(16, NY, USA) Anonymous - Take The Derivative
The derivative of sine is cosine. The derivative of cosine is negative sine. Sine squared plus cosine squared equals one.
I stare down at my notes. They look like they are in a foreign language. As a person who loves to read, words have always had a place close to my heart. The way one may change any narrative, start any conflict, or soothe every wound with just a few mashed-together letters has always astounded me. My love language is words, and I have a drawer full of old birthday cards and love letters to prove it. But when it comes to math, my love of words ceases to exist. It has never made sense to me that one could get letters from numbers, or vice versa. In math, the letters are empty placeholders for things that might one day exist. They are hollow, and in writing them, I feel nothing. None of the joy that I find in writing long, lush stories in my English class, where the letters are a manifestation of humanity, a way to immortalize one’s feelings and thoughts on paper.
But nobody has ever asked me which one I prefer. It took months for my precalculus teacher to notice that I was struggling so badly I was on the brink of failure.
I’d spend hours on one page of homework, trying desperately to remember the mantras I had been fed my entire life, the ones hung on a Dollar Tree poster in every classroom: “Just keep trying,” “Giving up on something is giving up on yourself,” “You can do it.” But I couldn’t. Eventually, I’d just succumb to the exhaustion and scribble down some illegible numbers on the page and submit it. My teacher never even noticed.
Few of my friends knew how I struggled either. And when I did tell some trusted ones, I will never forget how their jaws dropped in shock, how they looked at me in surprise that someone like me was struggling in math. Someone that looked like me.
My parents are from South Asia, and in a school where we are the minority, it is painfully obvious. I go to a diverse school, yes, but it is diverse in the way a fruit bowl is ‘diverse.’ No one understands that to call me the “model minority” is more of an insult than it is a compliment. My math teacher only notices the melanin in my skin and the red thread on my wrist. Indian people are usually good at math. They dominate fields like computer science and engineering. She probably thinks that’s what my parents do. Every time I raise my hand to ask a question, her eyes glaze over me. I want to shout, “I’m not trying to answer the problem, I really do have a question!” but she never gives me the chance.
To be a “model minority” is just another way of saying that people have high expectations of you: to understand quicker, to be smarter. But what happens if you’re not? How do you get help? How do I explain that I just don’t get it? It is like feeling your way through the dark here. Like walking up the stairs, and when you get to the top, you think there is one more than there is, and your foot just drops.
