At college I had to take a required course in Physics and Chemistry. I had already taken a course in Botany and done very well. ... Botany was fine, because I loved cutting up leaves and putting them under a microscope and drawing diagrams of bread mold and the odd, heart-shaped leaf in the sex cycle of the fern, it seemed so real to me.

The day I went into Physics class it was death.

A short dark man with a high, lisping voice, named Mr.Manzi, stood in front of the class in a tight blue suit holding a little wooden ball. He put the ball on a steep grooved slide and let it run down to the bottom. Then he started talking about let a equal acceleration and let t equal time and suddenly he was scribbling letters and numbers and equals signs all over the blackboard and my mind went dead.

I took the Physics book back to my dormitory. It was a huge book on porous mimeographed paper -- four hundred pages long with no drawings or photographs, only diagrams and formulas -- between brick-red cardboard covers. ...

I may have made a straight A in Physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it. What I couldn't stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers. Instead of leaf shapes and enlarged diagrams of the holes the leaves breathe through and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll on the blackboard, there were these hideous, cramped, scorpion-lettered formulas in Mr.Manzi's special red chalk.

From The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.