By Lila Wells ’19
Have you ever left YouTube running? I mean, when you finish a video and autoplay cues up another one that was related to your first search, then another, and another, until next thing you know you’ve somehow gotten from an SNL clip to a documentary on mantis shrimp? I like to call these involuntary explorations YouTube “deep dives.” Most are ridiculous and peripheral at best, but one deep dive that was rather fruitful was when videos from a channel called YesTheory started popping up in my cue. YesTheory is a group of friends from all around the world who make content aimed to expand their worldview and comfort zones by living according to the motto: seek discomfort.
That definitely resonated with me. But I mean, how much “discomfort” can we really seek in Fairfield County? Well, at least in a “school sense” I’ve definitely sought discomfort — or rather, discomfort has sought me — in math.
Growing up, you were either a “math kid” or you weren’t. I was not. Flash forward to Geometry freshman year with Mr. Martocchio, and I still had little to no idea of what I was doing algebraically. But Geometry was a sort of incognito math, using more shapes and words than numbers, and it worked for me. It clicked. So, when Mr. Martocchio recommended me for Algebra 2 Honors at the end of the school year I said yes.
Bad decision. At least, that’s what I thought after getting my first quiz back sophomore year. It was bad. I mean, really bad. I was a sophomore thinking about college, which is way too early and a little ridiculous, but on a more realistic note, I was terrified of letting down my family, and pretty much anyone else who would see my grades. I wasn’t doing well and was way too stubborn to drop the course, so I shifted my focus towards conquering this challenge. I went to extra help, did my homework twice over, watched Khan Academy videos for hours on end. I got my next quiz back and it was somehow worse than the first, which I didn’t think was possible. I had done everything right and then some and could not comprehend my own lack of progress.
But giving up really wasn’t an option, at least if I wanted to end the semester with a good grade, so I pushed on. One night, when I was re-doing my homework for the second or third time, my little sister walked over to talk to me. She’s four years younger, a sixth grader at the time, and, upon seeing my messy attempts at polynomial graphs and rational expressions, she said, “Wow Li, you’re so smart.” And, as ridiculous as it may seem, something clicked in my brain at that moment. I thought: Hey, maybe I am so smart. In my mathematical discomfort thus far, I hadn’t acknowledged what I knew to be fundamentally true, and something that applies to each person in here: you’re so smart, I’m so smart. I could do this.
With my newfound revelation I stopped trying to avoid discomfort. Failure became that much easier to deal with when I took each iffy quiz grade as an opportunity to improve myself: redoing problems, looking up concepts I didn’t know on Khan Academy, asking classmates about their strategies between classes, meeting with Mr. Matte multiple times a week and watching math-y YouTube videos like it was my job. I learned to laugh at myself, quite literally, and became a vocal participant in class, even though most of my contributions began with “Can you explain…” or, “I don’t understand…”
I welcomed discomfort, and although you can’t get corrections on a final exam, I didn’t need it at the end of that year. I finished strong and was somehow recommended for an honors math course my junior year. That’s a whole other mess that we don’t have enough time to talk about today, but what I would stress above all else is to be willing to fall down. GFA is the place to do it. We’re all essentially rehearsing for adult life outside this campus, and whether we welcome it or not, failure is a part of life. We all fall down, but what is truly defining is how we pick ourselves up, learn from our mishaps, and expand our comfort zones accordingly.
Discomfort will find you, it is persistent and pervasive. Know that you are smart, you are enough and, at least in the GFA community, you have a plethora of resources available to help you when you fall. You have Mr. Matte’s with abundant extra help sessions available, patient classmates who will answer your questions, Khan Academy, and upperclassmen who have taken these courses and who are willing and able to help. But above all else, you have YouTube: helping you seek discomfort from the comfort of your mobile device because, by using these resources to pick yourself up, you begin to learn to do it for yourself.