Competition, the Great Teacher

Competition is a great teacher—a type of spiritual crucible...

All through high school, my friend, Ellery, and I kept up a running competition in our math classes. We tallied numerical scores on our quizzes and tests with nothing at stake—so we thought—but private bragging rights.

We were children of the late sixties, devoted to radical politics, and wildly attracted to all things bohemian. We knew we had to make straight As to advance toward our ultimate goals, and this demanded a degree of conformity, but we put our own spin on life's rating system. It was not enough to make straight As. Each teacher also gave marks for conduct and work habits: E for excellent; S for satisfactory; U for unsatisfactory. We considered a perfect report card straight As for academic performance and straight Us for conduct and work habits.

Neither Ellery nor I were prone to violence, theft, or even talking out of turn in class, which made the U in conduct difficult to achieve. We could, however, argue points ad nauseam. I became infamous for telling the American history teacher she was betraying her pupils by believing in such imperialist fictions as manifest destiny. Both of us made a ton of Us in work habits by doing our homework—to be prepared for the tests—and then not turning it in. Our teachers caught on, of course, which unsatisfactory spilled over into our conduct marks—much to our satisfaction.

Ellery and I had the same math teacher, Mr. Lewis, for three of our four high school years, in algebra I, algebra II, and trigonometry/math analysis. We felt close to Mr. Lewis, who had a great dry wit and a predilection for punning. He gave quizzes, never tests, since tests had to be coordinated with other instructors. His quizzes were, of course, the hardest tests in our high school. But his strict numerical scoring made Ellery's and my competition easy to track.

At the end of our senior year, Mr. Lewis gave a "final quiz." Ellery and I were close in our four-year battle. I trailed by 20 points or so. The final quiz would be worth 200 points. Ellery asked that it be as hard as possible, because he was the better mathematician. I asked that it not cover anything we hadn't been through in the text. Mr. Lewis had the habit of ending each quiz with a question derived from the following chapter. He reasoned that if a student really understood the material, he could intuit what followed.

Mr. Lewis promised that the final quiz would be sufficiently difficult, and that it wouldn't cover anything we hadn't already looked at.

The final quiz had five problems. The last was absolutely alien to me—essentially a fraction, but stated in terms of second-degree trigonometric functions. Ellery and I glanced at each other; I could tell that he found the last problem as much of a sweat as I did.

When I started on the final problem, I remembered Mr. Lewis' promise. I had confidence he would never break a promise, although he might finesse it in the interest of learning. Somehow, what I was looking at must be resolvable into something familiar. I knew how to turn the second-degree trigonometric functions into simple functions, transforming a four-decked fraction into an eight-decker. This was the golden key. The eight-decked fraction consisted of divisions that cancelled out, resolving into the number 1. This answer won our four-year contest.

Ellery never solved the problem because he continued looking at it as a mathematician. I solved it by understanding the situation as a story in which I knew the motivations of my major character, Mr. Lewis.

Ellery went on to earn a Ph.D. from Cal in logic and mathematics; he teaches philosophy at a major research university and writes abstruse articles about causality using symbolic logic. I tell stories, which have their own logic and means of reasoning about the human condition and its causes. What turned out to be at stake in our competition—or what it allowed—was a deeper understanding of our identities and ways of approaching the world.

Competition is a great teacher—a type of spiritual crucible—in which we aim at winning to gain far more than victory.