Algorithmic Behavior
She had been copying―people, equations, conventions―all her life, long before she copied the Sumerians’ correspondence preferences. She had become quite skilled at replication, to the extent that she could no longer tell what she had lifted from other people and what was genuinely her own. When it was very cold outside and she was bundled against the world, she suspected nothing was. It had never been cold outside where Tam was, before Tam came here, to this rural university town where she taught the brightest young minds a subject they found more irrelevant than they found her.
Note to self:: How to get through your first winter in this town: Behave like they do. Put on a scarf like they do, and tuck it into the breast of your coat, being careful not to let it leak out between the buttons. Wear tights under your jeans like they do, so that weather has to try harder to get through to you. Stomp the snow from your knee-high boots like they do before they go into a building. Like they do, wear a tasseled knit hat so you can walk with your head up. Keep, like they do, your hands balmed. Then when you touch someone, like they do, your hands will feel soft, like theirs.
Fact: Psychologists say much can be learned about your personality by asking you to draw your house.
When Tam was a child, her parents told her that she had been born in a house at the top of a mountain. She could not remember ever having seen a mountain, and she imagined all mountains as having triangular, snow-capped peaks. She wondered how a house could sit atop such a mountain, teetering on the point where the two lines of its incline met.
She sketched the house this way when, after a battery of multiple choice questions about her ability to understand the social nuances of eight-year-olds, the school psychologist asked her to draw where she lived.
“Asperger’s,” Tam heard the psychologist tell her parents. “She will have trouble interacting.”
Tam’s current house sat on a summit. Though she knew better, she would have drawn this house the same way as she had in the doctor’s office: precarious, isolated, black and white.
Fact: When chemical elements have problems interacting, they are called “noble.”
Tam taught Historical Mathematics to basement-floor classrooms of students who thought courses like “Eastern Mathematics: Not Just the Abacus” and “The Number Line: Where in the World Did Zero Come From?” would be easier because the answers to the problems had been solved long ago.
Tam’s first speech of the semester was titled “Just Because Someone Else Could Figure It Out Doesn’t Mean You Can.” She found that this decreased class size.
