Welcome to the South, Y'all: My First Trip to Mississippi

A sign in a highway rest stop.

“There’s so much nothing. It’s just nothing everywhere. I’ve never seen so much nothing in my life,” I kept repeating emphatically to my parents as we drove into the Mississippi Delta on our first trip to visit the state that will in two months be my home.

We had arrived in Mississippi in mid-February for a race. I had been offered the opportunity to come help out at the Mississippi River Marathon, which benefits Teach for America. I was visiting over Valentine’s Day weekend and would have the change to get to know the state and it’s people a little bit while I was there, including meeting community members and current corps members and taking some time to visit some classrooms. When the chance was presented to me back in December I jumped on it and immediately set about the surprisingly easy task of getting my parents on board for the ten-hour car ride.

When we set out early on a Thursday morning, I was eager to see a new part of the country and to learn a little bit more about my new home, but I was nonetheless nervous. When I made my commitment to teach in Mississippi I knew I was going to end up feeling like a stranger in a strange land, and I feared that visiting the state for the first time would exacerbate my nerves about the coming foreignness.

The ride was long and mostly boring. Because I live in the very southwest corner of Ohio, there were really only three states to drive through on our trip: Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Having driven through Kentucky and Tennessee many times before, I would have to wait for the prospect of a new landscape to observe until we had ventured all the way through the familiar foothills of the mid-South. Fortunately, with me and both my parents driving, the long trip was a little less taxing and no one openly objected to listening to Taylor Swift’s “1989” on repeat during my three hour driving shift.

The first thing worth noting when we reached Mississippi was the welcome center. As a family of mildly versed travelers, my parents and I had seen many-a-welcome-center, but Mississippi’s was the first that offered free coffee to weary road-trippers. As my parents perused travel brochures about the many Civil War sites and sleepy towns that they could visit, I paced around nervously, suddenly very aware of how much my life was going to change in four months.

As we entered the Delta it was hard not to notice just how flat everything was. Growing up in the Midwest, I thought I knew what flat looked like. After all, I had been subjected to the torturous drive through Indiana on multiple occasions, but the truth is Indiana ain’t got nothing on the Mississippi Delta. The Delta is as flat as a piece of paper and it left me feeling oddly exposed. For miles around us all I could see was empty fields interrupted occasionally by the odd clump of trees or a lone building.

In addition to the disconcerting emptiness, it was also hard not to notice the many vivid colors. We were driving in at sunset and I have to say I had never before seen a sunset quite like a Delta sunset. Because the land is so flat, the sky swallows everything and every color you’ve ever associated with a sunset surrounds you fully. Drinking in the colors of my first Delta sunset, I clung to the notion that maybe this masterpiece in the sky was a sign that I would find good things among the foreign scenery.

When we finally arrived in Indianola, where we were to meet some corps members for dinner, it came to my attention that I had no dress shoes to wear to visit schools the next day. Since we had a half an hour to spare before dinner, we found a store and, standing in the shoe aisle, I jokingly remarked to my mom that I always knew that one day I would end up frantically searching for dress shoes in a crowded Walmart in the middle of nowhere and she replied that she wasn’t sure where she’d gone wrong in raising a daughter who wouldn’t double check that she’d packed appropriate footwear.

After the unfortunate shoe mishap, things started to look up. Over the course of the next two days I was able to talk with current corps members who provided practical advice (Invest heavily in bug spray) and another future corps member from Alabama who shared a little bit about life in the South (No, not all Southerners like to eat in restaurants in gas stations; that’s a Mississippi thing) and community members who graciously welcomed me and my family to their home for dinner (And, in one meal, demonstrated the absolute culinary superiority of the South).

I was also assaulted by kindness from strangers. People would say hello and ask how I was doing even though I had never met them before. Everywhere I went strangers had something nice to say. One day I chatted with a waiter in a Mexican restaurant about making the move out from the big city and the next I spoke at length with a man who was in the middle of running a marathon in every one of the fifty states. It quickly became evident to me that Southern hospitality and friendliness is no myth and every one of those conversations eased my fears about the coming transition.

