22/11/2002 - 10:44 p.m.

Account for me, says staring Equus.

I think I did well on my math test today. I really think I did well. Math has always been a peculiar subject with me. I've been doing difficult maths since I was young. My father tells me of "games" played with me at age two involving blocks. He would lay out five blocks on the floor, ask me to close my eyes, take away two, and ask me how many there were. At the age of two, I could tell him that there were three on the floor in front of me, but also that he had two behind his back. According to my psychology class, children are not supposed to be able to grasp that things not visible to them still exist until age six. They are not supposed to understand negetive numbers until age ten. I was two.

And then I went to school and, like my left and right, was taught to understand things in a different way than I had learnt on my own. I had learned my left and right early on and knew them. My Kindergarten teacher taught left and right to the class by standing up in front of us, left hand upraised, and instructing us that that hand was our right. Yet another psychological problem- children are not supposed to be able to mirror image things until much later. I, however, could, and can remember being puzzled that she didn't know her left from her right. So I was never sure which to do, hold up the hand she named, or hold up the hand she indicated to be the hand she named. To this goddamned day I have trouble with left and right; stage direction is a living nightmare.

Oh, how this relates to math class. I was always able to have these things worked out for myself in a way that made sense to me, and by the time they got round to teaching me, I had no idea what they were talking about. In my eyes, they made a super easy task all the more difficult, but it had also been drilled into me to do what teacher wanted (because otherwise they called up your parents to say they were worried she wasn't catching on, she wasn't doing anything the way the other children were), so I had to.

This has put me in a dreadful muddle about math. I never know whether to do it the way I think it would be done easiest, or the way I've been taught to do it. So usually I just do something half assedly in there and fail miserably. On those standardised tests, I would do better on the sections of math I had never taught to do than on those I had.

Listening to Equus backstage tonight, it struck me again. The sacrifice of children to the Normal. That's what psychology is, it's taking passion, individuality, the fundamental uniqueness that everyone is born with, and taking it all away; turning it to plastic. That's what school is, it's just child psychology at work. It's taking minds that can do things and changing them into machines that work the way we tell them to.

The man that invented the computer, not the fellow from ISU, but another one- he turned up late to his college math class one day. On the board were five problems. He assumed they were the homework and copied them down to do that night. He completed three out of the five and the next class period approached the professor.

"That homework you gave us was really hard. I worked on it for hours and I only got three of them done, I can't think how to do the other two. Would you show me?"

The professor looked at him, took the paper, checked it over and said: "That wasn't homework. Those were five famous problems. Famous because no one had yet been able to solve them. You just did more than half of them."

He just did it. He didn't know they were supposed to be impossible. If he'd known they were "impossible" he never would have tried them and I wouldn't be writing this here now because of that. He used everything he already had himself. Sure, maybe originally he was taught how to add and subtract and multiply, but for this guy, he had everything he needed to solve those problems himself. You can't say he was taught how to do them, because he wasn't. He just did it.

I believe in heuristics. Through trial and error you can learn something. You can teach yourself things. Romantic poets, Renaissance artists, The Beatles learning guitar, Lincoln reading: these guys didn't have anybody teaching them things, they worked it out on their own. Nobody told them "you've got to do it this way or no way at all", and so they flourished. They found their own styles and ideas and theories.

We don't need to be taught anything, we need only to be given the desire to learn, the wish to find out all about something, anything. Everybody wants to know something. Just give us the tools and let us go to work, stop getting in the way.

Alan Strang's passion may have been a destructive passion, but Dr. Dysart is right; it was his own passion, his own pain. He created it for himself, created it because he knew nothing else. That was his world, one that had not given him the tools. With the right things, he could've been something else. Instead, he was simply a freaky kid in a lot of pain.

Don't tell us how it should be, let us work it out for ourselves. And when we find what it is for us, let that be an end to it. Don't drug us and change us and tell us what to think and how to live. Those are chains we can live without.

So I may yet fail psychology, but I'll be passing math.