Snarky Repartee

The comments by Madaha here brought back a couple of math-related memories that I want to share here. So flashback to the 11th grade again, in my new hypercompetitive school, where I’m taking a while to adjust and not doing great in the weekly exams etc. At the same time though, I’m learning an immense amount and am in some ways enjoying this really challenging environment. Now the state we lived in put out a magazine meant mainly for math teachers and school students where they showcased interesting theorems or techniques. It was a fairly low-budget affair but quite enjoyable. So my then best friend (and later ex-boyfriend) N and I decided to write a small article for the magazine because we believed, in our naivete, that we had found a new way to prove Euler’s formula.

However misguided this may have been, the article we submitted generated enough interest on the part of the editor of the magazine that he decided to come down and speak to us at the school. So of course he contacted our math teacher — let’s call her U. Now U was a perhaps well-intentioned person, but her way of teaching was to terrorize everyone she believed was stupid, while those who were deemed intelligent enough were often given a free pass on homework. N was one of U’s favorite students. After being contacted by the magazine editor, U asks N to come meet her after school and they have the following conversation:

U: So I see that you and ____ have decided to write an article together.

N: Yes, ma’am, we did.

U: So why did you decide to write the article with her? Is she really that intelligent? (Notice too the subtle way in which U dismisses any possibility that the idea for the article could have been mine.)

N(slightly shocked): Yes, ma’am she is very intelligent.  

U: Hmmph. Well, there’s no point in being intelligent if no one else knows it.  

Once N got home, he called me up and recounted this conversation to me. I don’t recall my reaction to it exactly, except that I felt quite angry and told the whole thing to my parents, who were quite as angry as me about it.

Fast forward one year and it was time for the annual Olympiad examinations. While I participated in all the Olympiads, I’ll just discuss the Math Olympiad here. I had written the Olympiad preliminary examinations the previous year but had not understood most of the paper. It was a testament to how much I learnt during that one year that what had seemed gibberish then now seemed quite understandable. Now to understand this anecdote you also to have understand the complicated structure of the Math Olympiad examinations in that state. At the very highest level we had the International Math Olympiad with participants from all over the world. Below that level was the Indian National Math Olympiad with students from all over India. In order to be allowed to write the INMO one had to get a high enough rank in the Regional Math Olympiad. There were two ways in which one could be allowed to write the RMO: 1) There was a preliminary examination held at school — let’s call it Exam A. Students who did well enough in this exam were allowed to write another exam — let’s call it Exam B. If they did well enough in Exam B, they were allowed to write the RMO. 2) Schools were allowed to nominate 4 students who would be allowed to write an Exam C. If they did well enough in Exam C, they would be allowed to write the RMO. Whew!

So all the interested students from my school sat down to write Exam A. I immediately noticed something interesting about the scoring structure. Each question had four multiple choice options. If we got a question right, we got 1 point and if we got it wrong 1/4 of a point was deducted. It doesn’t take a lot of math to figure out that if we were to randomly answer every question, we would get 1 question right out of every four = 1 point - 3(1/4) points = 1/4 point for every four questions. That doesn’t sound like a lot but I decided that my best strategy would be to ignore that there was negative marking at all and just answer the exam as though there were no penalties for wrong answers. The questions were mainly interesting number theory problems and geometrical questions. I really really suck at geometry. I decided that my best bet, since I was planning on answering every question anyway, was to use a piece of paper to approximate the lengths that we were supposed to figure out and whittle down the number of possible answers and then guess.

