Brandon 1

Tiana Brandon
Miss Allen
CSP 105 Section 201
17 August 2016
Literacy Gained Through Sciences
By five years old, I understood that I was lost in the world. I did not live with either
parents, either of my older siblings, or anyone who truly cared for me in my governmentmandated foster home. I know it may be crazy to claim that I felt lost at five years old, but I did.
My most significant memory from that year was watching my father go off to jail.
I woke up from my nap, and I walked down a hallway across ash-brown carpet in my
five-year-old feet. I turned the corner passing my fathers room, and greeting a shattered reality. I
saw a brown baseball bat sticking out of a big, black screen television. I saw the glass to all of
our three living room tables smashed across the floors. I saw items out of place, like broken
bottles askew and our telephone with coiled wire pulled out of the wall. I did not see anyone
around, and I continued on, holding my shock in, to go and find people.
I turned to the right and I saw the woman my father was married to, Stacy, sitting on a
chair crying loudly with her face hidden in her hands. This was unusual; she never went on the
porch to sit. Then I saw a man approach her in a uniform, asking her if she was okay. He had a
gun on his hip and he was probably three times my size. He scared me, so I looked away by
looking up, past the two conversing on the porch. Thats when I saw my father.
He was wearing a green, blue, and white plaid shirt. He had curly hair and a bronze skin
tone that matched mine. When his brown eyes met my gaze, he put his head down. His hands
were behind his back, and I felt the shame he embodied all the way from the house I stood in.

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When he was taken away, I stayed with his now ex-wife Stacy. I later learned that he
punched her in the face because she would not give him money for drugs. He blackened her eye,
that is why she called authorities on him. She became my foster mom through a program named
Kin-Gap, where you can take care of a child that is not yours but that you have had some relation
with.
Now, you may be thinking this was so selfless of her to still take care of you.
Especially since my birth mother was occupied in jail already. Unfortunately, that was not the
case. I learned that she kept me to still have a tie to him she loved him. She wanted revenge for
how he hurt her, and she took it out on me. We looked identical, my father and I, and she only
used me to try to get back to him. This was the start of my foster home becoming more abusive
than my previous lifestyle.
These aspects made me lost at five, and depressed by ten. I needed some stability, some
way to understand why things were the way they were. Otherwise, I would make my own, and
that would just lead to more sadness. I remember thinking what did I do to make my parents not
love me. That needed to stop. I needed reality, rules, structure, and stability.
Unfortunately, I did not find what I needed until I learned complex math and sciences.
Lets take calculus and apply it to my five-year-old self. Calculus takes the present, or the
position, looks at how it changes, whether with its velocity or acceleration, and uses that as a
reference to predict how it would be in the future. The beautiful part about it is that sometimes
there are no answers. Sometimes, we do not know the future. For example, if a car is traveling at
a rate of 60 miles per hour, we know how long it will take to reach a destination 500 miles away.
Even if the car travels 40 miles an hour for part of the trip, we will still know. But, if we know a
car is traveling 60 miles an hour, and we try to predict the color of the car, we will be lost. So,

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when I was five trying to predict why my parents were not in my life, and if I would ever live
with my real family again, I noticed I was lost. I was trying to divide twenty by zero there was
just no answer that existed. I was okay with that, but I needed to understand that sometimes,
there really are no answers first.
Once I learned that I can use math and science concepts to understand my surroundings, I
kept doing it, and it worked well. I faced a situation later in life that required this understanding
in order to allow me to get through it.
I was twelve years-old now, and foster care became the past. I was moving back with my
biological mother, and going to get to know my real family. Unfortunately, I found myself lost
again as I made this transition. When I first moved in, I did not even know my mothers birthday.
I felt like I lived with a stranger. Secondly, my mother was white, and I came from a black
family. When I did get to know her, I figured out that we did not have the same morals, values, or
perception of the world, due to our racial differences and life experiences.
I still needed a mother I was 12 years old. So, I found a mother in a science concept
called entropy. Entropy is sometimes referred to as a measure of the amount of "disorder" in a
system (Entropy and Disorder). Well, theres one thing I had in common with my made-up
mom we both had lots of disorder associated with us. (Disorder meaning difference amongst
people, not disorder meaning medical instability.) My mother, Entropy, tells me that it is okay if I
do not understand everything and everyone, because it is supposed to be this way. She comforts
me as I lie awake at night, overthinking my surroundings, by saying it is okay to view things
differently and be your own person, and that life would not exist without this necessary disorder.

