Mathematics.

This morning, I got a job.
I am an official calculus tutor.

Mathematics is at once the most frightening and most beautiful subject I know. As the universal language of purists, the discipline is crafted from amoral symbols, facts, axioms and conjectures and culminates in what I believe to be the most undiluted pursuit of truth. Every concept requires sequential, concrete proof, which can be as sharp, eloquent or unnecessarily verbose as literature. With all the similarities between English and math, I find it funny that people usually pick just one to enjoy.

If academic subjects were drawn on a Cartesian plane, most people would probably sketch math and English as parallel lines, destined to hold each other at a constant length forever, never crossing. I prefer a Venn diagram. There's so much the same between the two subjects; not the specific course material per se, but the critical thinking, the desire for truth, the techniques of innovation. For example, in my way of thinking, the literary device of satire is a perfect example of proof by mathematical induction. In an induction proof, to prove something is true of k, one must prove it is true of k+1. Similarly, satire is used to twist a situation into hyperbole (k+1), and by so doing proves truths that apply to our current situation (k), which may not be so extreme. QED.

I've found that teaching math, though, is much harder than learning it. If I concentrate, math comes easily to me, and when I do it I skim along my own plane of thought, which is why I find it difficult to teach a student. If my thinking style is a convex plane, and hers is concave, how are we to understand each other? I'm learning to design equations for the space between our intersections, creating functions tangent to her style, molding my well-worn neural pathways into something she can more easily recognize.
I hope it works.