When I arrive, I glance in and see so many faces that look like mine. I am ashamed, but I bury it and force myself to walk in. The desk attendant takes my information and then assigns me to a tutor named Zach, a white boy from Rhode Island. I can tell by the way Zach coldly shakes my hand, devoid of all warmth and understanding, and the way he doesn’t make real eye contact, that he isn’t going to be able to help me. My RWP sensor starts beeping.

“All right, so you’re here to get some help with calculus,” Zach says. “Awesome. That’s a biggie ’round these parts. Let me start off by asking you a few questions. Do you have a solid understanding of basic arithmetic, algebra, and functional equations? You’ll need to have a good foundation in those to really grasp calculus.”

I want to tell him I don’t understand anything about math outside of simple addition and subtraction and that my brain doesn’t relate to numbers at all. The words are my friend, the numbers my enemy. I can’t even do long-form division. I started falling behind in middle school, when I also had a teacher who didn’t know how to teach, and I never caught up. I made it through most of my high school math classes by cheating and doing extra credit. I can see in his empty Rhode Island eyes that he won’t understand.

“All right, why don’t we start with this equation. Can you tell me the order of operations? Where should we start?”

I stare down at the collection of words and numbers. Words and numbers should never be mixed together, I think to myself.

“Umm, maybe we should start by multiplying these two,” I guess.

“Solid effort, but we’re actually going to divide this side first and then we’ll multiply. OK, so what’s this divided by this?”

Even though it’s two small numbers being divided, 32 and 4, I still punch it into the calculator and report the answer to Zach. He writes it down and then shows me how to finish the equation.

“OK, so for this next one, we have to do some algebra. If two expressions are equal for all values of their variables, the equation is called an identity. Does that make sense?”

I nod my head, but I don’t understand anything he just said.

“Now, another important concept. For every x value, the slope is always zero. Therefore, the derivative of a constant function is zero. We gotta get that down before we can move on. So considering that, can you work this one out?”