Memory on a Sunday Morning

One of the strange developments of adulthood has been my body’s stubborn persistence to wake up at about the same time each day. During the week, my 7:30am sleep schedule is strong enough that on the weekends I’m lucky to manage 9am (and even then, only when I force myself to stay up later).

So I wake up early on Saturdays and Sundays, with little to do but read and think. And this morning, I picked up Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others, a neat collection of short stories. (Will surely say more after I’ve actually read it all.)

One of the stories, about a mathematician, unexpectedly led me to remember my own Calculus teacher. I was lucky enough to start taking Calculus my junior year of HS, and had the same teacher for Calculus 1, 2, 3, and Differential Equations (as they were broken down by semester at the school). He was one of the most amazing teachers I’ve ever had, a graduate from MIT who found himself teaching high school calculus at a public school in a suburb of Kansas City.

He had a few things that made him especially endearing as a teacher, one of which was the calculus cheer. I’d heard he brought it from MIT, but at our school, it went like this:

E to the U, DU DX E to the X, DX Secant, Cosine, Tangent Sine, 3.14159 Integral, Radical, U DV, Calculus Forever, SM East

There were other verses too, that we were taught as we reached the appropriate level of math, including one final one for Differential Equations that made us feel like hot shit. The cheer was what everyone knew about the teacher and the class—we chanted it before tests, loud enough to be heard by every other classroom on that wing—but what kicked me into memory was a subtler joy.

The best thing about Calculus, and why I’m a super-strong proponent of getting everyone to at least try it, is how it’s so much more elegant than the hacks and cheats usually taught as part of Algebra. The effect is of going from silly, arbitrary formulae for determining the vertex of the graph to simply taking the derivative and solving for zero.

But calculus itself has its own mysterious formulae, and learning how to use them is most of the battle. We were introduced to each formula in class, and tackled it over the course of about a week. Once we were good enough at using it—and this was most of the motivation for getting that way—our teacher would prove it.

Watching a good proof snap into place is an amazing thing, and he would show us the steps of how where we had arrived came from where we were, and how these insights were encapsulated from some seemingly-messy interim manipulations. Terms would appear and disappear, expand and collapse in a clean elegance that really can’t be matched by any other subject.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that this was the best, and I didn’t appreciate how good it was until I went off to college and it went away.