01/27/20: i get a writing mentee and we do math

So I’ve got this mentee now. I had one before this one but then she had to drop out of the program as her uber-conservative parents didn’t want her taking the subway into the city for our occasional Wednesday/Friday night sessions. Her mother doesn’t speak or read English, only Tajik and Russian, so my original mentee had—I suspect—sort of glossed over the schedule details during the parent sign-off process, hoping, as one does, that her mother would be totally cool with the subway thing by the time it became a reality.

Alas, her mother did not in fact have a sudden and complete change of heart about her sixteen-year-old daughter riding the subway alone after dark, which was too bad: I really like the young woman and I know she was excited about the program. I still keep in touch with her, though, and now we meet up once a month (instead of once a week), which is honestly a little bit of a relief for me as I take the B/Q to Newkirk Plaza and then hoof it another half-mile to meet with her and if that doesn’t mean anything to you, FYI it is a schlep. Like, people who matched on a dating app might not bother getting to know each other if they lived this far apart. But she’s worth it, and I’d have continued to do it once a week if she’d stayed in the program, but…once a month isn’t a terrible adjustment.

My new mentee is as equally adorable and sweet as my old mentee; I will not apologize for being absolutely delighted to discover she goes to school about four blocks from my apartment. Once a week, at 3:45, we meet at a library on 10^th Avenue, in the Teen Zone (!). I’m supposed to be her writing mentor, but of course we talk about all kinds of other stuff, too. The other day she had forgotten her computer and told me her mom had accidentally thrown her hand-written story pages away so instead of working on writing, first we ran lines together (she is a singer and an actor) and then I helped her with her math homework.

Here, I will brag. You know that problems that are like, “Anna has 80 coins, all nickels or quarters. If the total value of the coins is $11.60, how many of the coins are nickels and how many of the coins are quarters?”

Welp, say that you—like Anna—found yourself in a situation where you have some coins and know their total value and how many of them you have but not, for some reason, how many are nickels and how many are quarters. Then you, too, could probably use the internet and realize these dumb problems are actually really easy to solve. Like, so easy I wonder whether they invented new math since I was in a HS algebra class; I do NOT remember being able to do problems like this like a BOSS, however, just FYI…if you run into Anna, please let her know she’s got 38 quarters and 42 nickels.*

That said, I definitely pretended I didn’t see the worksheets where you have to graph the line of an inequality and then shade the area that represents the azimuth of the sun when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars, whoops, that might be the “Age of Aquarius,” and if you told me that song was involved in graphing inequalities, I might believe you who knows how that shit works.

My main mentee, K, also has a lot of questions for me, which is immensely flattering in that it suggests she thinks I might have answers. She’s fifteen, my kid, and she’s gorgeous, but she has some insecurities about her appearance. I consider them completely unfounded, but you can’t argue with teenage emotions, so I listen and then I ask her if she would talk about a friend the way she talks about herself. The first time I did that, it took her a minute—of course she wouldn’t say a friend was ugly, that she looked awful, she would never say that. Now when I play that card she’s ready for me, she rolls her eyes and laughs, but I think she gets it.

K asked me the other day if anyone had ever been mean to me about my appearance when I was her age. I was like, “Um, OF COURSE,” and I told her about the time I was at the mall, back when there were malls, and while I was waiting for a friend two boys walked by and barked at me.

Apparently being as ugly as a dog is not a thing anymore because K didn’t seem to totally understand the complete and utter humiliation I felt, knowing as I did exactly what it meant when a boy barked at you. But she could tell that something bad had happened and that it didn’t take long (what’s faster than a nanosecond?) for me to dredge that memory up.

The good news, of course, is that while that memory is crystal clear and close at hand, it doesn’t have any real feeling associated with it. If anything, I would say it conjures a genuine desire to know what on earth would prompt two young men to see a rather ordinary-looking young woman and then bark at her.

I told K all of this, of course, and then I asked her if she thought those dog-boys remember this event the way I do, thirty years later. Absolutely not, we agreed, and then I tried to turn this into a larger point about how bullies get their power, but then light changed and we got distracted by this dude on an electric bike who nearly mowed this old lady down and holy shit parenting is hard, y’all.

With both of my mentees I asked them very early on what the word “mentor” meant to them—what did they expect from a mentor? What did they think the job of a mentor was? They gave me similar descriptions, which I wrote down: they both said a mentor is someone who has been through what you’ve going through, someone who will listen to you and can give you advice and help guide you. I’m not a parent, I’m not a teacher, I’m not a peer: I’m just a gal who’s been around the sun a few dozen times, now getting a chance to go back in time and see things a little differently. Highly recommend, if only for the sheer pleasure of realizing you never have to graph an inequality again.

* First you write two equations based on the (stupid) facts at hand.

n + q = 80 coins, and n numbers of $0.05 coins plus q numbers of coins worth $0.25 adds up to $11.60, or, (0.05)n +(0.25)q = $11.60

Then you figure out how to make it so the number in front of n is the same but negative in one equation and positive in the other. Remember to multiply each part of the equation by the whosiewhatsit outside the parentheses, the -0.05.

-0.05(n + q = 80) = (-0.05)n +(-0.05)q = -4

Now add the new equation to the other one.

            (-0.05)n + (-0.05)q = -4

+

             (0.05)n + (0.25)q = $11.60

                   0n  + (0.20)q = 7.6

                             (0.20)q = 7.6

Divide both sides by 0.2 and….q = 38!

Now plug 38 in for q in either equation, I will use the easy one:

n + 38 = 80                                                                     

Subtract 38 from both sides and…n = 42!

That is some powerful fucking juju right there and while I am certain the answer is correct I am not certain that it is how K was supposed to have gotten to it BUT: she told me they don’t even look at your work, they just look to see if you have the correct answer, and so if any of y’all need mysteries like this one solved…do not contact me that was EXHAUSTING and you should never have a problem like that in the first place. Pay with plastic!