Patrick Honner starts to doubt his lifelong love of math when graduate school becomes a lonely experience.

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Patrick Honner is an award-winning mathematics teacher who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He has taught everything from introductory algebra to multivariable calculus, and currently teaches calculus, linear algebra, and mathematical computing at Brooklyn Technical High School, where he also serves as instructional coach. Patrick is in his fourth Math for America Master Teacher Fellowship; he is a New York State Master Teacher; a Sloan award winner; and a Rosenthal Prize honoree. And in 2013 he received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. Patrick writes about math and teaching for Quanta Magazine, the New York Times, and on his blog.

This story originally aired on July 27, 2018 in an episode titled “Loneliness: Stories about finding friends”.

Story Transcript

I’m sitting at a campfire with my best high school friends.  We’re about to graduate from college.  We’re thinking about the past and the future at the same time. 

One of my friends asks the group, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” 

“I want to be in my residency on my way to being a doctor,” one of my friends says. 

“I want to have a good job and have my student loans paid off early,” says another. 

A third says, “I want to be my own boss running my own company.” 

The question makes its way around the circle to me.  I’m kind of surprised at how quickly I say, “I want to be fully initiated into the world of mathematics.”  They laughed at me too. 

I started out in a great relationship with math.  I guess I’m one of the lucky ones.  Early on, I learned to see math as an elegant system for processing and understanding the world, society, myself.  Everything, really.  It was very natural to me. 

When I got to college I didn’t know what I was going to do but I knew I loved math so I just kept taking math classes.  Along the way, I started to romanticize the idea of being a mathematician, a researcher, a scholar, part of the mathematical community.  Going to graduate school seemed like a reasonable thing to do.  I mean, how could I be more initiated into the world of mathematics than that.  I had some nagging doubts but I didn’t have any better ideas so I went. 

In grad school things started to change.  My relationship with math started to change.  I was expecting to be welcomed into a community but instead I immediately felt like I was on the outside looking in.  I could still do the math for the most part but for the first time in my life I wasn’t really sure why I wanted to.  But people on the inside they seemed to know why.  They seemed to get it.  They seemed to have better relationships with math than I had.  That kind of unnerved me. 

I increasingly started to see math and experience math as really technical, esoteric, removed from my reality, removed from everyone’s reality, really.  I was enjoying it less.  I was getting it less.  Where I used to feel successful, I now felt like I wasn’t failing.  And despite the seeming mathematical equivalence of this, things are definitely not the same thing. 

I started to feel alone.  That first year I spent more time throwing darts in smoky bars with my roommate than I did furthering my mathematical career.  I know I wasn’t the only one because more than a few of my grad school colleagues took up darts with us.  There were moments where being alone together brought some comfort, but ultimately not enough. 

I think part of the reason is because part of the loneliness I was feeling was kind of anticipated future loneliness.  I saw people doing this complex mathematics working on things that only a few people in the world could understand, working out of the edge of human knowledge, and it seemed kind of lonely out there to me. 

I realized grad school wasn’t the place for me.  I finished the master’s degree and I did what any disillusioned graduate student does.  I moved to Asia. 

I had a great time.  I travelled.  I taught English.  I practiced my Chinese on hundreds of cab drivers.  I got a preview of what it’s like to live under state-sponsored propaganda.  And I didn’t do math. 

It was kind of nice taking a break.  It was kind of liberating.  For the first time in my life, math really wasn’t at the center of what I was doing and it felt kind of nice.  I didn’t feel guilty or ashamed.  I did feel something, though.  I felt like part of me was unused, was muted.  I felt like I was keeping a secret, the secret that I once loved math, that it was once a huge part of who I was and that we parted under less than ideal circumstances. 

After a year in Asia I came back and I did the next thing that disillusioned graduate students do.  I took a corporate job, which was disillusioning for entirely different reasons.  Again, I had a great time.  I came to New York and I learned a lot about business and technology.  I met a lot of great people.  I learned a lot about myself.  For example, I learned that I did not want to work in a corporate job.  I just didn’t care about user acquisition or content management systems or money, flow charts. 

