Categories > Celebrities > My Chemical Romance > 10 Theorems of Calculus and Relationships
"Math" and "fun" aren't exactly two words that are often used together unless decorated with a negative connotation like "not." Yet, teachers and parents constantly go on about how math is everywhere and it truly is. It's there when you step onto a scale in fear of gaining another pound. It's there when you stare intensely at the mirror counting how many pimples sprouted out from surrendering your temptation to that bar of chocolate. It's even there when you're counting how many times a guy has screwed you over. Or when you want to decide how many barriers to place in front of your heart to insure it never happens again. Math is power, right? The power to keep an accurate count of everything good and bad in your life. And you pray with your entire soul that, in the end, the good will outweigh the bad.
Mae Lin always stepped into her Advanced Placement Calculus class with some sense of disbelief. Math had never been her best subject, but somehow she had climbed her way from the lowly steps of arithmetic to the first steps of algebra to the visually stimulating geometry passing through the doors of pre-calculus and entering into a complex world of derivatives and integrals. She associated herself with the kids known as the "school brains," but she never felt like she fit in with them. Sure, they had her in most of their classes ever since freshman year. But there was always an inside joke they knew that she wasn't aware of, there was always a party that she was never invited to, and there was always an awkward silence when she sat near them. It wasn't that they didn't like her because they always treated her with the same respect they would treat their associates. It was just that, aside from their class schedules, she was nothing like them.
Mae thrived in art and literature. She devoured books by Dan Brown, Jodi Picoult, and Janet Fitch. She was a natural poetess, finding meaning in the most unusual of places. She once compared herself to a piece of velcro, sticking onto someone so fast and tight yet having the ability to remove herself from them completely just as quickly. She spent most of her lunches in her art class. Finishing off a portrait of her favorite musician or meticulously tracing her penciled lines with an ink quill. Her creativity clashed with her classmates' logic. Sometimes, she felt like she was the outcast of the outcasts.
She took her seat in the front corner of the room, separating herself from most of the class. There were many gaps of empty seats during that class since a very few number of students in her school made it to Calculus during their highschool years. The teacher had no reason to assign a seating chart since they were the "well-behaved" bunch of the school. So the students were always scattered throughout the room with groups of best friends clustered together in the middle or the back of the room. Mae's desk was somewhat isolated from them. An empty desk divided her between the other two people who sat in her row.
For the most part, Mae was silent in class only because her friends weren't in any of them. Most of her friends had graduated or didn't care to take AP courses even if they were smart enough to handle them. Mae didn't mind since she figured that taking challenging classes would be her way of taking advantage of a free education. The only irritation she had about it was the stereotype that came attached with the curriculum. She's had kids from her school tease her that the only reason why she was good in math was because she was Asian. She hated being judged by her skin or ethnic background. It was as if they were saying she was born with a graphing calculator in her hand. As if she hadn't worked hard to get where she was. Knowledge wasn't a birthright, she thought. It was something that you had to earn.
The one thing that Mae questioned about herself was her weakness in science. Math and science were supposed to go hand-in-hand, right? Yet, she almost failed Advanced Chem, but managed to survive it with a C-. Her best friend, Gerard, seemed to understand it enough for a B+, but that was the year she learned that science was not her cup of tea. She guessed it meant that she knew how to do math, but she didn't know how to apply it to real life.
The day started off normally enough, Mr. Betterby had already begun to write equations on the board for their daily warm-up. Mae opened her spiral notebook to a blank page and wrote her name, date, and period on the upper right hand corner. She glanced at the previous page where she could see the hard penciled lines bleeding through the back of the paper. She remembered exactly what it said: Note to self: Don't date alcoholic, lying bassists with glasses! She shook her head in disgust of her ex-boyfriend who just so happens to be her best friend's brother. Fortunately, he graduated last year and he was the least of her problems.
The door suddenly creaked open, letting loose the hallway noise of the kids who cut class. Mr. Betterby set down his dry eraser marker before he got to finish the rest of the warm-up problems. He walked toward the doorway and exchanged conversation with the disembodied voice of an unfamiliar student. Mae used the minor interruption to let her mind wander of all the things that had changed in her life over time.
