Writers Unbound

Since I recently took the AP Calculus exam (although with surely disastrous results) and have officially completed the course, I was asked to write a letter describing the course to next year’s students and offering them advice.

I am a cynic. Here’s what I said:

2007 - 2008 AP Calculus Students:

A year from now, when you’re asked to write a letter like this one, you won’t be able to do it.

It will be physically impossible.

After all, you won’t have fingers. And quite obviously you’ll need fingers. You can’t type with just palms.

( I suppose you could, but the awkward result would be something to the tune of jksdfauhamhavtrhmuarv.)

Where will those fingers be, you ask?

Excellent question.

Well, you’ll have gnawed them all off.

They were causing trouble, you know, scribbling sprawls of unintelligible mathematical gibberish on your paper in some arcane process called “note-taking,” drumming and deconstructing every beat known to mankind on your desktops, occasionally pouncing on your eye sockets or your temples to clutch and rip out whatever they find in frustration.

It’ll just take one single mistake (say, drawing a line incorrectly on a slope field diagram) and you’ll snap. You’ll hear it too: a dry and brutal noise, like an old breadstick finally giving way to a maitre d’s shoe, splintering into starchy slivers as it hacks out a puff of granules into the air like a death rattle.

After that, the epiphany. You’ll realize: you need to savagely crush this insubordination so brashly enjoyed by your digits. You need to Stalinize the situation: iron fists and curtains, poster propaganda, gulags.

And when the time comes to finally do the deed, to dispense a little localized justice and punish your appendages for every murdered integrand and butchered derivative, don’t let Anna Akhmatova fool you. Every nationality of ground loves fresh blood and anyway it can get it, whether it’s trickling out like you forgot to turn a faucet that last inch to the left somewhere in your hand or even gushing forth, flood waters, violent and Biblical, ready to swallow whole any pebble-sized Noahs that might be loitering around.

But I disgustingly digress. And with good reason, mind you. This course will take everything from you: your sanity, your dignity, your sense of accomplishment, your ego, your money (AP testing fees, of course) and then, the final blow, your fingers and whatever other body parts you’ve room for in that pit of self-cannibals you used to call a stomach. You will be annihilated, utterly, unequivocally crushed into a fine and sifting “honor student” powder.

But maybe you’ll do well. Maybe you’ll actually learn something. Maybe, in the end, you’ll be glad you took the course.

Even with all those caveats, though, you’ll still have to lose the fingers. Best to accept it, you know, and move on.

Oh, and don’t get any blood on the textbooks.

You’ll have to pay for them if you do.

- Jason R. Wallace