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I felt like a lost atom amongst inconceivable numbers of others in the galaxy, and entropy
protected me and gave me a home. Entropy told me when you feel like you are so small and
insignificant, think of how unlikely your existence is, and rejoice in being alive. Okay, actually
Stephen Hawking told me that, but I can actually feel it from entropy. Entropy is the notion that
nothing in the universe will be perfect, and that is okay, because that is simply the way of the
world. Having this understanding helped me accept and conquer the disconnection I had with my
actual mother, and it taught me many lessons that should have come from my mother herself.
Since I felt so disconnected with my home life, due to all the shifting around I endured, I
began to focus on other avenues as I got older. High school was a new, exciting chapter of my
life and I was eager to submerge myself in it. I found that I connected more with friends than I
did with family. My friends gave me a greater chance to be myself, and accept me for who I am.
My family took my life experiences and tried to create a personality for me. My family had
expectations, while my friends did not.
Like all phases of my life, this one included hardships too. High school made me start
thinking about my identity, and how that affected my relations with other people. By the time I
was a senior, I was still unsure of this identity. What I did know was my core values, and my
culture I connected with. I found myself in positions where I needed to defend my values and
culture, and that is when I acknowledged it most.
I had a friend senior year named Alisha who tried to tell me I was not black. She claimed
that since my hair was curly and my skin was not as dark as others, that I could not possibly be
black. The craziest part is, she thought she was complimenting me by stripping me of my
identification with black culture. She wanted to lift the burden of it from me and keep it to
herself as if she held the key to Pandoras Box. Inside of it was black men being killed by police

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officers, women left to be the mother and father to children, families living off of welfare in the
American ghettos, people who do not usually receive or value a proper education, and people
who never leave poverty. Inside of it were outsiders who perceived us as loud, obnoxious,
ignorant as we speak Ebonics, gang members, and thugs. Inside of it was pain, and of course, the
history of slavery. Alisha would never want to rest that burden on me. If I had known more about
chemistry, I would have explained to her:
I understand why you are ashamed by the pigment of your skin and what it represents,
but I want you to understand that I am proud of mine. I love being associated with people that
rose again the strongest oppressors of all the nations in the world and succeeded; we made them
change and add to documents governing their own lands just to give us rights. I love being
associated with a culture so dynamic that outsiders get intimidated and cover up their own
ignorance with critiques. Regardless of what these outsiders say, I will always feel at home when
one of my black female friends greets me as girl or sista. I know that you see all of these
people in poverty, and so you think that it is all we are capable of, but I have seen more of the
world and there are successful blacks everywhere I go. Please understand that you are offending
me more than humans offend Poseidon with every ounce of filthy waste they dump into the
ocean by stripping away the most significant element of my identity.
I needed to know chemistry in order to assert myself this way. Chemistry taught me that
everyone has an identity through its elements. The elements are individual because of their
protons. Sometimes, the two elements mix well, as if they share the same ideology like
hydrogen and chloride when they make salt. Sometimes, they only mix in certain situations.
Carbon and Oxygen can make Carbon Dioxide, which is necessary in the cycle of purifying
oxygen. However, it can also make something polar-opposite like Carbon Monoxide, which is a

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deadly gas that is difficult to detect. Or, in other cases, elements may not react with each other at
all, like Nickel and Titanium. People interact in this same way. I understood that I may disagree
with people, regardless of if they are family or not. Moreover, this is natural. These are laws and
ways of the world. While they may seem sporadic at first, they helped me get through my
challenges. They gave me the stability and structure I desired. I learned to love science.
While I still worry about my adequacy to take Chemistry 130 in the fall or
Thermodynamics as an upperclassman, I cannot wait to use the sciences to help me learn more
about my world and myself. Math and science helped me achieve literacy by helping me
understand my world. Simultaneously, it made my struggles educationally when I took on new
topics and subjects. I took two years of calculus, and I still find myself learning new theories
about it in the Summer Bridge Program. While it may be a very different approach to literacy, it
works for me by helping me learn who I am, accepting that I am different, and understanding
what else surrounds me.

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Works Cited
"Entropy and Disorder." Dave's Physics Shack. Morningside College, n.d. Web. 15 July 2016.
Hawking, Stephen. "Stephen Hawking Sings Monty Python... Galaxy Song (Music Video)."
YouTube. Monty Python, 13 Apr. 2015. Web. 15 July 2016.

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Tiana Brandon
Ms. Allen
CSP 105 Section 201
17 July 2016
The Relationship Between Physics, People, and Literacy
I.

Energy birthed the world.

