“My father called me ‘stupid’ a lot. Even when I’d bring home...

“My father called me ‘stupid’ a lot. Even when I’d bring home good grades, he’d say things like: ‘You’re smart, but you don’t know anything.’ I just wasn’t a big reader like him. He always had a book in his hand. Math was my thing. During lunch I’d go to the junior high library and sit on the floor with puzzle books. Now I’m a teacher, and I’ve taught every math class in the high school curriculum. A few years ago I was teaching my precalculus class, and I stumbled upon a set of numbers that generated ellipses with identical positioning in both the rectangular and polar coordinate systems. So I turned them into variables, wrote a two-page proof, and had my work published in a journal called The Mathematics Teacher. Take that, Dad.”