There’s something so wholesome about watching your college calculus professor (who usually gives us problems that require a little too much knowledge and digging, such as Newton’s Law of Cooling and the body temperature of the average dead person) write the equation 1+1 on the chalkboard (yes, chalk) in hopes that a student will answer.

But, as is typical of this class I’m shamefully a part of, no one did.

Well, I guess I repeated the answer half a dozen times in my head, largely out of disbelief.

It’s two.

1+1 is 2.

But still, no one responded.

This has got to be a mistake.

Convinced there was some hidden element to his seemingly obvious equation, I sat and pondered before speaking up. “It’s two.” 

It was upon speaking up that I realized what I had done was a mistake. The sheer excitement like that of a groundbreaking discovery exuded by my professor was enough to convince me that the earth is flat, if that had been the message he had wanted to portray.

“It’s two!” he exclaimed. “Twoo!” He was basically saying, “Can you believe it? The answer is (by some mystical external force) two.” 

Mhm…

He’d repeat this number a couple of times, perhaps a couple dozen times, ingraining this seemingly insignificant number in my mind as he gazed into each and every pair of eyes that wasn’t looking down into the endless void of some device (oh, how I regretted sitting at the front of the class), and eventually, when the feeling struck, I was forced to hold in my laugh.

That’s a way to end the week, I thought. Never did I think I’d smile so much in math.