You know how you can get so absorbed in a book that it becomes your entire reality? The world outside the pages stops existing; you forget what you were worried about before you started reading. And then the story ends and you’re launched, often abruptly, back into whatever life had paused from. The chaos, the circumstances, or the weight of just dealing with things. 

That’s exactly how last week felt for me. As a child I always wished to attend some kind of summer school but never got the chance to, so being able to volunteer at the UKMT Maths Summer School meant lot to me. Even if I made a slight difference to just one student’s experience of mathematics, I was pleased. And more importantly, my younger self was very pleased. 

Two days into the summer school and I’d genuinely forgotten the world outside¹ existed. By Friday, I definitely didn’t want the story to end. Somewhere between the morning walks and increasingly unhinged games of Mao and card tricks that somehow fooled a room full of mathematicians, I found myself appreciating things more than when I’d first learned them. Geometry in particular crept up on me. I think there is a difference between understanding something and appreciating it, and sometimes one needs a second encounter to get from one to the other.

There’s also something to be said about being a part of another student’s learning journey. Watching someone struggle with a problem and then watching the moment it clicks. Or the way their relationship with a topic can shift over the course of a week; or even witnessing the confidence grow in someone who arrived thinking they weren’t good enough to be there. Every time someone thanked me, or told me an explanation had helped them, I felt that inexplicable joy.

Another thing I hadn’t fully anticipated was how much the people would make the week. Living and working alongside other volunteers and students for a week seemed to distort my perception of time in strange yet fulfilling way. By the end of the summer school I felt like I’d known some of these people for far far longer than the six days I was present. Being around people who cared about the students, the mathematics, and each other was something I didn’t realise I needed as much as I did. 

The sadness at the end of a good week is real, in fact, rather proportional to how good the week was. But I think it’s also proof that something genuinely good happened; you don’t mourn the ending of a story you didn’t care about. In the past few weeks I’ve noticed that my memory is less reliable² than I’d like it to be. Good weeks blur, faces fade and specific textures moments like the chaos of doing bedtime checks or the exact feeling of playing my first ever complete game of quantum go-fish start to soften at the edges sooner than you’d expect. There are various reasons for this, some of which (most of which) I’m still making sense of. But the result is the same: without some form of record, it feels like even the best weeks can start to feel like they might not have happened at all.

This post serves as another piece of evidence. Good days do exist, and I am lucky enough to live through them. And when they come³, they’re worth holding onto.

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P.S. – The thumbnail for this post is ‘Strava art’, i.e. drawing shapes by tracing the GPS routs on foot. What started as a “let’s try to draw the π symbol on the field” evolved across the week into the I ♡ UKMT you can see above drawn at 7.30am with very helpful direction from some students! It felt like the right image for a week I already know I’ll want to remember. (Also yes, I did get the students interested in Strava art)

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1. And by this I mean anything outside the summer school site, including most of Leeds ↩︎
2. Unfortunately memory isn’t a nice bijection ↩︎
3. And they do eventually come ↩︎