Long ago, when I was just a little young thing in elementary school, I walked home from school one sunny winter day. There had been a snowstorm a day or two ago, and the plows had heaped up the snow over the ends of the driveways and the sidewalks. It's a typical New England winter scene, as anyone from there will attest.

My parents, in a well-meaning admonition, had told me, NEVER walk in the streets, because a car will hit you. So, being a good obedient girl, I wouldn't walk in the smoothly plowed streets, only on the sidewalks.

But the sidewalks on this day were covered with craggy piles of snow. From school to home was more than a mile. Block after block, I toiled on through the heavy deposits, climbing over some, sinking into others, crunch crunch crunch through the snowbanks, trying to get home, obeying an abstract principle I was too conscientious to break. Finally I remember collapsing onto a snow hummock, just trying to retrieve the energy to go on.

I feel this way now, more than forty years later, trying to get through trigonometry. I have just filled 16 pages with solved trigonometric identity problems. I can solve them now, at least most of them. At this point they seem as meaningless as snowbanks. They don't build anything permanent, and they melt when you apply the heat of algebra to them. Yet I have to know how they work. They are essential to what comes later in calculus and physics. And after this will come double-angle formulas, and after that, sum, difference, and product formulas. And after that, trigonometric equations and a return to graphs.

This is taking much, much longer than I thought it would. This is the type of person I am, and how I learn: not by the brilliant flashes, enthusiasm, and risk-loving energy of youthful genius (who would walk in the street regardless of cars), but by the step-by-step, stolid plodding of someone who will work by the rules of completeness and propriety even when it takes the energy right out of me.

My hope is that I will get through this, and that spring weather will come soon. The mathematical snowbanks will melt and I'll be able to walk on unobstructed sidewalks till I get where I'm going, which is not home, but a place that recedes forever into the cosmos.

Posted at 1:10 am | link