Putting an idea into written words is like defrosting the windshield: The idea, so vague out there in the murk, slowly begins to gather itself into a… - William Zinsser

I don’t like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written — in having finally made an arrangement that has a certain inevitability, like

I had been sitting in Joan Countryman’s living room for two hours talking about mathematics. My pulse was steady, the hand that held my note-taking pencil didn’t shake and wasn’t even clammy. Where was that old math anxiety? I hadn’t been at any loss for questions; they came to me naturally. Like the process of writing, the process of asking questions had been a form of learning, raising further questions and telling me what I wanted to know next. I was genuinely curious. It never occurred to me that this was a subject I wasn’t supposed to be any good at. What did occur to me was that mathematics was not some arcane system of numbers; it was a language, a way of putting thoughts together. I might never master the language — my checkbook might still go unbalanced — but at least I had begun to glimpse what the language was trying to say and how it could help people to understand the world around them.

I thought of all the subjects where the teacher never gets this inside look, where students are graded solely on the basis of a right or a wrong answer.