Of Calculus and Child Rearing

How algebra adverse parents created a mechanical engineer

Mr. Aldrich taught algebra at the small-town South Carolina high school I attended for just a single year back in 1985. I was a freshman at the time and my next oldest brother was a senior, yet we both had Mr. Aldrich for the same class during the same year, just at different periods. Paul hated the fact that — despite the years between us — we were taking the same math class.

Paul had Mr. Aldrich first thing in the morning and I had his class fourth period, often arriving sweaty and gross having just come from P.E. We had Algebra at different times of the day, but the homework was always the same for us both.

“You will all have a slicker,” Mr. Aldrich insisted every day during the first week of class. He’d hold up a half-inch thick flimsy three-ring binder and wiggle it in front of the class. “Not a solid binder. No bigger than this. A slicker.”

He scraped his fingernails back and forth across the cover of the example slicker in his hands. It faintly sounded like someone rapidly scratching a record: whicka whicka whicka whicka whicka whick.

“A slicker,” he repeated emphatically. “On some days - and you won’t know when - I’ll collect your slicker to make sure you’re doing your homework. The homework won’t necessarily be graded, but it will count against you if you didn’t do it. So bring your slicker every day. Or else!”

We were more annoyed by his threat than actually threatened.

He then passed out our books, Saxon Algebra 1, with its blue cover with the word “Algebra” filling the front in bold orange letters. For reasons I never understood (and still don’t), the orange letters were laid out in this order:

GALABRE

Galabre?

If you stared at it a certain way, you could see how AL and G could be connected, but then the E was all the way down at the opposite corner from the G, and then the A couldn’t connect to the R.

It was infuriating.

No matter how long I stared at it, I could never figure out the logic the Saxon Publishing Company used in laying out those letters.

Paul and I both grew to loathe that book.

It was a small school for a small town with a single narrow main hallway that we’d all push through between classes. It is not a stretch to compare the minutes in that hallway between classes to cattle shoving their way down narrow gates, squished and turning around, slamming against each other on the way to a place they didn’t want to go.

If Paul hadn’t done his homework, I’d give him mine to take to class and he’d toss it back to me as we passed each other in the hall before it was my turn for algebra. If I hadn’t done my homework, we’d reverse the process.

“Give me your slicker!” I’d yell at Paul as we passed each other on days when I was the one who didn’t finish the assignment. If Mr. Aldrich called for an unexpected slicker check, I’d pass Paul’s notebook to the front, and Mr. Aldrich never knew the difference.

Years later, after graduation, college, and a few anniversaries into marriage, my wife, Jennifer, and I went to a massive used book sale to support the Atlanta Humane Society.

Whereas math didn’t quite find a welcome home in my brain, I’m a sucker for a good book and even more of a sucker for a good used book sale.

I remember following the signs leading into a school downtown and the sense of awe upon discovering a cafeteria filled to the brim with endless card tables stacked high with books from every genre imaginable. I made a beeline for the fiction section and was overwhelmed by the selection. It was sort of like looking in a packed refrigerator: there was so much to take in that I couldn’t see any of it.

Despite the number of books, I couldn’t find anything that I would typically enjoy.

What I at first considered a treasure trove quickly felt like a wild goose chase.

As I made my way to the exit, a large hardcover stopped me where I stood. It was bright blue and orange and in surprisingly good condition. On its cover were those annoyingly arranged letters:

GALABRE

At the bottom of the cover were the magical words, “Teacher’s Edition.”

Teacher’s edition? Teacher’s Edition?

To this day I’m not sure what overcame me at that moment.

Here was this book that I absolutely despised when I was fifteen. But now, in my thirties, I was being offered the magical teacher’s edition with all of its answers and better explanations and lack of required slicker.

I grabbed it and pulled out my wallet.

“Why are you buying that?” my wife rightfully asked me.

Why indeed?

Once home, I brought the textbook to our home office upstairs and started from the beginning, voluntarily re-doing the homework that once brought me to indescribable levels of procrastination.

Jennifer would occasionally walk in and discover me working on algebra problems and laugh. I couldn’t explain to her why I was drawn to this. What had changed to make me so focused on discovering how if X equaled Y, then what was X?

Sometime after that, my brother came to town. We were upstairs in the hallway, replacing a door that led into what had become our home recording studio. It was a pleasant afternoon working on an interesting project, drinking a couple of beers with my brother when I almost ruined the moment.

I reached into the closet and grabbed the textbook.

“Hey,” I said to Paul. “Remember this?”

Paul almost dropped his beer. His arms flailed and he literally jumped so high that both feet left the ground.

“Why the hell do you have that?” he nearly spat.

Eventually, the novelty of the Saxon Algebra book wore off. I maybe completed fifty of the homework assignments, which at first felt like nothing more than doing a sudoku puzzle, but quickly increased the level of difficulty to borderline impossible. It stopped being fun when I started to feel stupid again.

Maybe Paul’s reaction wasn’t so overblown after all.

With our own children, I’ve always been flummoxed at trying to understand what draws each of them to different and varied interests.

When they were younger, I always assumed they’d each naturally inherit my love of reading and literature. Some of them do enjoy reading a book every once in a while, but not to the level that I once did, when I relished summertime not just because there was no school, but because I could spend afternoons laying on my bed with the window open, an oscillating fan blowing air around my room, as I ripped through books in record time.

When they were younger, I’d drag some of the kids to the library at the end of the school year so they could sign up for the summer reading program. I loved summer reading programs.

You’re going to give me prizes for reading a lot of books? Seriously? Sign me up!

My kids never took this bait.

