The Discipline of Dentistry

In the first act of the macabre rock musical Little Shop of Horrors, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman inserted one of off-Broadway’s most side-splitting numbers in which the character Orin Scrivello begins by revealing the sadistic childhood thrills that led his mother to believe him uniquely suited for maybe the most contemptible of all professions, the mad science, civilization’s most abject excuse for personhood. In short, he became a dentist. Specifically, he sings of his “talent for causing things pain,” and despite his patients’ distress, they “pay him to be inhumane.” Seriously, the song is hilarity itself, and highlights a cultural aversion too common for a single ounce of the satire to be misunderstood. Somehow everyone gets the joke. And why? Because all dentists are sadists, of course. Is it even a true satire to begin with, or merely an exaggerated refraction of the truth? In light of my own blatant love of satire, let me offer that
it is most likely just an accusatorial projection of a culture-wide phobia. I know few people who don’t respond to the notion of going to the dentist with some anxiety, while some go aquiver with outright fear at the mere thought of a dental chair or dental instruments, with the dentist a veritable Vincent Price or Bela Lugosi, and but for a few gargoyles, some cobwebbing, and a creak in the door, the office might make a fair House of Wax or Dracula's castle, or better yet, a Frankenstein's laboratory. (Note to self: avoid any dental exam room with giant electrical coils and a family of Erlenmeyer flasks.) Honestly now, is any caretaker of human health viewed with greater suspicion of being secretly mad or of taking some hidden pleasure in dispensing trauma or relishing, in the deepest antechambers of his heart, the freakish horror his work engenders? What makes dentists so cheerful anyway? When they walk in the room, squat down on that tiny swiveling barstool, and smile from ear to ear, what dark and sinister pleasure is lurking in the mind whose education required such a sober interest in the extractor or its maniacal cousin the drill?

But all joking aside, I can only imagine the kind of personality that can study a dental extractor with total sincerity and then attempt its use unfettered by even the slightest empathetic qualm. It definitely takes a certain kind of person to be a dentist, I think. But imagine, for a moment, a world without that person. The first order of business is survival, of course, and beyond the basic requirements of safety and shelter, the most immediate need is the consumption of food and water. So, beyond the expertise of a physician who ensures general health, what could be more essential than the work of the dentist, who ensures the health of the mouth and teeth so that eating is even possible? And yet, who is more reviled in the provision of health care? Who commands the hairs on the back of the neck or the fluids of the stomach like the dentist, whose mere presence is quite enough to tip the balance of the mind and stir its flavors of tension and distress to the fore?

Despite my own personal aversion, however, I must admit that the greater part of me understands the dentist’s situation, because my profession is often regarded with similar repugnance, as the education field seems to have a cultural equivalent, its own dentist of sorts. Not the principal, nor the school secretary, the truancy officer, or yard duty. Not the requisitely androgynous female gym teacher nor the vice principal who stalks the halls and restrooms hunting contraband. No, it is the math teacher. Who else? No other role in the American high school is susceptible to such pandemic scorn. Like the dentist, math teachers are often seen through a lens of projected menace and sinister intent, as if taking some quiet delight in the agony and frustration induced by their subject. And yet, truth be told, I’ve impressed upon my students many times that, despite the importance of math, nothing they learn in school is more important than the ability to read and write. So, if we 
analogize medicine with pedagogy, I believe the English teacher might best be seen as the general practitioner, who provides the most vital basis for quality of life. The other members of the faculty have their respective specialties by which they might easily correlate with various specialists, but the math teacher is certainly the dentist. And the reason is simple, for what subject is more widely regarded with distaste or outright contempt than mathematics? Throughout my adult life, a new acquaintance, once given the news of my profession, frequently utters some unmistakable brand of sneer, sigh, or groan. Regardless of people’s aptitudes, it is rarely met with approval or enthusiasm. The most a good math teacher can hope for, much of the time, is objective tolerance.

