Last night I dreamt I ran into a guy who looked familiar. He rminded me that he’d hit on me many years ago at Math Camp, apparently by saying “Maybe you don’t have to find YOUR room.”
When I woke up I thought, “That’s weird, I never went to Math Camp.” Ten minutes later I realized that I HAD. Oh, the humanity.
It was the summer between my sophomore and junior year in high school. While I was a bit of a math geek, the real reason I went was that my Grandmother and Great Aunt lived in Oxford and were friends of the two professors who ran the camp at Ol’ Miss. (So, yes, I mean Oxford, Mississippi. The one with William Faulkner’s home and two Confederate war memorials.) With this trip I could enrich my mind and visit with the family.
I went for six weeks, lived in the dorms – girls in one builidng, boys in another, no visiting allowed – and had a grand time. And, to my shame, did not learn one wit of math.
We had two courses in the morning, one in topology, which started out interesting and then I got lost. The second was something called Analysis and to this day I’m not really sure what it covered. Perhaps Calculus. The professors would lecture and call us to the board to do proofs. The one time I went to the board, the professor said, “Well, that’s nice but it’s not very correct, is it?”
In the afteroons we had study hall with two very nice TA’s. I think I spent it writing letters home. Around 2 or 3 we were free to run around the beautiful Ole Miss campus, mock the girls at cheerleading camp, have watermelon fights, play video games and disco dance in the Student Union, and hike throught the tick-infested woods to Pizza Hut. For a big night out we’d head into town for movies at the Hookah, a theater in a converted quonset hut.
I discovered I could check books out of the University Library and spent hours in its cool halls, with its intriguing study carrels. I read Marjorie Morningstar. I wore cut-off jeans shorts which shocked the other students, who were all from the South. When my grandmother bought me a beige knit dress, the boys told me I looked like a proper Southern girl. The black girls were mysteriously assigned to room together and only socialized with us during the very largest of the dorm floor shenanigans.
Only in the last few years did it occur to me to wonder why the professor and TA’s let me give up. The homework consisted solely of writing proofs, and we had no text, only notes from our classes. I was completely and utterly lost. OK, sure I was lazy too, and didn’t go looking for help. That’s why it’s only recently occurred to me that perhaps since I was the child, and there were four grownups around, they should have done something about a girl who had signed up for Math Camp and then not done the math.
For the record, no boy ever did ask me to his room. They were Southern and proper. I, despite my Confederate ancestors, good manners, and Colonel Reb charm bracelet was neither. I would have gone.
It was one of the biggest events of my teen age life, and for 10 minutes this morning I’d forgotten all about it.
This post was written by
Nadya – who has written 117 posts on UniBrain Trust.
Nadya is the resident food giver and trip planner. She likes to make things, and occasionally finishes them. Look! Shiny thing! You can often find her fixing JIm's spelling errors.