Those good old days at UVa

While having a cup of coffee with friends the other day the conversation turned to our kids and how they were doing. They told me that their oldest son was a student at William & Mary and was doing very well there. It’s great to hear about parents who don’t have to worry every spring that Junior will be coming home for the summer in a few weeks with 300 metric tons of dirty laundry and will immediately begin to prepare them for a sub-stellar semester report card. My parents were not so lucky and I’m not talking just about the laundry that I came home with.

My youngest daughter made the Dean’s list her first year at Longwood University; my grades my first year didn’t total Dean’s list much less average that. There were a number of reasons for that, none of them good ones. In fact, my grades would not have been as good as they were had it not been for my required math class. Back in ’63 at the University of Virginia (that’s 1963 not 1863, thank you very much) one part of the requirements for a degree was successful completion of one year of mathematics. I can refer you to 12 people who will testify that teaching me math was quite possibly the most futile pursuit of their professional lives.

The first semester of math was something called Analytical Calculus. I had no idea what that was since I had always thought that a calculus was something that happened on your elbow if you played too much tennis. Complicating the issue was that my instructor was from Taiwan or someplace like that and had an accent so heavy that it was three weeks before I understood that when he said “yeentiger” he wasn’t talking about a young striped feline jungle predator. He meant “integer”. Who knew?

Now the good news: He graded on a strict curve and there were 5 scholarship football players in my section of twenty students. These guys took up all the F’s the curve allowed for so by the time he got to my grade there were no F’s left for me and he had to start handing out D’s. I was passing with exam grades in the high 30’s and low 40’s.

So first semester was not the math debacle I had expected. Second semester did not look good, however. That course was something called Matrices and Vectors. I always thought that “matrices” were the snotty guys you slipped a couple of bucks too for a table that was actually inside the restaurant and not in the alley. I almost panicked at registration but then it dawned on me, follow the jocks. I found where they were in the lines waiting to register for second semester classes. I passed “Matrices and Vectors” as well, hanging on to the coat tails of 5 very large sweaty men without necks. 

My academic career was, on the whole, undistinguished. As I tell it today, I crammed a 4 year course of study into 5 ½ years and three summer sessions. Someone had to make the upper 90% of the class possible after all, right? As poor as my transcript was, though, I’ll always have memories of one or two academic victories; I’ll always have Math.

Comments

[Portsia]

I hated math in school, too. Good with words, bad with numbers.