So many ways to answer this problem!

 The Certainty of Numbers

by Bruce Snider

It’s not the numbers you dislike—

the 3s or 5s or 7s—but the way

the answers leave no room for you,

the way 4 plus 2 is always 6

never 9 or 10 or Florida,

the way 3 divided by 1

is never an essay about spelunking

or poached salmon, which is why

you never seemed to get the answer right

when the Algebra teacher asked,

If a man floating down a river in a canoe

has traveled three miles of a twelve mile canyon

in five minutes, how long will it take him

to complete the race? Which of course depends

on if the wind resistance is 13 miles an hour

and he’s traveling upstream

against a 2 mile an hour current

and his arms are tired and he’s thinking

about the first time he ever saw Florida,

which was in seventh grade

right after his parents’ divorce

and he felt overshadowed

by the palm trees, neon sun visors,

and cheap postcards swimming

with alligators. Nothing is ever simple,

except for the way the 3 looks like two shells

washed up on last night’s shore,

but then sometimes it looks like a bird

gently crushed on its side.

And the 1—once so certain

you could lean up against it

like a gray fence post—has grown weary,

fascinated by the perpetual

itch of its own body.

Even the Algebra teacher

waving his formulas like baseball bats,

pauses occasionally when he tells you

that a 9 and a 2 are traveling in a canoe

on a river in a canyon. How long

will it take them to complete their journey?

That is if they don’t lose their oars

and panic and strike the rocks,

shattering the canoe. Nothing is ever certain.

We had no plan, the numbers would tell us,

at the moment of our deaths.

 

Bruce Snider. The Year We Studied Women.

I love this poem. It was one of my favorites when I was a high school algebra teacher. My students were all mono-lingual - they spoke nothing but spanish. I was bilingual.

Somedays I wanted to accept that 6 plus 2 was purple. Or that a dividing two fractions was poached salmon. Everyday I wanted these students to grasp whatever they could - because once they hit the real world, they would lose their oars and panic.  There would be no room to budge.

Sometimes the digit 1 did grow weary of waiting for the right answer. And when I told the students that 9 and 2 were traveling in a canoe - the canoe immediately sunk.

At the moment of our death, we have no plan. And algebra??? Once you solve a binomial, are you any more certain?