Things They Made Us Do In School
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
I started into Ken Follett’s The Man From St. Petersburg this afternoon, but after I had read the first ten or twelve pages I realized I had read it before, when it was – I don’t know – but it was a while back. It must have been at least a year because the characters were vaguely familiar but I didn’t remembered how it ended so I kept on reading.
That happens to me a lot. The little blurbs on the covers aren’t always that helpful. I once rented a Rambo video after reading the back of the sleeve and when I started to watch it, I realized it was the very same video I took back the day before. But part of the problem with books is I am not a particularly good reader. I tend to skip over long descriptions of landscapes and old buildings, although rarely descriptions of bare-naked women, and sometimes I miss something that is important to the plot. This explains why when I read the Bible I missed the part about Jesus.
I do the same with poetry. You have to admit that most poets run on a bit – often quite a bit. A good example is William Wordsworth’s The Daffodils a poem that every schoolchild for the last two hundred and twenty-two years (April, 1802) has had to memorize to get out of Grade Five.
I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high… it goes on and on forever. All Bill needed to say was ‘Them’s nice flowers’ which almost anyone could memorize unless you had the misfortune to be educated in Barrie.
There was another poem we were forced to learn and that was Indian Summer, the ‘Along the lines of smoky hills,’ one. (We may no longer be allowed to call it that. I will have to check the latest political correctness list to see what’s in and what’s out.)
The strange thing about poetry is we memorized dozens of them and I’m sure that even now, years and years later, we can still recite them, although why we would want to is beyond me. There must be a poetry cell somewhere in our brain that stores all this stuff just in case you meet your Grade Five teacher coming out of the LCBO some afternoon and she shouts, ‘Hey! What comes after tiger, tiger burning bright?’ And you say, “Damned if I know. I was away that day.’
But why is it we can remember poems and dirty limericks but the really important stuff like your beloved’s name or birthday draws a blank?
Myself, I think it is the fault of the ministry of education. They spent so much time drilling stuff they will never use into the beleaguered brains of little children there is no space left for the day to day stuff. I know it is not Jill Dunlop’s fault because Jill has only been on the job for a couple of months, but I plan on talking to her soon to straighten this mess up. There was, and no doubt still is, too much stuff in the curriculum we never use taking up space up there.
A good example is Archimedes Principle; we took that in Grade 11. Because of his principle I know that if I plop into the bathtub the weight of my svelte body will displace the same weight of water over the sides and onto the bathroom floor. But, I shower so that information is next to useless.
Because of what I learned in geometry class, I may be one of the foremost experts on the Pythagoras’ theorem, the one about the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle being equal to something else, but I forget what that something else is. With that information I can measure the height of a Bell telephone pole without digging it up, lying it down and pacing it off. But I don’t care how high it is, never did, and don’t need to know because we are on Rogers. Not only that the lines in most of the new subdivisions are buried and his theory only works for height. He never mentions depth. Come to think about it, he doesn’t mention height either. If all this is too confusing for you, let me put it in layman’s language so that even you can understand it.
When Euclidean space is represented by a Cartesian coordinate system in analytic geometry, Euclidean distance satisfies the Pythagorean relation: the squared distance between two points equals the sum of squares of the difference in each coordinate between the points.
Well, that certainly explains it.
Next week, the limerick and why old ladies from Nantucket should never go down a well in a bucket.
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