Timed multiplication drills. Remember those fucking things?

    A recurring terror for grades 2 through 6, each worksheet had a grid with 20 math problems, and students were given 60 seconds to complete as many as they could. I remember the panic and excitement that rose at the announcement, the feeling of resignment, because if you weren’t prepared you were fucked, and there was nothing you could do to save yourself except take the test anyway and hope for a miracle. I was inconsistent at these things. On a good day I would finish 18 problems, and on rough days I barely made it to 6. My performance varied wildly according to hundreds of tiny factors that had absolutely nothing to do with math skills. I was either hit with a powerful surge of hero lightning that catapulted me to the finish line, or I was totally and utterly abandoned by fate. There was no middle ground in this quest for glory. Despite the anxiety of the whole ritual, I miss something about it. 

    In Kengo Hanazawa’s I am a Hero, a mentally ill small-time mangaka is thrown headfirst into a zombie apocalypse requiring levels of fortitude to stay alive that he’s frankly nowhere near capable of. He’s hallucinatory, easily beguiled, and a terrible coward. But there’s no denying that he’s a hero in some sense of the word. Pelted by terrifying obstacles, he consistently does something. Is that too pathetic a definition of heroism? A hero, when faced with an obstacle, does something? Perhaps not a definition, but a defining quality. Even if it’s not heroic, it is categorically gutsy, when faced with any urgent hurdle (zombie, times table, etc.) to say fuck it, we ball. That we ball can mean any number of things, but it will always mean make an attempt. It’s more about immediacy than guaranteed effectiveness. 

    There is another rule to the multiplication drills, which is... unfortunate. I’ve always disagreed with this rule, but when I was a child the disagreement was spite-born, whereas now I disagree with what the rule represents. If you attempt a problem and get it wrong, half a point is deducted from the total instead of the usual +0 for an incomplete problem. In other words, you are actively punished for trying and failing. Any reasonable second grader can come to the conclusion that it’s safer to do nothing than to do something wrong and lose half a point. If you had literally zero idea what you were doing and you left the whole worksheet blank, you would receive a better score than someone who attempted (but, alas, failed) the whole thing. A reward for knowing when to give up.

    In a more exciting world, this rule would have been gasoline for the flames of additional dramatic guessing. But in our class, it was fodder for a gaggle of eight-year-old defeatests who resigned themselves to the easy problems, the x1’s and x0’s, and ne’er made eye contact with the x12’s, which were for all the better people who were already good at things. Or at least, that’s  how it felt to me. My approach to the times tables varied daily: I’d wait for the worksheet to drift into my waiting open palms before deciding if I was going balls-to-the-wall, or if I was going to throw in the towel. But I always had a plan by the time my pencil touched the paper. I savored that moment of uncertainty before the stopwatch started. Was I going to be a hero today? Or was I going to be a coward?

    The coin toss of HAM vs. home is effervescent in NBC’s The Good Place. Eleanor Shellstrop, a Very Bad Person, is bamboozled into believing she’s in the Good Place when she’s really in the Bad one. After much hooplah and bargaining between demons and judges and whatnot, Eleanor and her ragtag team of cosmic losers face an obvious choice: try to get to heaven wanyway, even though it’s literally impossible and has never been done and failure will result in eternal torture... or don’t. Try, or don’t. Try... or don’t. Eleanor begins this journey on team HAM – going hard because she has nothing to preserve and no “home” to retreat to. Her timorous companion Chidi would always rather opt for “go home,” his debilitating indecision leaving every metaphorical box blank, but no penalty points accrued. With a 50% HAM success rate on a scale of -10 - 20, and a 100% home success rate on a scale of 0 - 0, what should we do? Answer the question, or leave it blank? Try, or not? Is there even a “try?” What was Yoda on about when he said that shit about “do or do not?” Here’s what I think: Yoda must be a times table hero. A times table hero who has an equal chance of succeeding or failing at their given endeavor will always go for it, because in their mind, “there is no try, only do or do not.” Potential gains outweigh definitive drawbacks. Much like a game show contestant choosing between maybe having $1k or definitely having $0, there’s nothing to lose but your inhibitions.

    My mere relational existence to multiplication drills is proof that “hero” and “coward” aren’t nouns as much as “heroism” and “cowardice” are verbs. I was still figuring out what game I was playing, what sort of player I was going to be. Each day, I was electric with potential. It must still be inside me somewhere, that current, but I miss the surge of energy I got from these drills. They were forceful, frequent, low-stakes challenges to my developing personality. An opportunity to say fuck it, we ball.

    Wouldn’t we all be better people if the world was full of high-octane pop quizzes? I asked myself just now, before realizing that it is, and the stopwatch it being pressed right now, and our pencil is about to hit the paper, and we are not done deciding between heroism and cowardice, but it is too late, and we must go one way, or go nowhere, and we must do it right... right... right...

Now.