Energy runs the world. People study energy in order to make sense of the planet we inhabit.
Nothing can exist or work without it. The world, when created, had a certain amount of energy
with it, and all of it is still there. Scientists proved centuries ago that energy cannot be created or
destroyed. In relation to thermodynamics, physics defines energy as half of mass times velocity
squared. A simple formula, gets straight to the point, and is easy to understand.
1
2
Energy= Mass x Velocity
2
The Chinese, however, had a much more complex way of understanding energy. They
believed that the world thrived off of two energies: the yin and yang. With one being black, and
one being white, they represent balance and order. The yin, or black energy, could signify a
woman, darkness, and inward. The yang, or white energy, could be a man, brightness, and
outward. The two forces form a shape similar to a comma because they push and pull each other.
Together, they bring the world to a perfect balance of zero.

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At a glance, I would not think that this symbol from Chinese culture and this simple, little
physics formula mean the exact same thing. The differ in some ways though. One seems to
almost be a superstition, leaves room to wonder, to question, to reconsider. The other is concrete
and brings about real world application by plugging in two numerical values. These are two
completely different approaches to understanding the human world and the energy within it.
II.

The only way to survive this world is to understand it.

Out of the two approaches, I prefer the equation. I can understand every element to it.
Velocity refers to an objects speed over time, and with it being squared, it surpasses acceleration
by one level. This means that it considers how acceleration changes over time. Mass is an objects
weight divided by gravity, or its true entity, since gravity does not pull the object down in this
case, making it heavier. Unfortunately, understanding energy does not mean that we understand
the world we live in completely.
III.

We all understand things differently.

As human beings, we typically have an obligation to interact. From this, we avoid repeating
each others mistakes, starving, and a terrible feeling we call loneliness in America. I apologize
in advance if you were expecting this phenomenon to be as simple and laid out as that beautiful
physics formula. That is not the case; it gets much more complex. Similar to our eating habits,
we do not interact for the pure sake of doing so, we do it to receive a notion of satisfaction. To
make matters more complicated, as creatures of habit, we tend to only get satisfaction from a
particular type of person. Usually, it is a person we can understand or relate to. Allow me to
demonstrate:
Alisha and I met during an ice breaker session, the first day of Calculus class,
senior year. I vividly remember her saying I cant believe I just met you and weve been

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going to the same school for three years, by the end of the period. We seemed to just
click, which is slang for connect on a deeper level than normal.
From my perception, I thought this would be great. For once, I met someone who
was like me. We both had the same curvy figure, short hair, medium-brown skin, an
interest in calculus, driving privileges (this is a big one senior year of high school),
outgoing personality, and sense of humor. However, we did not share this ideology.
One Monday morning, I said Alisha, why are you late? You drive so you have no
excuse.
Giirrrllll stop coming at my life like that, this hair is a struggle in the morning,
I laughed at this because I could relate, but I did not want to let her off of the hook that
easily.
My hair didnt stop me from making it to class before the bell, continuing my
playful criticism.
Thats because youre not black Hun, I was rather shocked. Youre not even a
nickel, she meant this in the context of black being a dollar. You dont have hair
struggles.
Youre crazy! I am black, was all I could squeeze in before the lesson started.
Alisha is a great friend to me, please do not take this the wrong way. She would never
intentionally say or do anything to offend me. She thought she was complimenting me by
attempting to strip away the cultural identity I hold. She wanted to lift the burden from me and
keep it to herself. Alisha wanted to keep the key to Pandoras Box to herself. Inside of it was
black men being killed by police officers, women left to be the mother and father to children,
families living off of welfare in the American ghettos, people who do not usually receive or value

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a proper education, and people who never leave poverty. Inside of it were outsiders who
perceived us as loud, obnoxious, ignorant as we speak Ebonics, gang members, and thugs. Inside
of it was pain, and of course, the history of slavery. Alisha would never want to rest that burden
on me. If I had more time, I would have explained to her:
I understand why you are ashamed by the pigment of your skin and what it
represents, but I want you to understand that I am proud of mine. I love being associated
with people that rose again the strongest oppressors of all the nations in the world and
succeeded; we made them change and add to documents governing their own lands just
to give us rights. I love being associated with a culture so dynamic that outsiders get
intimidated and cover up their own ignorance with critiques. Regardless of what these
outsiders say, I will always feel at home when one of my black female friends greets me
as girl or sista. I know that you see all of these people in poverty, and so you think
that it is all we are capable of, but I have seen more of the world and there are successful
blacks everywhere I go. Please understand that you are offending me more than humans
offend Poseidon with every ounce of filthy waste they dump into the ocean by stripping
away the most significant element of my identity.
I did not get to tell her this, but I hope she experiences something on her own that makes her
adapt to my mentality. It would be a lie to blame time on why I did not share this with Alisha.
Truly, human interaction is so fragile and delicate, I felt like I could not tell her. Once we
establish an inability to relate, we lose a connection. There are no laws governing her reaction,
because principles of physics (or chemistry in this case) do not apply in the social side of the
world. Nothing is factual, complete, or constant. Everything varies depending on perception.
Well, there is a physics aspect to point of view, but that is beside the point. The point is: we

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failed at our human interaction. Little did she know, we could not connect the way we intended,
our communication failed, and throughout our differing ideologies, neither can be proven right. It
is just not as simple as physics.

