AP Calculus BC

My high school reunion is tomorrow and I do not want to see those faces again.

I didn't attend the American high schools I saw on TV. There were no drugs, there were no unsupervised house parties, no late nights, no joy rides, no alcohol, no romance. It was a hospital with a chalk board and a bell that rang 8 times a day. We were all nerds, but some were nerdier than others. Those were the really smart kids. But then there were the really nerdy nerds. I mean, severely nerdy, unsocialized, uncivilized, MIT-bound nerds. I should know--I was one of them. They looked like they popped out of a stereotypical nerd caricature. Their goofy, greasy slick-back hair, the broken glasses taped in the middle, the buck teeth that never sat behind the upper lip, the lanky limbs and rounded shoulders. Most surprising of all, each of us nerds had their own style, their own personality. None of us looked alike, and we were proud of that, proud to stand apart from each other. We wanted to be seen as a line graph, ranked by GPA and most AP classes taken, instead of a group of top tens.

Although the rest of the nerdy grade took all the advanced classes and honors courses and dual credit enrollments, me and my uber-nerd posse were the only ones brave enough to take AP Calculus BC. We loved the isolation from the entry-level nerds--here, we could rank ourselves freely, to our hearts content. We paid attention to the board, read over our notes, stayed up until 7 pm studying--not cramming, we were too smart for that--then woke up the next day to take the first test on derivatives.

I swaggered in. My nerd friends maintained their uniqueness. One hopped in, one launched in, one scampered. Then we smiled complacently at one another, nodded to ourselves smugly, and pulled out each of our special pencils. Special--that is--not lucky. Because all this genius accumulated in one room wasn't luck. It was special.

I pulled out my calculator. My neighboring nerds chuckled and pulled out an abacus. I blushed. The nerd beside them retrieved an astrolabe, self-assured in his glances at us. The final nerd at the end of the room, quietly but confidently, placed a protractor on the desk. We all scanned the room, smiled obnoxiously at one another, then took our seats.

Our teacher, desensitized to the insanity of nerdity after half a century of developing Calculus-BC-oriented minds, passed out the tests, easily a foot-and-a-half thick.

I took mine softly, then whispered a thank you to my unimpressed teacher. I took my time, polishing my special pencil, sharpening my two extra pencils, then testing them to ensure optimum HB graphite. I adjusted my collar, took a breath, and got down and dirty into the test.

1. Assuming the socio-economic status of the function f(xe33x)>sin(3)cos(4)ln(44)nth, what can we assume about the derivative of the nth root of yellow?

"Oh."

I turned around and saw my peers on the next page already. Take it easy, I told myself. Clearly you're overcomplicating it. I picked up my prized pencil and calculator.

My teacher turned to me meanly.

"No calculator," she puffed.

I dropped my calculator, smiled an apology, and turned back to the question at hand.

Well, if I take the antiderivative of yellow, I'd get banana, and the limit as that approaches infinity to the power of insanity, well, I guess I'd get 29.

I marked my answer sheet, semi-confidently, but unshaken. I've always been on the top, and one setback would be no exception.

I flipped to the next page, but it was blank. Then the one after that. And the one after that. The foot-and-a-half tall test had only one question, and I was given a foot-and-a-half of scratch paper to solve it.

"Finish it quick," my teacher interrupted, she herself drowning in a mound of blueprints and paperwork. "You all need to find that equation so I can finally finish this time machine," she murmured, scratching her head with a wooden pencil.

Aha! My extra pencils, two pristine, hand-polished HB #2 wooden pencils! When my special pencil doesn't come in handy, these certainly will!

I erased my previous work and began anew.

Wooden pencil in hand, I began to feel something strange, something powerful. Almost like I could feel the answers soaking into my head.

Okay, I made a mistake last time. I should have taken the Riemann sum of yellow as it approached the limit of sin(3) before integrating by banana. Silly mistake.

So when I do that, I end up with blue, so when I carry the five and add the exponent, I get dog!

I circled my new answer. I was so confident, I was practically beaming.

I turned to my classmates, arms crossed, smirking like a mob boss. A few were surrounding a telescope, fighting over whose turn it was to analyze the rotation of the moon. Another was in the corner with a microscope, counting how many base pairs the genome of a dust mite had.

I returned, unsuccessful to my test. Yes, I admit I was slightly unhappy. I didn't feel as confident or as motivated as I had started, but I pulled myself up and together.

I was on the right track this time. I just should have accounted for the number of hydrogen bonds between a banana peel and the air.

I came back to my seat, erased, and got to work. Well, the number of hydrogen bonds between a banana peel and the air is about cos(x). So that, in addition to my previous answer, dog, raised to the power of broccoli, should get me...

...29.

I felt my armpits dampen. I began shaking. I dropped my menagerie of pencils and pulled at my hair, wet now with the perspiration of doubt and insecurity. I was going round and round in circles while my classmates were confidently off researching quantum mechanics and particle acceleration, reaching the end of the question.

I erased everything again, but it left streaky black marks and gray smudges across the paper.

Simple, really! The derivative! It just asked for the derivative!

I answered 58.

Then erased.

Banana! Orange! Mongoose! Groundhog!

I erased ferociously, ravenously, until my paper ripped.

Twenty....

...Twenty-nine.

I circled 29.

"Time's up!" my teacher shrieked, jumping up from her burrow of scientific discovery. "Hand me your tests!"

All us nerds lined up. Our teacher stood at the front of the line, red pen in her hand, and answer key in her memory.

"A!" she announced, scribbling on the first nerd's paper at the front of the line.

"A!"

"A!"

She lowered her glasses and glanced, displeased at the nerd in front of me.

"A minus." she whispered.

The nerd walked off, red-faced, ashamed.

I was the last nerd in the line. She scanned my paper, turned pale and harrowed, looked at me worriedly, then looked back at my paper.

She glanced around to make sure no one could hear her.

"B minus," she whispered to me, hand cupped around my ear.

I felt my heart palpitate.

"Is that the lowest in the class?" I whispered.

She nodded solemnly, patted me on the back, and sent me back to my seat.

I cannot go to my high school reunion tomorrow, because I cannot bear being reminded that I am the lowest-scoring nerd among the uber-nerds. And I still don't know what I did wrong on that first math test, the first of many more to come.