...to Crave Pi

I made pie today. Lots of people did, but while I was planning my pie, I spent a lot of time thinking about pi and the time in my life when I actually relied on the famous ratio to help me solve problems. Finding the area of a circle, calculating angles in radians, and designing crop circles - these are not the kind of problems that one encounters as a middle-aged English instructor. After college, I closed the math books and never looked back again. Until today, 3.14.15.

When I was in elementary school I thought of myself as a scientist and imagined that I would be a ballet dancer who just happened to know a lot about physics. Such are the dreams of young girls. As is typical for young women, once puberty hit, these ambitious dreams were replaced with more realistic goals, and my inclination towards math and science was replaced with more right- brain functions:  language arts, writing, literary analysis. And even though math did not come naturally to me, I found some degree of success in upper level math courses in high school. Of course, most of the credit goes to Sister Regina Maureen, who, apparently, could teach a rock the law of cosines, since I did very well in trigonometry and pre-calculus. It is shocking to me to write this historical fact, which brings me to my point.

         Thinking about pi and the hours spent solving equations, I find myself on 3.14.15 longing for some math. The

                simple elegance of following a prescribed proce-

dure, methodically, step by step, working 
yourself closer to a solution until
 finally, you solve for x. The 

great thing? You can go

     back and check to make  
sure you got the right

     answer by plugging  
x back into

  the original

        equation.       

      Whaaaaaat???!!!

Where in my life at the current moment is there such a clear path to a solution and such reassurance that you have found the right solution?  No where. I am currently in the process of deciding what my next career move should be when my family relocates to a place far, far from home; deciding whether to buy or rent a home in said remote and, as yet, undetermined place; helping Son 1 decide where to go to college; shepherding Son 2 through the tumultuous high school years. The list goes on. Primarily I spend the bulk of my professional life making judgment calls about student writing with rubrics that many would say are "subjective," teaching lessons that ask students to make rhetorical and stylistic choices for which there are few objective rules, and all the time wondering if anyone is listening. In writing classes, the students may or may not "get" the technique, strategy, or organizational pattern I'm teaching, but they can still write something that they might even think is good. Not so in a math class. If you don't "get it," you can't find the solution, and you fail. No judgments. No equivocation. No need to justify to a disgruntled student the red X  next to an incorrect equation. It's just wrong. No math teacher would ever write in the margins of a test, "I sense you lost your focus on the original problem," a comment that I often write in the margins of my students' essays. "I sense that you lost track of your thesis and strayed into a different topic." Happens all the time. Not so in a math class. So clear. So unequivocal. So impervious to second guessing. How lovely!

All of this uncertainty, and ambiguity, and potential for equivocation has made the Italian Mama long for pi.