“I paid two hundred,” Miles whispered.
He expected a tomb of boredom. Instead, he found a strange kind of peace.
Miles had always considered himself a student of stories, not symbols. He could spend hours dissecting a novel’s theme or tracing a poem’s meter, but the moment he saw an equation like f(x) = x² + 3 , his brain would simply… stop. The letters looked foreign. The parentheses felt aggressive.
By Chapter 7 (quadratic equations), he had a system. He highlighted in yellow, wrote notes in the margins, and even started making flashcards. For the first time in his life, he didn’t hate math. He didn’t even fear it. He just read it, like any other text. college algebra by kaufmann
Defeated, Miles trudged back to his dorm and tossed the thick, blue-covered book onto his desk. Its cover showed a neat grid with a graceful curve—a parabola, he remembered, though he didn't know why it mattered. That night, unable to sleep, he cracked it open to Chapter 1: Basic Concepts.
That summer, he didn’t sell the book back. He kept it on his shelf, between Chaucer and Morrison.
So when he failed his first college algebra exam, he did what any reasonable English major would do: he sold the textbook back to the bookstore. “I paid two hundred,” Miles whispered
Simple. Beautiful. A story with two endings.
He passed the class with a B-plus. Not because he had become a mathematician, but because he had finally understood that algebra wasn't the opposite of language. It was a language—lean, honest, and full of its own strange poetry.
He factored. (2x – 1)(x – 2) = 0. Then x = 1/2 or x = 2. Miles had always considered himself a student of
Chapter 4 introduced functions. Kaufmann wrote: “A function is a rule that assigns to each element in one set exactly one element in another set.”
And every now and then, he’d open it to a random page, read an equation, and smile.