Jamie Kenneth Banks

That Pi Day a 2nd grader beat out 12th graders in the school-wide recitation contest and left the auditorium with a mouth full of pie. I’d known of the child–a whiz with numbers, his Lower School teachers said. We can’t get him into our class stories the other kids love.

After Tim’s big upset win I happened to ask him what he liked about math, or maybe it was pi specifically. “It’s beautiful,” he said, the patterns in numbers that reflect truths about our world. I’m not sure I’d heard that word in that reverent tone from a “whiz kid” before. Or many adults. He’d offered it to me with the offhandedness of a long-familiar concept in our first ever conversation.

The rest of my memory of this sounds too much like a screed in my own voice to make me trust he said it–but I’m convinced he could have, if he didn’t happen to, or that his now-9th-grade self would vigorously nod along. I saw then that this child already knew art and why aesthetics matter. Had glimpsed humanity and the heights we reach as surely with concepts as with stories. If he didn’t yet take to the versions of people in storybooks he would get there, if he needed to.

I’ve used this encounter to defend my neurodivergent students’ humanity over and over in the 6 years since it happened. I thought I’d written it out to share, too.

I hope Tim’s adults grew up enough to see his soul in the thoughts he shared with them. I hope that started that year, 2nd grade, even though I didn’t end up sharing this incontrovertible evidence with his concerned teachers. I hope there have been others whose trajectories intersected with his at right-er times to be his champion. I hope Tim teaches some too-stubborn public that math is the creative art I have been blessed to discover in it. That’s not his job, of course–so I challenge myself to write more about what he taught me—me, a student tasked with paying my teachers’ gifts forward.