By Paula Yoo

It was a typical Sunday night for my dad and I, going over my math homework.

I was in the fourth grade and prided myself on being a math whiz, just like my dad. Math was easy. All I had to do was memorize formulas.

The surface area of a rectangle? A=bxh.

Area of a circle? A=?r2

Volume of a cylinder? V=?r2h

But things got tricky when my dad decided I had done enough memorizing. It was time to understand the reasons behind the formulas, he told me.

He started with the formula for the area of a triangle. A=1/2bh. He drew rectangles and squares on my notebook and asked me to find the triangle.

I’d draw a dotted line, splitting the corners to create the hidden triangle. “Good,” my dad said. “So what’s the height of that triangle?”

Suddenly, the sight of all those triangles scribbled across my notebook overwhelmed me. I panicked. I couldn’t see its height. I had no idea what my dad was talking about. Besides, what was the big deal? “All I need is the formula,” I complained. “I don’t need to know why the formula works.”

And thus began the infamous Battle Over the Height of the Triangle that would make me hate math, especially geometry, forever. I hated that my dad was so stubborn. I hated that he would not let me leave until I found the height of every single triangle he had sketched. Who cares? I thought, trying not to cry. WHO CARES ABOUT THESE STUPID TRIANGLES?
I finally faked it, nodding my head while my dad explained the reasons behind A=1/2bh, pretending that I understood every word. But all I really understood were two things:

1. I hated triangles.
2. I hated the look of disappointment in my father’s eyes as he realized I would never be an engineer.

Of course, looking back, my dad wasn’t disappointed. Frustrated? Sure. But that night, I felt this incredible pressure to be extra good at math in order to avoid what I mistakenly interpreted as disappointment in my dad’s eyes.

Over the years, the Battle Over the Height of the Triangle soon led to the Conflict of Absolute Values in the seventh grade and finally to the horrific Civil War of Common Derivatives and Integrals during my senior year of high school.

Words were my salvation as I saw my math grades plummet while my English grades skyrocketed. (This is also known as an “inverse relationship” where one variable decreases as another increases. See? At least I remember SOMETHING from my math days …)

I became a writer instead of an engineer. But I never could have become a successful writer without my father’s help. Even though he never had to tutor me in English or help me write an essay, my dad’s stubborn insistence that I understand the WHY behind the math formulas spilled into my writing. I questioned every book that I read. I wondered WHY the author chose his or her words to describe a character or place or theme. I never took anything for granted with my own writing — every phrase, every word was parsed down to the letter, because once I knew the reason behind every single little detail, the bigger picture would emerge.
Just like those mysterious triangles hidden inside the squares and rectangles my dad had drawn, their heights rising far beyond what my naked eye could see. Even though my dad was not a writer, I now realize how creative he was, how he was able to see beyond the boundaries set by these lines.