Well guess what? My strategies/dirty tricks paid off and I found that I had been selected to write Exam B. So had three other students, all boys. Now it was the custom of the school to nominate whoever scored the highest in Exam A to write Exam C. But surprise, surprise, this year U decided to break with that tradition and nominated N to write Exam C instead of me. I was really really angry. I think I would have made a bigger fuss than I did (which was none at all) if N had not been my best friend and hadn’t been preparing for this exam for years. In any event, I managed to clear Exam B, so was allowed to write the RMO, while N did not manage to clear Exam C. Ha to you, U. Preparing to write the RMO was an experience in itself — the school got a local math prof to give us preparatory classes. He informed me that in all his years performing this function I was the first girl to reach this level. Well no wonder really, with people like U making the decisions. I ended up not doing that well in the RMO (one the reasons was that the RMO happened to be held on the same day as our school’s fairwell party and I had to write the exam wearing a sari — not recommended). But I’m still glad I got that far.

Via Feministing, I learnt that this year, girls won the first prizes in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, in both the individual and team categories. That’s really awesome news. So there, Larry Summers. It always irritates me when guys try to use innate differences between men and women to explain away the huge gap between the number of men and women pursuing academic careers. Whatever such differences may be, they are completely insignificant compared to the far fewer opportunities women are offered and the pressure on them to be good wives and mothers above all else.

All this reminds me of my own experiences in high school in India, trying to establish myself in a new school full of very conservative, highly intelligent, extremely motivated students. Until the 10th grade, I went to a very easy-going school, where studying for about half an hour before an exam was enough to do well.  To be suddenly plonked down in this new school, with a different syllabus altogether, and a very different breed of student, was not at all an easy experience. I would do it all again though, because it gave me the confidence to know that I could survive no matter how difficult the environment and taught me the math and science skills I draw upon every day today.

Things were really bad at first. I bombed on the exams that whole first term and I am sure that most of my teachers were convinced that I was a dunderhead. The gender dynamics in that school were really screwed up. Boys and girls rarely talked to each other in school. Even at that age, the boys studying science far outnumbered the girls, while the reverse was true for accounting and finance. While teachers valued and praised the boys who were whip-smart and could solve a problem before anyone else, the only girls who seemed to be held in any sort of esteem by teachers were the "good" ones, who were docile, did what they were told and could be relied upon to babysit the class on the teacher’s day off. 

I remember the day I first heard about the Intel Science Talent Discovery Fair. Of course the school being what it was, I did not hear about it directly, but a rumor passing around the class that our chemistry teacher had asked two of her favorite students to prepare a project for entry in the fair. These students were, of course, boys. She even had the project they could do all picked out and had arranged with nearby institutes of higher learning for her students to conduct their experiments there. I remember seething inwardly at the unfairness of it all. Who was my chemistry teacher to decide who was worthy of creating such a project? I remember the biology class we had that day very clearly. Biology was by no means my favorite class at school. My biology teacher was a well-meaning and good-natured woman whose idea of teaching a class was to read from our textbook in a droning, monotonous voice. In this class she went up several points in my estimation, by first telling us about the upcoming competition and asking us to come and discuss any ideas we might have with her. Finally, someone who was willing to take a chance on us poor stupid people.

I wish I could say that I thought about possible ideas for a long time and carefully considered all the alternatives before plumping for one project. In reality, the day before the deadline for project proposal submission my dad and I came up with the idea of measuring pollution levels using some sort of bio-indicator. Some frenzied Googling later, I had decided upon my project. A few weeks later we got the happy news — my project, as well as three others from my school had been selected to proceed to the next stage of the competition — the regional finals.

I had a lot of fun doing that project. Peering through a microscope at tiny little pollen grains, travelling around the city to collect samples from the various pollution monitoring centers around the city, taking photographs, making a poster. In the end, both I, and another of the students our biology teacher had mentored got to go onto the next stage of the competition, the national finals, while the team that our chemistry teacher had handpicked did not make it. I’ve always seen it as a vindication of my biology’s teacher’s methods — offering guidance to any student who wanted to participate, not making the whole competition a semi-secret hush-hush thing and allowing students complete freedom to choose what the wanted to do. In the end, both I and the guy who also made it lost in the national finals, but the whole thing generated enough cred to make school much more bearable from then on.