Red Fern Meets Manual Math

More kids than I had ever seen were playing around a big red brick building. I thought some rich man lived there and was giving a party for his children. Walking up to the edge of the playground, I stopped to watch.

The boys and girls were about my age, and were thick as flies around a sorghum mill. They were milling, running, and jumping. Teeter-totters and swings were loaded down with them. Everyone was laughing and having a big time.

Wilson Rawls, from Where the Red Fern Grows

Walking around with my thumb in a paperback library copy of Rawls's classic, I'm proctoring a test in the library computer lab today. Students have rolled lazily up to the banks of computers and are now staring at screens, mostly quiet. It's the time of test-giving--after I've read all the material for my next lesson and sketched out the shape of the next few weeks of lessons--when I run out of things to do. Since I'm feeling neither tired enough to stare blankly at the Seattle Weekly online nor adventurous enough to peruse the T encyclopedia like my co-proctor, at the suggestion of a friend I'm reading about Billy and his two "hunting hounds" a few paragraphs at a time between my rounds of over-the-shoulder digital eavesdropping.

With outspoken scorn for "dog stories where the dog always dies," I've been resisting Where the Red Fern Grows for a while. It's a pity, actually, because I probably would have loved it if I'd read it when everyone else did, back in the fifth grade. Replete with vernal descriptions of the Ozark Mountains and thrifty, no-nonsense characters, the story would have fit well on the heels of my Little House on the Prairie obsession. As it is, I'm reading about the boy saving up for two hunting hounds and remembering not what it felt like to desperately want a dog (I've never wanted that), but instead the thoughts of the fifth-grader who read about prairies and schoolteachers and Indians and horses and sighed that her mountains, the mundane Cascades, could never be as interesting as the magical Dakota Territory.

It's the silence that first makes me look up from the novel, which has stalled for pages and pages at the love at first sight that Billy bears for his new dogs. For a room full of kids on computers, the lab is actually mostly quiet, and I watch the noiseless labor of the test takers. Everywhere I look, students are clearly in action, and after a second I remember the reason. They are taking a math test.

Watching students do math reminds me more of being in school than any other subject. Perhaps it's because most of the circumstances in which this happens are, like this one, tests on which I'm forbidden to help. There are other times when I'm vaguely aware that their homework assignments are beyond me and don't venture into the embarrassing territory of technique I've forgotten or--sometimes--never really knew. On occasion, though, when I decide to wade into a math problem, offering the much-caveated help that I can, my problem solving looks just like theirs right now.

My students' fingers are counting corners and angles on the screens, manipulating shapes by turning them in thin air and trying to imagine their path, and adding up averages manually. They scribble down whatever they know they must remember, making hesitant columns of long division and uneven geometry sketches. Their processes are on the surface, not mysterious or hidden, like with each new problem they evaluate and then roll up their sleeves, holding their breath and dodging obstacles as they arrive.

This is how I do math, too. Since there are no more tests, for now, I can enjoy the clean and ordered challenge of occasionally assisting on an algebra problem without fear. Writing has sunk below the surface for me, so saturating my thoughts and fingers that sometimes it seems to just happen, but with math the learning and the labor are still just as visible. I remember what it's like to pull on an equation like a gigantic knot, testing it for weaknesses that will lead to its untangling, or how sometimes the best way of thinking about a triangle's rotation is just to squeeze your eyes shut and twist your head around. It's not scientific, not the intuition that my calculus teacher always hoped to instill, but it worked for me as it seems to work for them.

As I go back to the book, just as Billy finally stows his puppies in a sack in order to transport them home, I pause in the intersection of my childhood passion--books about the country and hard living--and my childhood nemesis--math problems--and for a wildly nostalgic instant I'm intensely grateful for both, ghosts of school that remind me what it's like to be here.