It had only been one year since she lost both a good friend and a boyfriend. She always had a bad feeling about Ashley. She knew that Ashley was the type of girl who would flirt with the guy you were crushing on just because she could. She just didn't think that her own boyfriend would fall into her trap. Mae wasn't surprised about him being too much of a coward to tell her that he liked someone else. So instead of doing the right thing and telling her the truth, he avoided her at all costs. The weekly phone calls ended, days passed when he didn't even utter a simple "hello" to her even if they shared the entire last half of their schedules together, and he could barely look her in the eye. She had to find out from her other friends that Mikey had been going to Ashley's house, behind Mae's back, getting drunk with her and God knows what else they were doing. It was enough to want to make Mae swear off dating for the next few years of her life. Mikey seemed like the most decent and sensible guy for her, yet that proved to be horribly wrong. How was she supposed to know who she could trust?
"Class," Mr. Betterby's voice brought Mae back to her senior year mentality. "There's a new student who is joining us today and I don't think I need to tell you guys how to treat him."
Mae rolled her eyes. It was a fact that her AP teachers praised her and the class for being on the academic top of the school and frowned upon the students who took the "regular"and remedial classes as if they were lesser people than themselves. Although some of the kids there may have agreed, Mae was not one of them. Some of her best friends had never taken AP courses and they were wiser, more talented, and much more mature than most of the kids with a full AP schedule.
"Do you wanna say something about yourself, Frank?" Mr. Betterby offered.
The boy who entered the room definitely didn't resemble anyone else there. He was much shorter than the other boys, but stood with a sort of unspoken confidence. His hands were in the pockets of his black jeans clashing with his formal white button up shirt complete with a black tie. He slouched his back against the whiteboard and crossed his black and white Converses in front of him as he took a first look around the class. His eyes were a light green color caressed with a golden ring of brown which were large enough in shape to give him a childlike face.
"My name's Frank," he introduced with his smooth, deep voice. "But you already knew that. My mom and I just moved to this city and um it's nice to meet you."
"Well said," Mr. Betterby replied. "Have a seat wherever you want."
A small smirk graced Frank's face as he scanned around for the nearest seat. He noticed the empty desk behind Mae and set his backpack on top of it to mark his choice. Mae began to copy down the warm-up as Mr. Betterby started to finish up the problems. She turned around to get her calculator from her backpack and noticed that Frank was staring directly at her.
"Can I have some paper?" he asked.
"Sure," she said, staring back at his brightly-lit eyes.
She ripped off a piece of notebook paper and set it on his desk. He glanced at the board in confusion and didn't even bother to pick up his pencil.
"Do you get this?" he asked, raising an eyebrow at all of the equations on the board. "Are we supposed to graph it or something?"
"We're supposed to be taking the derivative and the integral of each equation," she guided him.
"Oh," he said, confusion still evident in his voice. "What's that mean, again?"
"Here, let me show you," she smiled as she turned her body to face him.
"Derivatives are when you drop the power by one and multiply by that power. So the derivative of 3x^2 is 6x. Integrals are the opposite where you add one to the power and divide by that power. So the integral of 7x^3 is 7x^4/4 + C. You have to add a C to the integrals because you don't have the limits of integration," Mae instructed, writing down the numbers on Frank's paper.
"Oh . . . so how do you find the limits of integration?" Frank asked.
"You set the equation equal to zero and you solve for 'x.' But we don't have to do that right now. Just add C," Mae explained.
"So what happens to the derivative when there's no more 'x' because the power goes to zero and it turns into a one. Like what's the derivative of just six?" Frank wondered.
"It'll go to zero. The derivative of a constant with no variable is zero," Mae answered.
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why do the derivatives of constants go to zero?"
"I don't know. It's just the rule, I guess," Mae shrugged and, at the same time, was impressed by his curiosity.
"What's your name?" Frank surprised her with another question.
"Mae."
"Mae," Frank repeated. "That's nice."
"Thank you," Mae looked down at the copy of his schedule resting on the corner of his desk. "What other classes do you have?"
Frank scooted the paper into her hand and she figured out that, besides Calculus, they had half of the day together. Mae almost took it as an omen, but decided it was just a coincidence. Having the last three classes together didn't always mean disaster, did it?
Mae spent the rest of the period trying to explain everything about derivatives and integrals that she knew to help Frank get up to speed with the rest of them. It didn't take him long to catch on and she never had to tell him anything twice. He was smart, Mae knew, and soon enough he would probably be one of the smartest in the class. She was sure of it.
"Do you think you could help me out with the homework later?" Frank asked Mae after the bell rang for passing period.
"Sure," Mae agreed. "I'll be in the art room during lunch."
"Thanks," Frank smiled, his grin and his eyes sharing the same expression.
