The Magic of Math
Davis, Mario

MARIO: Well my story is kind of different from everybody else's. I know most people were talking about how the difficulty of life was to learn, to read, literally. But mine is more from the aspect of mathematics. My father died young, my mother had three kids to raise by herself so it was a big burden on her to work, her to take care of us at the same time and to help us with our homework. She put me in a Spanish emersion learning center called Emerson Silk and honestly right now to this day I still think that was one of the best choices she made in my life. But the thing about the school was at that time it was focused more on teaching Latin kids on how to speak English and English-speaking kids how to learn Spanish. I would spend most of my time trying to learn Spanish, not that there's anything wrong with that, right now I can speak it better that I have come in contact with who aren't of Latino descendants. At the same effect it took time away from me learning mathematics, I could add, I could even multiply at a young age but what was hurting me was the vision and that was kind of pulling me back and on the same sense of that with my father passing away, I really had no male father-figure in my life to guide and hold me down, tell me I was doing wrong in school. So I was causing a lot of trouble in class because I used to get frustrated and those were the things that seemed to happen. Well my mom used to get called up to the school a lot to the point where she would be up there daily. I mean some days in my class she was holding my hand, by nineteen this was embarrassing for me. My mom was trying to figure why I wasn't learning math - it was because my mother only had a high school education and it was kind of hard for her to teach me and I understood the math, the adding and multiplication but subtraction and division I couldn't grasp; I could only grasp it if I saw it. Well, one teacher sat me down, her name was Ms. Lee, she would always threaten me when I would act like a fool in class, she would say, "You know I'm going to call your mom up here." So that was like the way to keep me in check. She used that and it was like I could talk to her more. So she sat me down some days and took me personally under her wing and taught me how to divide. Other teachers tried and failed, it seemed like they had no patience with me but she sat there and she helped me. It got to the point that I got it without learning how I got it, she embedded it in my brain. My brain was like a dry sponge and it was like she absorbed some type of liquid in there and to this day I still can't get rid of. Now it's like once I learned how to divide and I knew the whole circle, the aspects of math, I always wanted to learn math, even while other people were learning different things, geology and Spanish and writing, I was just thinking about math the whole time. I remember as a child riding in the car, I would try to add up all of the numbers from somebodies license plate in front of me, I'd convert the letters into numbers, one through twenty-six. It was just something that I would do because I was so fascinated about something that I had no grasp of doing. It's like somewhat being illiterate and finally learning how to read, they want to read every novel there is in the world. In my neighborhood, I grew up in North Minneapolis; in North Minneapolis about '95, '96, it was real bad. Gang violence, drugs, everything, the bad nineties, the second edition from the 80's cocaine era - it really affected our neighborhood. But I did have a strong mother, a strong single mother, and there were other strong women in our neighborhood. There were the nuns at the Visitation Monastery and my mom would send us there every day after school, roughly 3:30pm to four o'clock. They would tutor kids and when it was time for us to come over, they'd hang a windsock outside their house and it was called a windsock. They took me to Jamaica later on in life and they paid for me to get into a private high school called De La Salle, but it was something that they did when they brought the college students in to have them help us and tutor us. One of the college students, he brought in some math work and none of the other students or children that were being tutored could understand it but once they started teaching it to me, it was like I didn't want to stop learning. It got to the point that I went through all the math work that they had. Later on in life, once I started learning algebra and getting into high school, it was just like a refresher. So it's more in my life about learning math, it was about the dedication of my teachers and it was about the tutoring by people that were older than me, just giving me a chance to learn. So I feel that once you have something that you can achieve, once you're finally able to achieve it, you want to surpass every other goal.