The Day of Math Without Calculators

The sounds of erasing fill the Japanese classroom where I am helping to administer the Math WASL. The Washington Assessment of Student Learning, criticized and fine-tuned since its introduction a decade ago, now takes eight days of approximately two hours each. Of those eight days, today remains the most stressful, even after the Math WASL was discarded a few years ago as the sole mathematical gauntlet that would allow students to graduate. Today is Day of Math Without Calculators.

Yesterday there were calculators, fortunate calculators for the ten out of sixteen students who neglected to bring their own and worked out the problems with state-issued four-functions. But on the Day of Math without Calculators, students are erasing, dredging through years of calculator-assisted learning for what they did before, as children, to arrive at solutions. I idly remember the day I found out about calculators. I thought it was sorcery; I tested the tiny machine with problems to which I knew the answers, then squealed with delight when the mindless, faceless rectangle got it right. Yet somewhere—somehow—the enchantment fades, until we, these tenth graders and I and everyone, look at them with cold utility. We treat calculators like many-buttoned limbs or rectangular mind-annexes, forgetting about them until days like today. On the Day of Math Without Calculators, we are all children and calculators are all magic.

As the students keep erasing, I return to the book I’ve been reading. I brought two today, actually: Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Before 8:00 AM I stumbled sleepily through the biblically repetitive cadence of the WASL instructions, murmuring several times that “on this portion of the test you may not use calculators, rulers, compasses, protractors, or other manipulatives.” Less than an hour later, I am still not awake enough for Steinbeck, whose cast of characters is so expansive and multi-generational that I have filled its inside covers with family trees decorated with question marks and names like “sinister husband from far away” or “the guy from King City.” That particular masterpiece will have to wait.

I have plenty of energy, however, for the casual, self-conscious narration of Arnold “Junior” Spirit, the “part-time Indian” of Alexie’s title. I have been charmed by nearly everything about this book, from its harsh, colorful and loving depictions of life on the Spokane Indian Reservation to the imaginative doodles of its cartooning protagonist (put on paper by the talented Ellen Forney). It is by turns hopeful and hilarious, moving and awkward. It captures the otherness of the world Arnold occupies, at the same time uniting him to the hope of all young people to belong to, explore and make sense of the lives they occupy.

An unusually vehement erasing distracts me just as I reach the last page of the novel. I look up and a young woman writes down an answer, swishes the hefty test booklet shut and carries it with disdain to the front of the classroom. With an irritated sigh she then throws herself back into the desk and stares at a point on the floor. I scan the final sentence, close the book, and hand it over to her. With a shrug she flips past thirty pages or so, then starts reading.

We did this yesterday, too. Yesterday, I had taken her cell phone, which she got out immediately after turning in the test. She had let out a muted wail of protest, which I recognized from her freshman year, when she was in my LA class. Then, we had gone through this ritual of cell phone confiscation several times a month, and each encounter was tempestuous, as if I were demanding her soul for eternity, instead of her cell phone for twenty-seven more minutes.

“You can’t have this out while we’re testing,” I whispered.

“Then what are we supposed to do?” she whined, glancing at the clock. There were fifty minutes left in the testing period, and no one was allowed to leave until they were up.

“Read a book,” I shrugged, holding mine up to demonstrate. She rolled her eyes so high that the pupils were lost, for a terrifying instant, beneath her forehead.

“I hate reading. You know that!”

I shrugged again, offering no solutions. If we were in my classroom, I would have had some ideas, or at least about seven different books she could have tried to read until the test ended. As it was, we were in a Japanese classroom, where the only books were in a language that neither of us could read. I had no books.

Not true, I reminded myself. I have two. And one of them is funny and accessible and charming. I shut it and placed it on her desk.

“It’s funny. You might like it.”

Another your-face-will-stay-that-way eye roll, and she picked up the book.

Now she opens it again, and I return to my seat at the front of the room and pick up with East of Eden. I realize, as I open to somewhere in the middle and begin to read about schoolteachers in California in the late nineteenth century, the need that everyone must feel for familiarity and some measure of understanding as we start to read. Sherman Alexie was my warm-up this morning, allowing me to transition into more difficult spheres with ease and confidence. Even proficient readers seek to understand what they are reading, try to find themselves in the words. I linger idly on the contrast of schoolteachers then and now, tasting the phrases as I go.

“And the schoolteacher was not only an intellectual paragon and a social leader, but also the matrimonial catch of the countryside. A family could indeed walk proudly if a son married the schoolteacher. Her children were presumed to have intellectual advantages both inherited and conditioned” (142).

I'm suddenly struck with the lenses through which each of us read. This passage makes me laugh because I am a teacher, reading and drawing comparisons between this Olive Hamilton and myself. Across the room, my former student reads Alexie with a completely different perspective than I do, possibly based on her life experiences, but definitely because she is simply nearer to ninth grade than I am now. And suddenly, just like that, I am thankful for the infinite variety offered in literature; on the edge of possibility, we might together exhaust the canon, but I will never tire of sharing books with others, seeing the stories in new eyes. There are as many stories as there are readers.

The erasing comes to a gradual halt at the end of the test, but by then most of us are reading novels. Away from the harsh one-answeredness of Math Without Calculators, a place where the only grace is offered by the eraser, forbidden from electronics to tempt unethical behavior, we escape into otherworlds of fiction.