It’s amazing how the mind, given time and unuse, can suppress entire academic disciplines like geometry… but not plot lines to A Team episodes.
My GRE class is awakening all these memories of 6th grade geometry class: Mr. Brandt, who made us sit alphabetically order all year long. He had a giant compass that he armed with blue chalk, and I coveted it. These details I remember vividly, but not so much the blather about triangles, parallel lines, alternating interior angles, and so on.
Perhaps this is why, in my GRE study class, I have become the annoying “older student”, who is paying for this class out of her own pocket and sacrificing her leisure time, so, dammit, she’s going to understand triangles at the expense of the sanity of her fellow pupils by interrogating the teacher at every opportunity.
My GRE teacher is an interesting man, obviously passionate about teaching. He prepared for our geometry review by carefully illustrating each concept on a large pad of paper so we can gaze appreciatively at his handiwork while he expounds on the wonders of the isosceles right triangle.
He talked about inscribed polygons, which is a polygon whose angles all intersect with a circle. “And here is the most beautiful inscribed polygon of them all,” he said dramatically, flipping the sheet of paper and revealing:
The “beautiful” pentagram!
I’ve learned in GRE class all about this lovely cult of Greeks who called themselves the Pythagoreans who worshipped the Pentagram. I believe the teacher is trying to make the material interesting by talking about satanic math, but this is all I managed to retain about geometry. And it won’t be on the GRE.
While my hopes for an outstanding Math GRE score fade with each GRE lesson, I am a sentence completion demon: 30 out of 30 on the sentence completion practice questions, which I blazed through on the 20-minute subway ride from Alewife to Kendall, surrounded by tipsy college students singing U2 songs. Hey, if I learned nothing at UMass, I learned how to block out the noise of drunk college kids.
Speaking of geometry, tonight en and I are eating at the swank restaurant Radius. Because geometry is everywhere, once you are reminded of its fundamentals.