On the way back home, my parents asked me if I thought the trip had been worth it. I responded that it had been. I was so much less scared of what lay in front of me after my two days in Mississippi. Perhaps I had only seen a fraction of the state and of the story, but after being barraged at home by negative stereotypes of the Deep South, it was comforting to learn that the reality just wasn’t that simple. My dad agreed with this assessment, saying that before he had visited he had a pretty negative image of Mississippi, constructed from history, current events, and Hollywood portrayals of the state, but after our visit his understanding shifted.

Looking back a month and a half later, I like to think I was right about the sunset being a sign. The kindness and hospitality I saw in Mississippi assuaged my anxieties significantly, though, to be sure, they still linger. I understand that the reality of Mississippi is likely neither the frightening stereotype I had previously imagined or the narrow slice I saw in my brief visit. Likely, it is a mixture of both and, just like the people of the state the statistics are complex. Mississippi may have the lowest per capita income in the country, but they rank second highest in per capita charitable giving.  I suspect that my experience will reflect the realities and complexities of this fact and, while I may find myself surrounded by poverty and destitution, I will also find myself surrounded by compassion and community, the vivid colors amongst that flat, flat landscape.

Srinivasa Ramanujan and Unexpected Genius

About a year ago I was talking to some of my residents (I was an RA for two years) about their classes when two of them, Rob and Lucas, presented me with an interesting conjecture. Rob and Lucas claimed that 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +…. =  -1/12. I was not convinced, but the boys set about demonstrating the mathematical veracity of their claim and eventually succeeded, and down the rabbit hole I fell.

It turns out that the sum presented to me by Rob and Lucas has a name. It’s called the Ramanujan summation and it’s not so much a sum in the traditional sense as it is a method of assigning a numerical value to an infinite divergent series which is important if you’re interested in studying such series. I am most definitely not interested and if you are, then now is the time to leave this corner of the Internet and find a more mathematically informed one. What I became interested in was not infinite series, but the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan who developed the Ramanujan summation.

It turns out that Srinivasa Ramanujan was a really interesting guy and I don't mean footnote interesting. I mean "this guy's life could be a Hollywood movie" interesting. Ramanujan was born in 1887 in colonial India. He excelled at but did not enjoy primary or secondary school and flunked out of two different colleges before living in extreme poverty while independently pursuing mathematics. Ramanujan’s work began to draw attention from other Indian mathematicians, but there were doubts about his real abilities.

It was in 1913 that Ramanujan’s life took a fateful turn that would ensure his mathematical legacy would long outlive him. In a nine-page letter, Ramanujan wrote to renowned British mathematician G.H. Hardy, a professor at Cambridge. Ramanujan sought validation of his mathematical theories and abilities, but Hardy was skeptical at first, wondering if Ramanujan was a fraud. However, Hardy came around as he further studied Ramanujan’s work. Ramanujan’s letter to Hardy included some rediscoveries of mathematical theorems that were new to Ramanujan but old to the western mathematical world, but some of them were wholly new and incredibly innovative.

Hardy wrote back to Ramanujan, which resulted in Ramanujan’s travel to England to study under and work with Hardy and his colleagues at Cambridge.  Ramanujan died tragically at age 32 after several years of battling mental and physical illness, but in those three decades he produced over 3000 original theorems and his work remains invaluable to modern mathematicians. Hardy once remarked that his collaboration with Ramanujan was “the one romantic incident of my life.”

Ramanujan has been on my mind a lot lately because he drives home an important point for me. Genius can come from anywhere and everywhere. Ramanujan was gifted not only with incredible mathematical talent, but also with a set of highly fortunate circumstances that allowed him to share his talent with the world. Many students who are just as intelligent and innovative are not given such a chance. That is why the work of Teach for America and education professionals across the country and world is so important. Just as Ramanujan’s incredible work on infinite series could have remained locked away in the mind of a poor mathematician from Madras, the keys to curing cancer or reversing climate change or achieving peace in the Middle East could remain locked away in the mind of a student in a failing school in the Bronx or central LA or rural Mississippi. It’s up to everyone to ensure that that is not the case. Certainly the world owed Ramanujan better 100 years ago and certainly we owe our students better today.

How Did I End Up Here?

