Kimberlee K.

When I was in 8^th grade, my geometry teacher assigned our class to create polyhedrons, which are three dimensional shapes whose sides are comprised of polygons (triangles, squares, pentagons, etc.)

It was one of our final projects of the fall semester, and one that required a lot of calculations (and glue) to pull off.

I was obsessed with monkeys at the time. I frequented Pac Sun looking for new releases in the Paul Frank collection, had orangutan stuffed animals hanging from each of my bed posts, and drew monkeys on every piece of scrap paper I could find. So naturally, I decided that my polyhedron would also be a monkey.

But I didn’t want to do any of the math.

I’d always considered myself a smart kid. I got good grades and did all of my homework, I was always noted a pleasure to have in class and took pride in being liked by all of my teachers. Algebra, the big, looming math milestone that many of my parents’ friends had warned me about growing up, saying things like, “wait until math has letters,” had been easy for me. I liked the formulas and the constant solving for x. It all made sense. But geometry was a different story.

Geometry was all memorization and rules. It was paragraphs and shapes, words and angles and laws. I hated it instantly and my motivation tanked. I was aggressively 13 and fatigued by puberty and life—geometry seemed pointless.

So when the time came to put together my polyhedron, I thought I could shortcut it. My friends and I agreed to do the assignment together. We went to Michaels to get supplies, and then set ourselves up in different corners of the room to work on our respective projects.

My friends had notebooks full of math: numbers and angles and calculations. They started measuring and cutting. They organized their shapes, preparing to glue them together into the polyhedron they’d drawn ahead of time.

Meanwhile, I sat surrounded by piles of Styrofoam and construction paper, disappointed that the idea in my head wouldn’t materialize just because I thought of it. I watched my friends make notes and check off calculations while I applied pressure to a Styrofoam sphere, waiting for the hot glue adhering it to a Styrofoam cylinder to dry.

“The sides have to be shapes, remember?” my friend Reina said politely.

Not only was I trying to cheat my way through the project, but I was missing the point entirely. The challenge was to make the shapes fit together and form a three-dimensional object. I was making a sculpture of a monkey.

I left with absolutely nothing done and approached my dad in tears, both worried that I wouldn’t finish in time, and frustrated that I still didn’t understand the project or how to accomplish it.

We went back to the store, bought foam board, and started doing the math.

We decided to make the object a kind of scrapbook, an autobiography. I cut out pictures and glued them to miscellaneous pieces, and then held them in my hand as my dad began to glue, first forming a bowl and then arcing up to meet at the top. It felt like holding a house of cards. My hands were tense, not wanting to drop it but not wanting to squeeze too hard.

We finished the Sunday night before it was due.

For the rest of the year, the polyhedrons hung from the ceiling in our math class, every so often swaying when the air conditioning kicked on. Mine hung in direct eyeline from my seat, above the head of the smartest girl in class. I often stared at it, watching it slowly turn. The red, blue and yellow foam board was vibrant, and I liked when the LEDs reflected off the triangle cut photographs of me and my family.

Most of the sides were left blank, which seems fitting. I was thirteen, most curious about what it might be like to be fourteen. I didn’t know much about who I was or wanted to be or could become. Though to be fair, if I were to recreate the project today, I think there would still be many sides yet to be filled in.

And isn’t that something?

Isn’t it amazing to realize that there is always a side to ourselves we have yet to discover?

Isn’t it wonderful to be given the opportunity to learn about ourselves for the rest of our lives?

Isn’t it a privelege to be given challenges (like building polyhedrons) to learn what we are capable of?

The beginning of a New Year often puts pressure on us to become more, do more, be more, but I have been trying to think about it as an opportunity rather than a requirement.

How lucky we are to continue to learn more about who we can be, what we can do, all we can accomplish and endure and overcome and experience and marvel at.

Thirteen-year-old me would be shocked at what we’ve learned, achieved, and discovered. She would be shocked that we passed geometry. But I also think she’d be so proud of the person we are today, and she’d be impatient to know what else there is for us to find and learn, and so am I!

So here’s to all of the discovery yet to come.

Here’s to filling in the sides of my (now metaphorical) polyhedron little by little, and here’s to you filling in yours. Lucky us!