Page 17 of On His Schedule
“Yep. Do the math.”
I do the math. I do it carefully. She watches me do it.
“Twenty-eight over forty-two,” I say.
“Reduce.”
“Two-thirds.”
“Yep. That’s what they want. Now — read the question they actually asked you.”
I read it.
“Oh,” I say. “They want the percent.”
“They want the percent.”
“Sixty-six-point seven percent.”
“Yep.”
“That’s annoying.”
“It is annoying. I suggest that before you do any math, circling the wordswhat percent,orwhat proportion,orthe probability that.Different language, different output. Always.”
Hell.“Circle the words,” I repeat and start circling.
She pulls the textbook closer and tabs to the next problem. Her hair has fallen forward over her shoulder, so she pushes it back behind her ear without looking up.
“Second problem,” she says.
I pick up my pencil and work the problem.
She doesn’t look up at me. It’s unsettling to be ignored like this, but it’s better this way. The light in the study room is the kind of fluorescent that doesn’t flatter anyone, and somehow it doesn’t matter with her.
I get the answer and write it down.
She glances at my page, upside-down, from her side of the table, and nods once.
“Good. Keep going.”
For twenty more minutes, we just work. I get one wrong. She corrects it without making it a thing. I get one right, and she doesn’t applaud me.She just nods and turns the page, and the absence of praise for getting a problem right is, weirdly, the most respectful thing anyone has done for me academically in three years. She’s just teaching, and she’s good at it.
I am, slowly, getting it. The trick is, exactly like she said, in the question. The question is the whole problem. Once you read the question correctly, the math is mechanical. I have been doing the math correctly all along. But the trick questions had me jumbled up. I don’t need tutoring anymore, I realize. That’s all that it was.
Halfway through the next problem, I see the setup. Easy. So when she finishes reading and looks up at me, I am already saying, “Conditional. P of A given B. We want this one. We use this one.”
She looks at me for the first time since I sat down. She’s not reactive to my good looks or the blank expression on my face.
“Have you seen this material before?”
“No,” I answer honestly.
Her face softens. “Okay.”
I stare at her. I am not — I don’t know what to do with this. I am, in some way I cannot trace, pleased about her surprise. I’m also, in another way, mildly embarrassed because I can see in her face — in the half-second pause, in the slight tilt of her chin — that she has just realized she has been teaching me at half speed. She has spent thirty-five minutes of this hour reading me problems slowly, the way you read to a kid. I didn’t push back because I assumed that’s what tutoring was. And now we both know she’s been babying me.
“That’s good. Bring out your homework.” She flips through the syllabus near her, pointing with her finger. “Do the work. and I’ll check it.”
