That summer, we each took entrance exams for the high school we wanted, I got into arts.
Serious studying had been done, but at the cost of inhumane stress. We, the professor's re-sitters, all scored over an eight, and with a 9.80 in Romanian, I got into anywhere I wanted. In high school, I did math again with joy in my stomach. The respect I initially received was generated, paradoxically, by the professor's name.
At the first class, seeing her enter, we all screamed with joy, because Irini Papanicolau was assigned to 9B Visual Arts, a recent arrival in the city, a total lady, who had come all the way from Greece, who spoke Romanian perfectly, with a slight accent, I think she had been married to a Romanian, and who was so radiantly Western, that you couldn't help but want to be near her and listen to her, even if she whispered numbers. The 9A Music class ended up with the high school's longtime teacher. God had truly blessed us. She was so beautiful that I promised myself I would name a child after her, and I actually did.
She started her lesson by announcing that in the first few weeks we would delve deeply into the set of natural numbers and what operations could be performed within it. That it is infinite, but its infinity is smaller than the infinity of other sets of numbers, in which it is included. Because we were an art class, she started from the premise that we hadn't done much mathematics. Her expectations were minimal, so she asked if anyone knew which letter this set is denoted by. Haha. Everyone knew which letter it's denoted by. Then, if we knew how to mathematically state its definition; and here no hands were raised anymore. She then wrote it on the board and asked if anyone could read in human language what those symbols meant, and then I perfectly remembered a scene from the beginning of middle school. Without having taught this, the math prof called the boy from the last row to the board and ordered him:student Iacob, write the condition for the existence of N. Student Iacob, as if by magic, knew, and wrote that sequence. Because I was struck by amazement at how smart Iacob was, if he was born with something like that in his brain, it stuck with me too. I raised my hand and said that Set N is the ordered sequence, n, n+1, of non-negative integers that can be counted. Or something like that.
Ah, what's your name? Răvnic Maria Cosmina. Oh, what a beautiful name! Dear Cosmina, what school do you come from? From General School 3. Aaaa, wow, you studied math with Master B, correct? Extraordinary, what a chance, what a chance! You certainly know this definition from him.
Well, I knew this definition from student Iacob, but at that moment nothing was more important than having earned my first name in the new group! I had a first name! From this point to teaming up with Dana so that this sublime teacher could hold her classes with someone, until the moment I became a kind of student Iacob (to the despair of the teacher, I could translate equations for Coturbaș, because I had younger siblings; poor her, she couldn't, she didn't have such infantile language) and to get a ten 'for pedagogy,' as she argued. From that to leadership was only one step.
Irini saved the Cosmos in my heart. The beautiful Cosmos, as she called it, the perfection created by God for which numbers were just an efficient translator, able to fit on a notebook, in a more restricted space than an endless literary novel. But which describe His world just as well. She showed us pictures of the center of a sunflower as examples and wrote on the board the equation that creates that algorithm and dictates that form to nature. And many others. Just to see, to dream. To dream.
Out of love, I always did my minimal homework and helped those who wanted to do theirs during breaks. She had a grade inspection, and she wouldn't have been able to prove that she had ever taught integrals in art class if Dana and I hadn't always had our hands up and filled the board. She kept us at straight tens, at the level at which academic subjects are taught in vocational high schools – here we were a ten. I never told her that I came from among the master's re-sitters.
(to be continued)
Cosmina Dragomir
Photography by Noemia Prada
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