IV.

I understand things through physics.

I think my favorite part of science is entropy. I am a lost atom amongst inconceivable

numbers of others in the galaxy, and entropy protects me and gives me a home. Entropy tells me
when you feel like you are so small and insignificant, think of how unlikely your existence is,
and rejoice in being alive. Okay, actually Stephen Hawking told me that, but I can actually feel
it from entropy. There is a notion that nothing in the universe will be perfect, and that is okay,
because that is simply the way of the world. That notion is my mother Entropy.

Entropy is sometimes referred to as a measure of the amount of "disorder" in a system.

My mother tells me that it is okay if I do not understand everything and everyone,

because it is supposed to be this way. She comforts me as I lie awake at night, overthinking my
surroundings, by saying it is okay to view things differently and be your own person, life would
not exist without this necessary disorder. (Disorder meaning difference amongst people, not
disorder meaning medical instability.)
My mother provides me with a home. Instead of brick, our house is built of physics. She tells
me that we can have rules and simplicity so that I can feel like I belong, and that we do not have
to model the world outside of our dome. She speaks to me with love, and in a language I can
understand. Its okay to apply it outside sometimes, but know your limits. Not everything is

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defined so easily. I love her for this, she does her best to make me happy and teach me that I
belong and that my identity matters. It matters more than my physical matter, she likes to make
me laugh with puns if I am feeling sad.
V.

Physics taught me literacy.

Physics, and its definite, unchanging laws, help me understand my world and build a home.
Having a foundation based on rules helps me adapt to situations where there are none. It keeps
me grounded and helps me remember who I am: someone who forms her own opinions and
beliefs and takes pride in her independence. All of these elements are the reactants and literacy is
the product. (Chemistry is very important in physics.)
Physics places characteristics with things we encounter throughout our lives, and allows us to
understand, and thus, connect with our surroundings. I take this lesson and apply it to my
surroundings so that I can understand them and thrive. In the black culture, we love the smell of
soul food. The sweet, brown-sugar smell of yams; the sharp, tangy smell of baked macaroni; and
the spicy, hot-oil smell associated with homemade fried chicken remind us of home. The taste is
even better than the smell. Each and every ingredient stands out, which shows the love and
authenticity coming from our elders. This cannot be found in store-bought versions. The sound
of rap music comforts us. It has a consistent, upbeat rhythm, and is usually spoken in Ebonics.
We can associate this with characteristics of our spirits. We love the feeling of an afro. Fingers
cannot run through its rough, absorbent texture. It reminds us of the defiance we had to exploit in
order to be released from chains. We love the sight of a family barbeque. It is filled with talking
people we endear wearing smiles and comfortable clothes. This image contradicts the one media
makes of us.

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Physics helps me discern every individual description of my world, and teaches me to
embrace it because the world needs energy and entropy to survive. This connection or
understanding I received from my culture is literacy. The knowledge connects me to this world,
the connection allows me to make relationships, and the relationships allow me to feel like I
belong somewhere amongst the masses of atoms.

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Works Cited
"Entropy and Disorder." Dave's Physics Shack. Morningside College, n.d. Web. 15 July 2016.
Hawking, Stephen. "Stephen Hawking Sings Monty Python... Galaxy Song (Music Video)."
YouTube. Monty Python, 13 Apr. 2015. Web. 15 July 2016.
"How Do We Weigh Objects in Space." Ask an Astronomer. The Curious Team, 22 June 2015.
Web. 15 July 2016.
"Kinetic Energy." Work, Energy, and Power - Lesson 1 - Basic Terminology and Concepts. The
Physics Classroom, n.d. Web. 15 July 2016.
"What Is Yin Yang Theory?" Shen-Nong Limited. Integrated Chinese Medicine Holdings
Limited, 2005. Web. 15 July 2016.
"Yin Yang Vectors, Photos and PSD Files." Freepik. Shutterstock, n.d. Web. 15 July 2016.