is this topic too personal for a college essay? i thought the experience illustrated well my issues with being a math-loving girl. please comment!!!
What is a function?
My math teacher D— ------ occasionally posed this question to my tenth grade math class. A function is a set of points, I answer. The classmates muffled crossing legs tell my paranoia that I respond too arrogantly, and should answer instead another question: What is your function? This is a question implicit in the voice of all who see me think and love. Yes, what is your function as a woman in mathematics?
When I release myself from the voluntary confinement of Mister -------s office, I sense mandarin oranges and Mozart. He peels and digests the oranges obsessively; I am told that when one eats too much orange food their skin turns orange, and his existence provides the elegant and muted axiom. To drown out the numbers lounging outside, he twists the dial up deftly so that we can no longer speak, or count, or divide. Instead, we communicate our proofs and logic through the strains of the maestro. When I step outside, the first feet and heart and eyes that I see ask me two small questions, through their pitter patter of difference:
Why she, why math?
The corpus callosum is a dense bridge between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Some scientists name it intuition and provide jumbled numbers explaining that women have larger CCs. Feminist theory tells us that we must walk this strange bridge with care, to not tread too powerfully on any one bit of reason, feeling, or intuition. As one of those math girls, then, I view my body as a function of societal, rather than biological, differences. For example: My body as a biological entity has repeatedly informed me that I should not become a mathematician. Last May, I was told not to fret about the AP Calculus exam. In the interest of time and efficiency, then, I chose to study biology rather than calculus in the weeks leading up to the exam. In particular I memorized the letters, then the syllables, then the words: menses, progesterone, endometrial. The definitions ebbed and flowed beneath the bridges of my brain as the words did the same within the confines of my body. I have been told to memorize that estrogen is the reason why I cannot think in the same way as my male peers do. Yet because I do not want to believe that biological difference is truth, my long-term memory rejects the details of the menstrual cycle so I cheerlessly cram them once more.
So it is the morning on a day, and I sit in the back of a classroom with cool steel legs pressed against mine. The lining of my uterus began to self-deconstruct. My body had spoken and my corpus callosum responded with a weary mutter, a sorry creak. As I shuffled around the objects on my desk (pencils, calculator, mind), I wondered if there would be blood on the chair when I rose. I told myself, with whispered intent: you can never become a mediocre mathematician, because youre fighting for the most important numberthe countless girls struggling to achieve in mathematics. After, I could not move with others: I hid my back, smiling nervously and backing into a bathroom with wild intent and muddled explanation. I scrubbed away the crimson; it looked like the corpse of any mathematical prowess I had once possessed. As I splashed water on my exhausted face, my mind fought with the damsel in distress, locked deep beneath my skin. Even before I entered, the bathroom smelled like rotting mandarin oranges.