Fundamental Theorem of Nobody-Cares-About-Calculus

[Adam Deulane]

[Adam Deulane]

Adam arranged his note cards on the podium in front of him, and the tapping echoed around the small lecture hall. The room was pale slate colored: the carpet, the walls, the seats, the fluorescent lighting. The introductory slide of his presentation glowed on the wall behind him. He coughed. The slate room coughed back. There was not even the bustle of passing students in the hall outside to break the stuffy silence. Adam had been in mausoleums with more lively chatter than Greenview on a Saturday.

He had placed the fliers furtively, surreptitiously, in a few book stores, the school bulletin board, in the staff room at Hammel. He didn't expect anyone to come, he said to anyone who saw him doing it. But he was unable to completely crush the hopeful voice that asked, Who wouldn't think this is interesting? Life experience had taught him basically everyone, that's who.

He was half-glad none of his coworkers had showed up. He had explicitly forbade Nory from coming, since the only thing worse than an empty room was an empty room with only his sister sitting in it. He tugged on the sleeves of his conservatively-striped, button-down shirt in frustration, mostly with himself. He'd give it five more minutes. He'd worked hard on those graphs.

[Winter Rowley]

Winter Rowley hadn’t set foot on the Greenview campus in at least four years, but he still remembered exactly where everything was. He was a quick, efficient learner… for all the good that it had done him in the past.

It was Avery who’d convinced him to go back to school; she was one of the few people who could counter his doubts with logical arguments, and in the end, her tough-love manner of encouraging him had won out. It had taken him some time to find lectures that didn’t conflict with his schedule, and it had taken him even longer to find lectures that covered subjects he was actually interested in. He’d put in a lot of effort.

He tried not to let himself be discouraged by the lack of results; even now, over a year after his hospitalization, moving forward seemed like a slow and thankless job.

He was leaning against the wall of the Eaton building, unfolding and re-folding an aqua blue flyer and nursing the last few drags out of his cigarette. Math in the Real World! it proclaimed. Winter skimmed the words with weary brown-black eyes before folding the paper up for a final time. He disposed of the butt of his cigarette, then, and made his way toward Room 102 no less than five minutes too late.

This didn’t matter too much, in the end. He stopped just inside the doorway, awkwardly holding his black canvas messenger bag, and took a good look at the man at the front of the lecture hall.

“Er,” he said. The room had very good acoustics, he noted; the fact that it was completely empty probably helped. “Is this the lecture on… practical applications of non-linear calculus?”

[Adam Deulane]

Adam's thoughts were occupied between wondering if a second lecture at a different time would yield better results and berating himself for such a hopeless idea in the first place when the door at the back of the room opened. Adam felt a swell of hope chased down immediately by nervousness. "Ah, yes, yes it is."

When he had worked in research, self-consciousness had made Adam mean. So had fear, embarrassment, stress, and most other negative emotions. Predictably, this had cost him his job. When he started teaching at Hammel, armed with weekly counseling and the grounding influence of his family, he made a promise to himself. No shouting. Ever. It was unrealistic to cut out snapping but he did his best. He still had a ways to go on sarcasm.

But he had come a long way. Rather than hostility, he now entered most conversations with wooden courtesy. While this hadn't proved to be a crowd-pleaser, he hadn't made any students cry yet.

Rather than silently watch his lone pupil work his way down the aisle and select a seat, Adam cleared his throat and fiddled with his notes. "I was planning to wait another few minutes before we--" he could use the plural now at least "--get started."

[Winter Rowley]

Winter found that he’d been expecting more people to be present—someone other than himself and the lecturer, at least—and then he realized that he probably shouldn’t have. Mathematics was the awkward, socially inept cousin of all the other school subjects, the one that everyone shunned and talked about behind its back. He felt a brief pang of guilt at this thought; in some strange way, he felt like the only person who’d shown up to an unpopular kid’s birthday party.

“Cool,” he said, making an effort to sound at least kind of sincere about it.

He made his way to the very front row of seats and plopped his bag down in one of them. He squinted experimentally up at the text on the slide, then, and seemed to be satisfied enough with its legibility. He sat down in the seat directly to the left of his bag. He nodded agreeably when the other man informed him that he’d like to wait a few more minutes.

“Sure,” said Winter. “No problem.”

He made sure that Adam’s eyes were averted before he chanced a look in his direction. Winter could see him much more clearly now: they might well have been the same age, but the crisp blue button-down and just-rugged-enough shadow along the jawline aged the other man in a good way. He looked like a Calvin Klein model who had fallen on hard times—Winter couldn’t think of any other reason that he, or anyone else, would be teaching calculus.

He tugged down the ratty sleeves of his hooded sweatshirt self-consciously. Then, after another beat of stifling silence, he unzipped his bag with several tentative pulls—zzip! zzip! …zzip!—and fished out his notebook.

[Adam Deulane]

Adam gave his new student a bullet-like glance as he shuffled into his seat. Their similarity in age made his stomach squirm. He'd known that he would get older students--or student, it seemed--at the community college than he was used to at Hammel, but the foreknowledge helped less in practice than he'd hoped. He had a hard enough time remembering he was the teacher in a class of 17 year-olds, let alone those in their twenties. It didn't help that Winter was four inches taller than he was. At least he had the podium.

Adam had intended to wait for several more minutes in dignified silence. Then Winter started maneuvering his bag, and the tentative flapping of the canvas satchel was so unbearable that Adam clicked to the first slide of his presentation before Winter had his notes on his desk. "Let's get started."

He plunged into the introductory material without waiting for an answer. He stood behind the podium as if it was nailed to it, speaking with stiff rapidity and keeping his eyes anchored to his notes. As he worked through the second slide his speech fell into a more natural pattern. By the time he finished the third, he looked almost at ease.

"Obviously this is only an outline of the main theorems of non-linear calculus, but they form the foundation of the Viantes paper." He tugged at the collar of his shirt and glanced over at Winter. "It's just us today," he admitted, as if Winter hadn't noticed before now. "This can be more of a discussion if you like. Is there a particular application you're interested in?" He suspected that one of the professors offered extra credit for attending this kind of thing.