I’m reminded of a season eight episode of Seinfeld called “The Yada Yada” in which Jerry’s infuriation at dentist Tim Whatley’s conversion to Judaism solely to expand his comedic repertoire leads to a hilarious counterpoint in which Jerry himself is labeled by Kramer et al. as an “anti-dentite.” What would, then, be apropos to describe the aspersive animosity leveled at math teachers, who don’t actually have their own schools, as dentists do? Are we the objects of rabid “anti-calculism”? Whatever the invective, a deep-rooted prejudice seems to lurk in the human heart. Algebra, geometry, and trigonometry all seem to offer satisfactory comparisons to the bloodletting of a root canal or tooth extraction, with all their associated terror. The hysterical phobia of drilling, crown and filling replacement, and even the basic cleaning and scraping of a hygienist seem on equal footing with the efforts of a math teacher trying to impart order of operations, the factoring of polynomials, or the properties of logarithmic and exponential functions. Our periodontal probe, dental syringe, bite block (or “mouth prop”), and host of dental burs that adorn the drill are the likes of equations, proofs, word problems, formulas, set theory, vectors, limits, graphs, charts, rates of change, complex numbers, and the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra. For some, the mere mention of math brings an immediate shudder, for others, an acute attack of nausea. I admit to have sensed, at times, in the eyes of my students, the very bedlam of mind that consumed Jimmy Stewart’s character and was so innovatively captured through the use of the dolly zoom in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Something about the study of geometric proof or matrices and determinants makes one feel as if standing at the edge of some great abyss. And like the occupant of a dental chair, the student of mathematics often feels like a hopeless acrophobic stretched above the abyss by a thin and feeble thread. And the math teacher begins to feel that all he or she need do is utter some demented chuckle, and the lunacy conveyed would be nothing more than any student might otherwise expect.

But you know, the truth is that people don’t like dentists because they don’t like dentistry, and math teachers are often disliked for the same reason. Every good math teacher, like every good dentist, must eventually come to terms with this antipathy. People object to math, and so, as the agent of its delivery, the math teacher naturally incurs a comparable contempt. The discipline of the profession, then, involves not only doing your job well, but also accepting the stigma of being characteristically linked to something so widely disliked. And why is it so disliked? Well…

Math is tremendously difficult, because our minds are so contextualized, which is why it’s typically taught by example. And yet, despite any catalogue of examples and creative teaching methods, like caretakers chasing medicine with a spoonful of sugar, at the end of the day, we’re trying to give students something that’s just very hard to swallow. The challenge, then, is to stabilize the delivery so that students don’t get so frustrated that they forfeit the endurance necessary to develop good critical thinking and problem solving skills. A great part of the challenge of mathematics is to cultivate a spirit of risk-taking and the ability to persevere despite repeated failure. Seriously, math is a head game. It’s a trip. It’s hard enough to train one’s mind to think objectively, and objectivity is never so pure as in the use of logic. Most people tend to view math as being all about numbers, and they get frustrated when asked to embrace the abstraction of variables or the symbols that represent complex thoughts and operations. Actually, while math is surely the language of science and technology, however it may be applied, principally, it is a science in itself, the science of logic, to be exact, a study of pure thought. It is, in many ways, the only universal language, and despite its applicability and capacity for contextualization, it is essentially abstract. And how better to demonstrate pure thought than through the use of symbols and the exploration of quantity? The properties of numbers and arithmetic, then, become the fundamental vocabulary of this study, which is every bit an exploratory science as chemistry, biology, or physics. Unlike these sciences, however, which rely on observation and experimentation to unfold, the potential to expand our understanding of logic lies solely in the realm of the mind. In mathematics, we are asked to think on a level so universally unfettered by context, setting, and experience, that the brain almost starts to run in circles, grasping wildly for a frame of reference it can’t find. In the nakedness of this experience, the attempt to learn this thought science tries our intellectual endurance like no other academic discipline. Other subjects—even the all-important English—don’t even come close, really. To quote my colleague Sally Roberts, “I’m an English teacher. I draw connections between things that aren’t related.” She was joking of course, but the humor points to the occasionally strained capacity for objectivity in the literary curriculum, beyond, of course, the mechanics of grammar and reliance upon a notable canon of widely accepted interpretations of the reading assignments. For example, Shakespeare’s first seventeen sonnets are often referred to in academic circles as the “procreation sonnets,” since they seem to recommend marriage and family to an unknown male character as an affront to the onslaught of time. And yet, with sufficient evidence from the sonnets, one might reasonably contradict this claim. You might be thought ridiculous by much of the academic community, but you might still survive as a student of English. You can’t do that in math. Configured, as it is, on the basis of precision, as opposed to interpretation, it’s just too rigorously defined. And because logic is so counterintuitive to the contextualized nature of human thought, it stretches us beyond any mental comfort zone in which we tend to live.

