Congruence
So you draw two triangles
on the board
and try to explain
how they are congruent.
But all I can think of is how you
come into class every day
and teach us when you so
obviously don’t want to.
You don’t yell at us
or show a ‘black face’;
you are calm,
you answer questions
with light humour (and with dark
you suggest consequences
when homework isn’t done).
“'Congruent' just means
they are the same type right,
Mr. Lee”, a frustrated classmate
says, when English seems to make fun of math.
“Yes, but more than that,
it is when two figures
are so identical
they are in harmony.
And if you know they agree like that,
you can use their properties to here –
find this angle and here –
calculate this hypotenuse –
Discover what you didn’t know before!”
You are earnest, but in
your sincere conviction that math is more than math,
in those straight and
curved lines of geometry you keep extending,
in your interpretation of the alien language of algebra,
you radiate thoughts of “there is something different out there for me”
and “this is not really me”,
and I want to stop you from writing
more equations and scream at you to go find your
congruence,
your ideal self.
