In interviews about my book, a question I get asked a lot is how I got into school finance. The asker usually has an inflection like “what the heck are you doing this for?”, and it has a couple layers, since I didn’t start out doing school finance and I have a good amount of fun talking and thinking about it. I have a couple stock answers to this question, but I realized another deeper layer recently.

The answer I usually give is that I was in Philadelphia and wanting to help out education justice movements—since I think academics should be connected to movements—and in Philly one of the biggest problems are the school buildings. The demands are always for more money (even now!) and I realized I couldn’t explain to myself or anyone else how that money worked. I was looking for a new project that was policy-oriented given a new teaching job with that focus, and I thought that school finance would be a great subject, particularly because very few critical theorists or marxists in education took it up.

I found I had a knack for reading financial documents. I fell into them, wandered around them, didn’t mind getting lost and trying to untangle them. I even found myself wanting to get into the abstraction of the numbers and sniff out the ideologies, the stories, the political economies to understand the larger political-economic terrain on which school people have to live and move and have their being.

Another answer I typically give gets a little more personal: I’ve always harbored a kind of revenge fantasy against numbers. I grew up with the message from all the adults in my life that being good at math makes you smart, that you have to be good at math, that the kids that were good at math were the best, etc. I wasn’t good at math. My grades were middling, my test scores wanting, and I developed a math psychosis where I’d freeze up in class.

Any time a teacher asked a question that they knew the answer to, waiting for which student would get it right, my mind went blank with a combination of fear, anxiety, and anger. I couldn’t focus. I found out that I wasn’t smart, which sucked.

When I got to college, I took a logic class to fulfill a language requirement. I really liked it. My professor, the philosopher of mathematics Michele Friend, said I seemed to have an interest and facility with it, so she invited me to take second order logic, the next level. I also really liked that, so she invited me into a small seminar of nerds who for whatever reason liked to do philosophy of mathematics, logic, and language. We studied set theory, modal logics, truth, the history of logic, and Michele’s specialty, paraconsistency (systems where contradictions are true).

For whatever reason, I loved dicing up the numbers, thinking about what they actually were, what was behind them, and how logic seemed to share things with both numerical and natural language. I’ve always loved language. I wanted to be a fiction writer: I wrote stories, novels, poems, essays constantly. I love words, reading and speaking and thinking with them. Punning. (I’ve gotten pretty into poetry recently, a new vista.) When I was kid, I liked to take apart electronics too. I remember being in the basement and taking apart an old computer monitor, just dismantling it. Maybe my parents thought I’d be an engineer or something, but it turns out I just like breaking things apart and seeing what they’re made of, sometimes for its own sake. Analysis just means breaking apart, so I was drawn to analytic philosophy, that did this with pretty much everything.

Philosophy of mathematics and logic was this opportunity to get to know language so intimately, so fine-grained, but also to take that revenge on the numbers that had so cruelly rejected me as a child, dismantling them and seeing what they were made of.

I found out I was pretty smart actually, reconstructing proofs and logical laws, hanging out with mathematicians and computer scientists and digging into the very depths of language where my love of language and my revenge against math met in a festival of formulas.

When I graduated I went into teaching, moved to Quito, Ecuador to teach, read Marx for the first time, and got my left politics, which would propel me, while in grad school in NYC in 2011, to join the Occupy Wall Street movement. That movement was a wonky movement, analyzing derivatives and swaps and the financial crisis and all of late capitalism while holding participatory action meetings in privately-owned public spaces throughout the city. I found that my tendency towards numbers was helpful there too.

But another thread of influence bubbled up in my reflecting on how I got into all this.

I moved back to New York City a few years ago, I’m constantly reminded of my family’s history, since several generations of them lived in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I grew up going to the beach in South Brooklyn, where my mom grew up, as well as my dad’s older sisters and his parents—they’d all lived in Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, and Manhattan Beach throughout the 20th century—before they moved out to Long Island with the postwar suburban boom.

My mom’s parents moved to the Upper West Side from Manhattan Beach when I was about eleven, and I was walking in their old neighborhood, where I spent a lot of time with them over summers and visits, and I remembered something: my grandfather Herb was an accountant. In fact, he worked in the Empire State Building, was a somewhat aggressive investor and, we found out after he died from a difficult illness when I was high school, a prolific philanthropic donor, sending tens of thousands of dollars to various civil rights groups.

He was a quiet, sweet guy. And he was addicted to punning. You couldn’t get two lines into a conversation with a pun coming up. He liked baseball too, I remember he had three stacked televisions in his den, a room on the third floor of their strangely German cottage-style house in Manhattan Beach, at the very edge of South Brooklyn, right near the water. I think I felt most safe as a kid in that den: a small bed, the televisions, a radio going with the news, games, and shows on mute, low lights and tiny pictures of everything and anything on the walls. There was an old exercise bike and various calculators, including an automatic one that printed what you punched into it. I think there may have even been an abacus.

Herb wore reading glasses down on his nose and would give me a wet, scraggly kiss, his unshaven jowls pressing against my cheek. I really loved him.

The stories about Herb that I know go like this: he was lefthanded, and for some reason his parents—who were from Galizia, or at least their parents were—sent him to a Catholic school in his early years. The nuns smacked him with rulers until he wrote righthanded, which, so it was said, accounted for his nervous manner. He was super anxious.

He wanted to be an engineer, but the war came, and during some form of training he got injured on a truck at a base somewhere in the south, which prevented his being deployed. He also had terrible allergies, contributing to his staying stateside. He got into accounting despite his interest in engineering—I can’t remember why (I’m sure my mom will write to tell me!)—but that’s what he got into, got his certification and training from City College, part of the CUNY system (nearly all my grandparents went through New York City public schools from kindergarten to graduate school). He developed a love for culture, music, art, books, travel, which my grandmother encouraged and developed in him as well.

Why did I think of Herb in this moment? It just suddenly occurred to me, in a psychoanalytic way, that my tendencies towards numbers echo his. He worked at numbers his whole life and had an ambivalent relationship with them, born out of his historical context and his proclivities, but this interest was also set against other interests in language, sports, humor, culture, and even a quietly decisive politics as he kept his small family’s accounts, contributing to movements in that quiet way he had.

When I was an adolescent and then a teenager, he had several heart issues, and then an immune system failure. I can’t remember how old I was during the last and most intense of these, but on a return trip to the hospital, after another severe bout of illness, my parents took my grandmother out to lunch to give her a break from the ward and I sat with him. He was mostly unconscious, unshaven, his eyes watery and opening at random. I knew he was dying and, sitting at his bedside, he taught me about death. It was a foundational moment for me in my own realizations about how I wanted to spend my life, to make it meaningful, to make it matter, to make sure that every moment I had I’d try to do my own desires justice, because what was coming for me, at some point, was what came for him.

The question of how I got into school finance, and school finance itself, took on a new meaning for me in remembering Herb, because working with audits and bond statements and budgets became a kind of tribute or memorial to him and the way he interacted with numbers, the way he pushed and pulled them about, while being funny and kind and listening so intently to me and others around, an unassuming and furtive trickster, whom I loved very much, was sad to see go, and whose memory is indeed, as we say, a blessing.