I am thinking about geometry class. Geometry was the most comfortable part of tenth grade. It was about rules and building up order from a handful of self-evident truths. Even more than most math, geometry and I got each other. The curvy lines in my brain straightened out every day for forty-five minutes, while my talents of logic and focus were rewarded. I’m pretty sure that’s the year I got a 100 percent on the Math Regents exam. Although it might have been the 99, and I pined over the single lost point for a summer in the way only a kid without a girlfriend could. 

In general, I liked taking math tests. Clearly that’s because math was something I was good at from the beginning, which meant I was successful at them, and praised for. The feedback loop is potent. It took another five years until I met a math subject that pushed me into the choice of work harder or fail/quit. I can admit to some regret at not working harder. My math books are the last vestige of those college books you hold onto in case you want to crack them open again someday. I think I’m still fantasizing about math in the way only a man who’s lost a love could. 

I’m pretty sure we used those light blue square composition “notebooks“ that only had a dozen or so pages, when we took our Geometry Regents. I can’t remember if we used them for other tests, but I can feel the sensation of flipping from one page to another with a pencil in my hand to start another geometry proof. I can see a circle and a tangent line on a page. My drawn circles never approached the beauty of the one on the paper, or the one my mind tried to make my hand produce. I could copy Euclid’s logic, but not his drawings, no matter how much I practiced. We could get these little quarter-sheet booklets of old regent’s exams for extra training, I think. They could fit in a pocket. Maybe they had a green cover. Did we have to buy those, or were they provided by our chalky little math teacher?

Later on in math, you learn that modern mathematicians “discovered” that every one of Euclid’s self-evident rules could be broken. Every “proof”, everything I learned, only remains true under a very limited set of circumstances.