/yesod

Tag: professors

  • ratio

    I raise my head and when the professor calls on me I ask “Are these real numbers?”

    She pauses and narrows her eyes, hand frozen in mid-motion on the chalkboard where she’d been writing out the tables for the various ratios she was explaining. “How do you mean?”

    I stand up and go to the front of the class, gesturing to the board. “Do these numbers actually do what you’re saying they’ll do every single time, or are there situations where it changes?”

    I look back at the rest of the students. “See, I’m not afraid to ask the stupid questions for the rest of you. You’re welcome.”

    The professor gives me a look. “Why would they change?”

    “I don’t know. I’m not good at math. Numbers don’t make sense to me.”

    There’s a shift in her posture and attitude towards me, genuinely interested and concerned. “Do you have trouble understanding or writing the actual characters?”

    I try to assure her that I am not dyslexic, that I actually have a facility with writing and language… but I wake up before I can finish.

    —

    I lay there in the early morning dark, mildly frustrated that I wasn’t able to let her know that it is just the abstract nature of math that I have trouble with and not some kind of disability.

  • payroll

    …I find that I have overslept and am in a rush to get a stack of deposits to the University’s bank by noon, otherwise all of the faculty and staff paychecks will bounce.

    The deposit is a stack of checks and slips totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are pink and yellow carbon copies, very slippery to keep in order. I leave the darkened school library — exhausted students sprawl here and there across chairs and couches, utterly done in by finals and the drunken afterglow parties.

    I pass through a maze of corridors and stairwells, time slipping away. Once I get out to the parking lot, I see a few professors heading to their cars. Everyone wants to get to the bank before noon. It closes early on the weekends, of course.

    Running out of time, I try to flag down one of the faculty but they do not see me. I end up running through the surrounding office park, cutting between buildings and scrambling over landscaping.

    Arriving at the bank, I see the tellers inside beginning to pack up for the day. I bang on the door but they wave me off, mouthing “we’re closed.”

    Somehow I manage to climb up to a small skylight and, quite suddenly, burst through to the floor below in a shower of glass.

    But, after all that, I make the deposit in time.