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, I knew what to do next. One thing at a time.

The equation didn’t change.
The language did.

I never became what anyone would call good at math. 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 be vibrations instead of solid things, known only by what they affect. I didn’t understand the math, but I recognized the shape of the idea immediately.

I’ve spent much of my life trying to turn unfamiliar things into something I could follow. I used to think something was wrong with me. Now I know I just need a way in. I need sequence. Image. A way to follow what comes next.

I think intelligence lives in translation.

—Tonya Snyder