So why teach math? What draws a teacher to embrace such a harrowing discipline? Any educator will tell you that a good teacher doesn’t merely have a passion for his or her subject matter, but also loves to work with young people. So, to be a math teacher, you have to like math, and you have to like kids. And you have to be okay as the agent of something most kids tend not to like. What made me do it, then? What made me join this ill-received profession? Two things, really: Chuck Gustafson and the joy of being a learner myself. Let’s start with Chuck (or "Mr. Gus," as many of his students affectionately referred to him), who was my teacher for geometry in tenth grade as well as algebra 2 in eleventh. He wasn’t just a good math teacher. He inspired me, particularly through the clarity of thought and simplicity with which he uncovered a variety of complex mathematical ideas. Furthermore, he had the uncanny ability to blend this task with his own captivating brand of storytelling, which had the effect of making the curriculum even more accessible. I loved his classes, and I loved him. So when, in my mid-twenties, it came time to change careers and I considered teaching math, the iconic impression of Mr. Gus fed into my aspirations the requisite heroism, a brand of integrity, charisma, and success I might at least seek to emulate. What’s more, a few years later, I actually had the opportunity to embrace him as a colleague! When one of the Geometry teachers at my school went on maternity leave, Mr. Gus, at the recommendation of several staff and faculty members (myself included, of course), stepped into the position as a long-term sub for the remainder of the semester. Not only that, but I had shared rooms with the teacher he replaced. So, for a short time, I enjoyed the honor of teaching the same subject at the same school and sharing the same room as the man who had largely inspired the whole course of my career. It was a real treat, and I’ve always been thankful for such a rare blessing.

The second reason for my joining the ranks of those who teach math was, as I’ve stated, my own personal love of learning. Though few people seem to understand this connection, I found that being a better student of math made me, in turn, a better student of English—literature and poetry being among my greatest passions. Something about the mystique of math as insurmountable by so many of my peers (my own brother included, whose opinion fed this mystique considerably) pushed me to want to excel in it. And throughout my high school and college careers, I don’t believe I put so much time into any subject as I did mathematics. I often tell my students, I know I excelled at math not primarily due to a natural aptitude, but because I wanted so badly to understand what so many others found intellectually confounding. In truth, I wasn’t half so intuitive as I was driven, and I often make a point of stressing to my students that they’re looking at someone who put in the hours himself, who put the pencil to the paper and sweated the whole thing out for years and years, as opposed to someone who found it laughably easy and has no idea what it’s like to be in their shoes, wrestling night after night with something that seems repeatedly and characteristically elusive. And so, as I wrestled my own way through definitions, theorems, and properties, I began to see that applying these principles correctly required a complete understanding of every word and without reference to unnecessary or unjustified assumptions. In other words, I learned to read for detail, not just for scope, and when I applied this same practice to my reading of literature and poetry, my comprehension improved considerably. The connection is especially evident in the study of geometry, the “word math,” where axiomatic thought and statement analysis are revealed as the key not only to theorem building, but also to using nearly all mathematical structures accurately and tenably.

Now, this otherwise adequate congruity between dentistry and mathematics doesn’t completely hold water. No one ever asks a dentist why they need their teeth looked after. However, students of math are very fond of begging the question “Why should I have to learn this?” or “When are we ever gonna use this in real life?” I want to acknowledge here that a great many intelligent adults aren’t immune to such questions. Many, in fact, are very fond of criticizing the school systems for insisting on a curriculum that so many kids “don’t need.” To be fair, when asked these questions, as I have been numerous times in the classroom, I do entertain them long enough to answer clearly and honestly, which is to say just this: “I don’t know. I really don’t know how or when you’ll have to use this in your life, because I have no idea what you’ll do with your life. And furthermore, neither do you, for the most part.” And this is principally true. What we plan for ourselves in our youth is most always challenged and often transformed by maturity and experience. What students need to understand is that until college, school is not about specialization or fulfillment. The high school student is getting a classical education, a tour of the disciplines that provides them the foundations of cultural fluency, and whether they like it or not, math greatly expands their understanding of the world in which they live. However, in return for the concession of time spent addressing those questions, I always insist my students entertain my own response question, which is this: What makes you think that the only things worth knowing are those that benefit you personally? In other words, ask yourself why you’re asking the question to begin with, and you’ll quickly realize that it’s born out of a cultural climate that stresses personal fulfillment over community and progress, both of which depend heavily on the scope of one’s understanding about the world. It is deeply bred into our minds, whether we realize it or not, that a selfish devotion to our personal prosperity is exalted over every other potential motivation. And it is the responsibility of educators to deal with this as well.

Hence, the final prospect of an already arduous profession is convincing the student of the value of virtuous thought: charity; compassion; understanding; and the transformative joy and empowerment of learning, even learning things that don’t necessarily increase the size of your wallet. This is the hardest lesson to learn, and surely the most difficult to teach. And although I would all my students had the joy that brought me to be their teacher in the first place, were it part of my job to be liked, I should feel defeated the majority of the time. A dentist’s work has a conspicuous benefit, as clear to see as the benefit of one's next meal. And yet, how well do we value the nourishment of the mind and the spirit? What of the amplified perspective and potential for community and growth in a newly discovered idea? This is true wealth, personal and corporate; the splendor of civilization; and a liability of every teacher.