He slung his backpack onto one of his shoulders and headed off to his Physics class. Mae wondered if he was as bad in science as she was or if he was just as much as a logical thinker as the other AP kids. One thing she was sure of was that he was definitely one of the most good looking guys she had ever seen in that school. She had no doubt that by the end of the month, he would find a girl just as good looking to date. Mae walked into her art class and wondered what it would be like to be pretty enough to go out with someone like Frank. She thought of Ashley and instantly felt a pang in her stomach until she distracted her thoughts with her newest watercolor project.
Mae Lin always stepped into her Advanced Placement Calculus class with some sense of disbelief. Math had never been her best subject, but somehow she had climbed her way from the lowly steps of arithmetic to the first steps of algebra to the visually stimulating geometry passing through the doors of pre-calculus and entering into a complex world of derivatives and integrals. She associated herself with the kids known as the "school brains," but she never felt like she fit in with them. Sure, they had her in most of their classes ever since freshman year. But there was always an inside joke they knew that she wasn't aware of, there was always a party that she was never invited to, and there was always an awkward silence when she sat near them. It wasn't that they didn't like her because they always treated her with the same respect they would treat their associates. It was just that, aside from their class schedules, she was nothing like them.
Mae thrived in art and literature. She devoured books by Dan Brown, Jodi Picoult, and Janet Fitch. She was a natural poetess, finding meaning in the most unusual of places. She once compared herself to a piece of velcro, sticking onto someone so fast and tight yet having the ability to remove herself from them completely just as quickly. She spent most of her lunches in her art class. Finishing off a portrait of her favorite musician or meticulously tracing her penciled lines with an ink quill. Her creativity clashed with her classmates' logic. Sometimes, she felt like she was the outcast of the outcasts.
She took her seat in the front corner of the room, separating herself from most of the class. There were many gaps of empty seats during that class since a very few number of students in her school made it to Calculus during their highschool years. The teacher had no reason to assign a seating chart since they were the "well-behaved" bunch of the school. So the students were always scattered throughout the room with groups of best friends clustered together in the middle or the back of the room. Mae's desk was somewhat isolated from them. An empty desk divided her between the other two people who sat in her row.
For the most part, Mae was silent in class only because her friends weren't in any of them. Most of her friends had graduated or didn't care to take AP courses even if they were smart enough to handle them. Mae didn't mind since she figured that taking challenging classes would be her way of taking advantage of a free education. The only irritation she had about it was the stereotype that came attached with the curriculum. She's had kids from her school tease her that the only reason why she was good in math was because she was Asian. She hated being judged by her skin or ethnic background. It was as if they were saying she was born with a graphing calculator in her hand. As if she hadn't worked hard to get where she was. Knowledge wasn't a birthright, she thought. It was something that you had to earn.
The one thing that Mae questioned about herself was her weakness in science. Math and science were supposed to go hand-in-hand, right? Yet, she almost failed Advanced Chem, but managed to survive it with a C-. Her best friend, Gerard, seemed to understand it enough for a B+, but that was the year she learned that science was not her cup of tea. She guessed it meant that she knew how to do math, but she didn't know how to apply it to real life.
The day started off normally enough, Mr. Betterby had already begun to write equations on the board for their daily warm-up. Mae opened her spiral notebook to a blank page and wrote her name, date, and period on the upper right hand corner. She glanced at the previous page where she could see the hard penciled lines bleeding through the back of the paper. She remembered exactly what it said: Note to self: Don't date alcoholic, lying bassists with glasses! She shook her head in disgust of her ex-boyfriend who just so happens to be her best friend's brother. Fortunately, he graduated last year and he was the least of her problems.
The door suddenly creaked open, letting loose the hallway noise of the kids who cut class. Mr. Betterby set down his dry eraser marker before he got to finish the rest of the warm-up problems. He walked toward the doorway and exchanged conversation with the disembodied voice of an unfamiliar student. Mae used the minor interruption to let her mind wander of all the things that had changed in her life over time.
It had only been one year since she lost both a good friend and a boyfriend. She always had a bad feeling about Ashley. She knew that Ashley was the type of girl who would flirt with the guy you were crushing on just because she could. She just didn't think that her own boyfriend would fall into her trap. Mae wasn't surprised about him being too much of a coward to tell her that he liked someone else. So instead of doing the right thing and telling her the truth, he avoided her at all costs. The weekly phone calls ended, days passed when he didn't even utter a simple "hello" to her even if they shared the entire last half of their schedules together, and he could barely look her in the eye. She had to find out from her other friends that Mikey had been going to Ashley's house, behind Mae's back, getting drunk with her and God knows what else they were doing. It was enough to want to make Mae swear off dating for the next few years of her life. Mikey seemed like the most decent and sensible guy for her, yet that proved to be horribly wrong. How was she supposed to know who she could trust?
