I spent my adult life in foolish toil
At least it paid the rent and gave me space
Teaching calculus until heads boiled
As for understanding, lose your cool
Infinitely smaller, numbers placed
I spent my adult life in foolish toil
Disappearing just as they beguile
Numbers irritate the mental space.
Games like calculus force heads to boil
Yet if we must learn algebra let’s smile
As neo-liberals lose the human place
I spend my life in Pascal’s counterfoils
One by one the tiny x’s file
Through my dreams to weave the demons lace
The holes of calculus were over-tiled.
When do we know we have found our place
Will it be in black holes of disgrace?
I spent my adult life in pain encoiled
Neither calculus nor boiling oil.
How my heart sings 
At least you know the meaning of the word. i heard a commentator talk of “the calculus of the Brexit negotiations” the other day 🙂
That is funny.Infinitesmal movements towards a solution.The gradient of understanding and agreement.A professor of econometrics once asked me.Why do two minuses make a plus? Well it’s not true in morals.Two wrongs don’t make a right,as it were.He had supposedly second marked exam papers in which students answered questions on calculus of two variables.linear algebra etc.So it was my fault the recession happened!