One thing I noticed was that math was kind of making its way back into my life.  At the various technology jobs I had, I found myself gravitating towards projects that were mathematically interesting.  I remember at a fantasy sports company I worked at, I got really obsessed with this elegant way to model the March Madness Basketball Tournament.  It was a 64-digit binary integer, and ones were victories and zeroes were losses, and it was all indexed by seed.  And I really got into it and I was excited.  It was really satisfying. 

At the end, I was really impressed with my elegant solution.  My bosses were not impressed mostly because three days after the tournament began, my elegant solution was still not working on our website, but it worked in theory. 

About that same time I remember being home at my mom’s house over the holiday and I found myself over a box of old textbooks and I was thumbing through them feeling nostalgic.  I grabbed a few and brought them back to New York with.  Before I knew it, I was working my way through them. 

My roommates didn’t know quite what to make of me sitting alone in my bedroom solving all the old exercises in my calculus textbooks. 

She asked, “So?  What?  Are you going back to school?” 

“No,” I said.  “Never,” was what I was thinking. 

I didn’t really know what to make of it either.  I was just doing math.  I was just reconnecting with math.  I was having fun.  I was learning.  I didn’t think about it too much.  But I was thinking about what I was going to do next because I knew that the corporate world was not for me. 

I spent a lot of time on the subway.  I do some of my best thinking there.  I remember one afternoon on the CTrain, one of those catchy New York City Teaching Fellows posters really caught something inside of me. 

“You remember your fifth grade teacher’s name.  Who will remember yours?” 

I remember my fifth grade teacher’s name.  Mr. Safronoff.  He took me to a swamp to go salamander hunting and then he took me to McDonald’s and bought me a nine-piece chicken McNuggets afterwards. 

If loneliness characterized my grad school experience, I would say emptiness characterized my corporate experience.  I was looking for a way to make more of a difference.  I think a lot of us were after 9/11.  Teaching seemed like a way to make a difference.  I mean, Mr. Safronoff made a difference.  I knew he mattered.  Maybe I could matter too. 

I didn’t know what to expect.  I knew that I once loved math but I didn’t in a while.  I knew I could teach but I assumed that the kids would drive me crazy, but I gave it a shot. 

My first year was tough, very tough.  Everyone’s is.  I made a lot of mistakes.  I took things personally.  I got angry a lot.  I experienced night terrors.  I did not feel like I was making a difference.  I wasn’t sure how long I could do it.  All of a sudden, the loneliness of graduate school, the emptiness of the corporate world didn’t seem so bad, but I committed to seeing it through. 

That first year I remember a student of mine, Dane, was finding points on a parabola in a really odd way.  I'd given him some parabola with strange coefficients.  He was going over one up three over one up seven over one up eleven.  I was sure he was doing something wrong so I told him. 

“No, it works,” he said. 

Dane was a very confident young man.  He never felt any obligation to defer to me, which I admired about him.  It also irritated me. 

“That seems kind of random to me,” I said.  So I squatted down and I checked his work and, sure enough, those points were on the parabola.  I was intrigued. 

The mathematician I almost became might not have been that impressed, but I was a teacher.  I had a different response. 

“Do you know why this works,” I asked. 

“Not really,” he said. 

“Well, let’s figure it out.” 

Just like that, math was inviting again.  And that was just the beginning.  Students have shown me how to solve geometry problems by manipulating diagrams, how to count things more efficiently by rearranging them, how to visualize complex surfaces and space by imagining them from just the right perspective. 

When I started teaching I assumed that I would quickly get tired of talking about linear equations and probability formulas and geometry proofs but just the opposite has happened.  I have a much better relationship with math now than I've ever had.  I have my students to thank for that.  Seeing math through their eyes has once again filled me with wonder. 

Through teaching, I've rediscovered my love of math.  And I’m right back out there at the edge of human knowledge.  It’s not the edge of humanity’s knowledge but it’s the edge of our knowledge: mine, my students, my colleagues. 

And it’s not lonely out there because we’re out there together.  We’re exploring.  We’re playing.  We’re arguing.  We’re collaborating.  Far from being lonely, it’s kind of like a party.  A party at the edge of human knowledge, and I brought the math.