Our second place winner this time around is from Lebanon. Her teacher at the Beirut Evangelical School for Girls & Boys submitted several of her students’ essays. I was delighted to have chosen Nour’s essay as a winner and especially delighted to have received this note from her in response to my email of congratulations: “This is wonderful news!! …Thank you for giving me this opportunity to share my ideas on an international scale. I believe that creativity … can cross borders.”

Following her winning essay, I’ve made some comments about what I appreciate in the way her essay works.

An Algebra Problem
by Nour Abou Fayad

“Stand firm in your refusal to stay awake during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra”. And I fully agree with whoever said that. Algebra is another way to torture people who know that it is useless. I, being one of those people, have had to suffer for so long. And quite recently, I flunked yet another test. Rather than blame myself for failing that test, I blamed that no good teacher, my overworked tutor, and even that stupid yowling cat of mine.

If men are from Mars, and women are from Venus, then algebra teachers are definitely from Mercury. They’re a species of their own. And to prove my theory, I present my very own algebra teacher, Mr. Abacus Calculus. This, of course, is not his real name, but it’s a nickname well earned. He stands there with his super thick spectacles that make his eyes look beady and even wider, hopelessly trying to instill his passion for algebra into our unwilling teenage minds. He fails, at least with me. I usually slump in my desk during his period, my head between my hands, silently praying that he’ll return to his mothership, taking his endless and useless blah blahs with him. He crouches over me and says in a high-pitched squeaky voice: “Ms. Nour, please try to stay with us.” And with that he raises his already too high turquoise colored pants a bit more, and trots to the board, leaving me with the horrible reeking essence of his breath. “Who cares if I stay awake or not?” I say to myself. And I return to my former position, only this time with less interest than before.

My mother, on the other hand, doesn’t share my revolutionary ideas about algebra. And for some reason, she insists on my passing this subject. So, she takes matters into her own hands and gets me a tutor. “Ding Dong!” chimes our doorbell, announcing the arrival of enemy number two. The tutor stands there, with his untidy ruffled hair, and pale face, dark circles etched around his eyes. In his hand, half a dozen hard cover books weigh his left side down, making him look even more unbalanced. “God, why must all math teachers, tutors, followers, and disciples look unattractive, tired, and overworked? Can’t there be one single mathematician who is cool and handsome?” So, we sit at our kitchen table that creaks under the weight of the two-ton books, and we begin a four hour-long session. It isn’t really four hours, of course, but that’s how long it feels to me. I wake from my daze at the hopeful voice of my mother saying, “Thank you. See you soon”.

 If this were an Oscar night, then you’ll find me saying,” … and I also would like to dedicate my failure to my adorable black and white cat, whose musical talents helped me through my darkest moments when I thought that algebra could actually do me good in life”. That fuzzy 12-pound feline yowls and meows so dam loud that the deaf would want earmuffs to block the noise. He spends half his time beside me, while I try to study for that algebra test, and meows for food. He’s sort of like my sister who won’t stop whining till she gets what she wants. And when he’s not begging for food, he’s busy sinking his claws into my math sheets and hiding them under the furniture.

So you see how it is? I’m completely blameless. IT’S THEIR FAULT!! I mean well. I intend to study but Mercurians and I don’t agree; overworked tutors are beneath me, and the feline community is out to get me. Algebra and I are not meant to be.

****

I very much enjoy Nour’s snappy opening–the quoted but un-attributed line that states her wishful thinking as if it were fact. Then our author goes from the “fact” that there is no algebra in real life to a short description of herself as one of those people who know that the subject is in actuality not mathematics, but a torture practice. Therefore, her amusing and illogical reasoning goes, failing an algebra test is not a sign of having difficulty but a sign that a teacher, a tutor and her mother have it in for her in the service of having the torture continue.

According to Nour, algebra teachers are not male or female but a race of Mercurians, unattractive beings with turquoise pants hitched high, bad breath, and squeaky voices. Adults, of course, don’t see that Mercurians are a different species–the speaker’s mother hires one as a tutor: a tired, overworked, untidy ruffled-haired Mercurian comes to Nour’s door! “Thank you. See you soon!” says her clueless mom much to Nour’s dismay.

If this were Oscar night, our speaker says, winding into her essay’s ending, she would thank her howling cat for keeping her an algebra failure, when in a moment of weakness she may have tried to succeed in the pro- rather than anti-algebra field.

This essay is a fun romp, in which the speaker uses unexpected associations from pop culture to promote her cause. But reality does seep in. In the last paragraph, Nour says, “IT’S THEIR FAULT!” So, the idea that algebra is not a subject in the real world, not something it would be good to be able to do, is not fact at all.

Nour’s technique is something all of us writers should allow ourselves to use once in awhile in the service of speaking out about our frustrations. Thank you, Nour, for reminding us about using our writing skills to help us to laugh at ourselves and make our audience laugh, too!