Remember Calculus? I was born the third son of a math teacher, she had earned a master's degree in math before any of us were born. I thought I had inherited her math gene until I met Calculus. Until then I had taken honors' classes in math and actually scored slightly better on math-related portions of standardized tests. I was a lucky tester, I think. It helped when it came to financial aid, even more than having an uncle who worked at the University I wound up attending (it's true, my Uncle Bart was the Director of Development there when I attended college).
It was in my first semester at college that I hit the proverbial wall in math--Calculus. Part of the problem was a language barrier between my teacher and his English-speaking students. We all found ourselves on our own in learning calculus, in light of the fact that we could not understand a word he said in class. We only knew the homework assignments because he wrote them on the blackboard each class.
That class was also the first where I saw my friend, Mike Heier, employ the constant-questioning technique. He would take a seat in the first row of the classroom and raise his hand not less than ten times per class. He would then ask long, convoluted questions that our instructor could not understand, only partly due to the aforementioned language barrier--Mike's questions tended toward gibberish and malarkey. On meeting Mike several weeks into the semester and asking him about those questions he explained the technique he was utilizing. His object was to slow the instructor down sufficiently to limit the number of chapters that he could cover in time to include them in the next exam. Mike had mistakenly assumed that there was some sort of principle involved that teachers would never violate--"Never include material on the test that was not covered in class." Mike was able to disabuse all of us of the notion that college instructors played fair (we were pretty naive).
I looked up my grade on an old transcript, believe it or not, and I received a "B." That didn't matter. I knew mathematics and I were through. Somewhere along the trail of differential equations and integral calculus, from the venerable Isaac Newton to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (developer of the Leibniz Notation), I had fallen off my horse and I had no intention of getting back on. This was first semester in college, for heaven's sake! I had nothing else to do but study. I was in four Honors classes, and had "A's" going in everything else. But there was some kind of block, and I was getting more interested in the study of people than applied mathematics. I turned toward Behavioral Science and never looked back. I struggled when I had to take the lone required Statistics class, but I survived.
There are few things I found harder than Calculus. Need a few examples? Hmmm, understanding women probably makes the list. Then, there is golf, an art I cannot seem to master--the more I play, the worse I get. My best rounds take place after extended absences from the game. A jump-shot in basketball--I usually wound up back on the ground before I released the ball. Jumping rope--my personal trainer has me trying that one again. I am up to five circuits now--a circuit is my word for completing one jump over the rope and having the rope clear my head coming back around for the next jump. Shag dancing--I admit I have only taken one lesson, but really, do you think it's because I am left-handed? I am always turning the wrong way. The totally unfair thing about this last one is that I love beach music.
All this came back to me this week when my yoga instructor mentioned "differential muscular inhibition," while explaining what happens when you tense one of a pair of opposing muscles in learning a yoga pose. She was proud of herself for using a highbrow word like "differential" in a sentence, especially after explaining she had spent only one week in Calculus, having dropped it in a hurry. One of her students mentioned the pose she had us in was "much harder than calculus." As much as I was sweating in the attempt, I had to agree. If you were watching me perform my own brand of yoga, you might observe that all the poses I try to learn are difficult, but I expect that thought will come back to me as long as I continue to take breath (and study yoga). "Some moves in yoga are harder than calculus."
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