"Class," Mr. Betterby's voice brought Mae back to her senior year mentality. "There's a new student who is joining us today and I don't think I need to tell you guys how to treat him."
Mae rolled her eyes. It was a fact that her AP teachers praised her and the class for being on the academic top of the school and frowned upon the students who took the "regular"and remedial classes as if they were lesser people than themselves. Although some of the kids there may have agreed, Mae was not one of them. Some of her best friends had never taken AP courses and they were wiser, more talented, and much more mature than most of the kids with a full AP schedule.
"Do you wanna say something about yourself, Frank?" Mr. Betterby offered.
The boy who entered the room definitely didn't resemble anyone else there. He was much shorter than the other boys, but stood with a sort of unspoken confidence. His hands were in the pockets of his black jeans clashing with his formal white button up shirt complete with a black tie. He slouched his back against the whiteboard and crossed his black and white Converses in front of him as he took a first look around the class. His eyes were a light green color caressed with a golden ring of brown which were large enough in shape to give him a childlike face.
"My name's Frank," he introduced with his smooth, deep voice. "But you already knew that. My mom and I just moved to this city and um it's nice to meet you."
"Well said," Mr. Betterby replied. "Have a seat wherever you want."
A small smirk graced Frank's face as he scanned around for the nearest seat. He noticed the empty desk behind Mae and set his backpack on top of it to mark his choice. Mae began to copy down the warm-up as Mr. Betterby started to finish up the problems. She turned around to get her calculator from her backpack and noticed that Frank was staring directly at her.
"Can I have some paper?" he asked.
"Sure," she said, staring back at his brightly-lit eyes.
She ripped off a piece of notebook paper and set it on his desk. He glanced at the board in confusion and didn't even bother to pick up his pencil.
"Do you get this?" he asked, raising an eyebrow at all of the equations on the board. "Are we supposed to graph it or something?"
"We're supposed to be taking the derivative and the integral of each equation," she guided him.
"Oh," he said, confusion still evident in his voice. "What's that mean, again?"
"Here, let me show you," she smiled as she turned her body to face him.
"Derivatives are when you drop the power by one and multiply by that power. So the derivative of 3x^2 is 6x. Integrals are the opposite where you add one to the power and divide by that power. So the integral of 7x^3 is 7x^4/4 + C. You have to add a C to the integrals because you don't have the limits of integration," Mae instructed, writing down the numbers on Frank's paper.
"Oh . . . so how do you find the limits of integration?" Frank asked.
"You set the equation equal to zero and you solve for 'x.' But we don't have to do that right now. Just add C," Mae explained.
"So what happens to the derivative when there's no more 'x' because the power goes to zero and it turns into a one. Like what's the derivative of just six?" Frank wondered.
"It'll go to zero. The derivative of a constant with no variable is zero," Mae answered.
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why do the derivatives of constants go to zero?"
"I don't know. It's just the rule, I guess," Mae shrugged and, at the same time, was impressed by his curiosity.
"What's your name?" Frank surprised her with another question.
"Mae."
"Mae," Frank repeated. "That's nice."
"Thank you," Mae looked down at the copy of his schedule resting on the corner of his desk. "What other classes do you have?"
Frank scooted the paper into her hand and she figured out that, besides Calculus, they had half of the day together. Mae almost took it as an omen, but decided it was just a coincidence. Having the last three classes together didn't always mean disaster, did it?
Mae spent the rest of the period trying to explain everything about derivatives and integrals that she knew to help Frank get up to speed with the rest of them. It didn't take him long to catch on and she never had to tell him anything twice. He was smart, Mae knew, and soon enough he would probably be one of the smartest in the class. She was sure of it.
"Do you think you could help me out with the homework later?" Frank asked Mae after the bell rang for passing period.
"Sure," Mae agreed. "I'll be in the art room during lunch."
"Thanks," Frank smiled, his grin and his eyes sharing the same expression.
He slung his backpack onto one of his shoulders and headed off to his Physics class. Mae wondered if he was as bad in science as she was or if he was just as much as a logical thinker as the other AP kids. One thing she was sure of was that he was definitely one of the most good looking guys she had ever seen in that school. She had no doubt that by the end of the month, he would find a girl just as good looking to date. Mae walked into her art class and wondered what it would be like to be pretty enough to go out with someone like Frank. She thought of Ashley and instantly felt a pang in her stomach until she distracted her thoughts with her newest watercolor project.
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