mnemonica, mnemonica, come light the menorah

One day, when I was a senior in high school, my Calculus teacher handed out mimeographs* of Math Christmas songs—like "Silent Night" but with new lyrics about algebra or something—and we spent part of the class singing them.  (Surely this was the day before Christmas Break Nondenominational Holiday Recess—hence the frivolity and the specific content.)  Back then, I thought it was hilarious to make mock accusations of anti-Semitism,** so I made a big stink about how there weren't any Math Hanukkah songs.  Dr. G said (wryly? wearily? patiently?), "[Short Round], if you want to write one yourself, go right ahead."  So I did, and I sang it at the end of the class period.  And now it comprises everything I remember about Calculus.

Goes a little something like this:

[to the tune of "O Hanukkah, O Hanukkah"]

dy/dx, dy/dx of x squared is 2x;

let's find the y-prime of x cubed: it's 3x

squared; it's very simple; it's as good as done,

when you take nx to the n-1.

* I'm not sure whether they were actually mimeographs...but that feels like something she might have actually done.

** At a school and in a city where I was able to grow up thinking that some people are Jewish and some people are Christians—like 50-50, the way babies learn that some kids are boys and some kids are girls—anti-Semitism had no more immediate reality for me than lion-fighting must have for [not-insane] American Christians, and I still chuckle when I remember how a classmate we sometimes used to call Ziti would, when yelled at by a teacher for being late to class, dramatically exclaim, "Is this because I'm Jewish?"—or how once, reporting to friends about how he had been kicked off of the lunch line by the school chaplain–cum–shadow headmaster (because our class wasn't allowed to get lunch yet), he quoted the chaplain (in the chaplain's presence) as having said, "Get off the line, Jew!"