More than one year ago, as a junior at Ohio State, I began my application for Teach for America's 2015 teacher corps. As a political science major, teaching wasn't necessarily what I had always imagined doing. With a forecasted graduation in spring 2015, I had previously imagined that I would launch my career as a low-level staffer on a presidential campaign for the 2016 election. There were a lot of exciting names being tossed around as potential candidates for the 2016 cycle and, more exciting for me, it seemed like this might be the best chance America had seen to elect a woman. Yet somehow even with my excitement at the prospect of being part of a ground-breaking campaign, I lacked a degree of certainty. There was still something pulling me away from this path.

That was when I received an email from a campus recruiter for TFA. The early admission deadline was fast approaching. TFA had always been in my periphery as a post-graduate option. I knew that one day I wanted to go into policy work or politics, and I knew that education was the most important issue to me. What ultimately influenced my decision to apply, however, was the time I had spent during high school observing my mother's journey as a special education teacher. Through her eyes it became clear to me that legislators making laws about teaching without setting foot in front of a blackboard would always be a part of the problem more than they would be part of the solution. I knew then that I didn't want to be one of those legislators and the best way to avoid that outcome was to teach, to figure out for myself how government and society can better support teachers AND students instead of a viewing them as opposing forces. So I took a leap of faith and applied to teach.

The application process was a long one, but the advantage for me was that the time and energy demanded of me during this process helped me to realize how much I wanted to this. As a friend put it, he hadn't been sold on me as a teacher until he saw how much passion I was approaching this application with. That passion convinced me, too. By the time May rolled around and I was notified of my admission, I knew that applying had been the right choice.

Then, a bombshell was dropped. I had ranked TFA's regional placements as soon as I was informed of my admission, but it wasn't until a week or two later that I received my official regional placement, something that was more or less immutable. I had agreed to go almost anywhere that I was needed when I ranked my regions, with one or two exceptions based on budget, but in my ranking I had placed a priority on the kind of environment and distance to family with regions in California, Texas, and the Midwest ranking near the top of my list. I was eagerly awaiting a placement decision and crossing my fingers for my first choice of Sacramento when I logged onto to the TFA admission portal to find the biggest shock of my life waiting for me: Mississippi.

That's right. Mississippi. Tree hugging, city girl heads to the heart of the Deep South. It sounded like a cheesy coming of age story, or worse, a horror movie. For a brief period, I let fear get the best of me and thought about pursuing another option. After all, Mississippi wasn't even close to any family and it just wasn't what I had pictured, but I did some research and it turned out Mississippi had a lot to offer (I'll get to that in a future post). Ultimately, what assuaged my doubts was something a TFA recruiter had said at some point during the process that has stuck with me ever since: "Remember, it's not Teach for San Francisco or Teach for Chicago or Teach for Delaware; it's Teach for America." I knew she was right so if Mississippi needed me then it was to Mississippi I would go.

But Mississippi wasn't the last curveball to come my way. The next would arrive in November just before I was asked to make an official commitment to teach for two years. It was time for my subject placement. Going into the process, I was anticipating a placement in the humanities. Surely, a person with political science would be teaching social studies or English, maybe even Spanish so naturally I was a little surprised when I once again logged onto the TFA admission portal to see the words "high school mathematics" waiting for me. How did that happen? Well, the best I can guess is this: I'm a political science major, but on the road to that major I've also majored in, at one point or another, biology, journalism, computer science and engineering, and physics. What I really wanted to do in college was learn a little bit about everything, but, as it turns out, "Bachelor of Science in Everything" is not a degree you can get at Ohio State so I ended up with my first love: politics. However, on the long and meandering path to a degree in political science I had completed a good amount of math classes and by "good" I mean a handful more than the average social sciences major. That meant I was more qualified to teach math than a lot of TFA's applicants and the need for math teachers, I'm sure you've heard, is astronomically high. For an hour or two, my commitment to this idea of teaching again began to waver, but I woke up the next morning and just knew that this was still right. I was still meant to be teaching even if it was the last subject I expected in the last place I expected. 

Over the next few months I would make my commitment official and begin the challenging work of dusting off my mathematical knowledge in order to pass the Praxis, the required certification exam for teachers in Mississippi. I took the test in January and am happy to report that, by some sort of miracle, I passed. Now, in addition to preparing to teach math, I'm also preparing for the move to such a foreign place. That transition is part of what I hope to document here and I hope you'll enjoy the journey with me.