Our oldest, Sam, has always been creative and artistic. That made sense to me. I could understand how two parents who met in the theater could breed a creative kid.

The same is true for Walter, who has pursued a career as a video editor. Again, creative work from creative parents.

Tommy, our fourth son, is a natural at playing guitar. He hears a song he likes, picks up a guitar, and plays it. Again, the apple fell close to the tree.

Our daughter, Lily — our youngest of the five — is actually the first of our kids to consistently get A’s and B’s across the board. She is currently taking Algebra, and like her old man, she can do it, but she does not at all like it (I’m curious to see what she’ll do in fifteen years when a copy of the teacher’s edition comes her way).

Our son, Ben, the one in the middle, defies all understanding. Ben is perhaps the most extreme example of a kid whose interests most definitely are in his nature rather than something that was nurtured. I might have shown a nostalgic interest in rediscovering my high school algebra textbook, but Ben could probably have written the dang thing.

Conversely, I’m not sure if Ben — in his entire twenty years of life — has voluntarily read ten works of fiction.

Jennifer bought Ben a copy of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park for his birthday a few years back, hoping maybe the science and something familiar (Ben had seen the movies) would encourage him to read a novel. It took him a couple of years before he finally picked it up and read it.

But if you gave Ben a LEGO set, or some batteries, or a soldering iron, or transistors and building blocks, now you were speaking Ben’s language.

While I once despised algebra, somehow I played a role in creating a creature to whom algebra was rudimentary. For Ben, trigonometry is fun. Calculus — while challenging at times - is a pleasure for my son.

I look at Ben’s calculus homework and feel like I’d have more luck translating Russian into Mandarin Chinese.

For Christmas a few years ago, when all his siblings were excited about goofy t-shirts, musical instruments, and fun doo-dads, we got Ben a very utilitarian 3D printer.

In high school, Ben taught himself AutoCAD and began modeling objects that came to life with that magical device. When he graduated, as a gift we bought him everything on his Amazon wishlist that included such appropriate graduation gifts as a 60 Watt Soldering Iron Station Kit complete with LCD display and silicone mat, a 6-piece plier set, hundreds of 0.5A transistors and RoHS compliant 1% assorted resistors. Oh, and I almost forgot: a 10-pack of 15cm plastic shell lead wire buckle connectors.

Because, you know, what graduation celebration is complete without some of those?

Ben’s high school graduation celebration: Opening up a box of electrical doo-dads.

I joke about these things, and yet I’m overwhelmed at times with amazement that God deemed me worthy to be a parent to such diverse children. When we started knocking out kids, I naively assumed they’d be carbon copies of my wife and me. But then where’s the fun in that?

I’m not a believer that everyone should go to college. I didn’t particularly like the experience, but I also didn’t have much guidance in navigating through my university days.

As our kids get older, we’ve tried to challenge them to either go to college and study something that will actually train them for something they can’t do on their own, or go out and get a job — hopefully in alignment with their natural interests.

For Ben, college made sense. Whereas his brother, Walter, could learn how to be a video editor by watching lots of YouTube and putting what he learned to practice, the concepts needed to be a successful mechanical engineer demand a more pedagogical education.

So even though he is our third child, Ben was the first to get shipped off to college. Now in his second year, whenever he shares with us something from his chemistry, calculus, or engineering classes, I just shake my head in bewilderment and fatherly pride.

A few weeks ago, Ben texted his mother and me a link with this caption, "Oops!…I Did It Again."

I clicked the link and saw this (which made me start looking for some Russian poetry to translate into another language):

He then sent this image:

To which I responded, “I have...no idea what I'm looking at.”

Ben, having learned the far-reaching scope of his parents’ unending ignorance, started a video call to explain.

Apparently, a few weeks ago a new video game called Plasma dropped its demo for a few weeks of beta testing.

The game, which will officially launch in spring 2023 is described as, “an engineering sandbox. Unleash your creativity with fun and intuitive robotics, physics, and visual programming tools.”

In other words, this is the video game of Ben’s dreams.

Over the course of a weekend, he designed the above cosine wave generator. You enter cycles and angles and it generates an accurate cosine wave, based on the calculations Ben had developed in the first screenshot.

We immediately insisted Ben make a video of this contraption he created in this virtual world so he could share it with his professors and I could share it here:

What’s awesome is that after posting his video, the Plasma game developers saw it and included it in their own community highlights video. Only in his sophomore year, Ben got to experience the excitement of being acknowledged among other creative engineers.

We were proud parents.

Oh, and he got a 97/100 score on his last calculus exam.

To me, this variety of personalities within our children has been one of the most important life lessons I’ve learned.

Growing up, as the youngest of six, I always felt out of place. My interests were always different from those around me, and I often felt shame simply for being who I was and liking what I liked.

As a parent of unique, diverse children, it’s unburdened me a bit from me to realize that I wasn’t an outcast or abnormality, but was truly made in the image and likeness of God. For it is God who possesses everything — Calculus and Mandarin Chinese and video games and dinosaur DNA and Captain Carrot comic books and guitars and everything else. And as His children, He shares bits and pieces of himself and places those bits and pieces to different and varying degrees within us so that we may together experience as much of creation as the Creator deems fit.

Algebra made little sense to me as a teen, but as a parent with a kid who loves it, I now have a greater appreciation for math than ever before, because it allows me to see the Creator at work in one of the very creations my wife and I made in connection with the Creator Himself.

The same holds true in other areas that I would have discounted in life. If not for my children, I would never have paid much attention to Metallica, Mouse Guard, pet rats, and My Little Pony.

On my own, I would hold a much more myopic view of the world.

Through my children, however, the world is vast.