Driving around West Nashville recently, an expected, suppressed memory popped out, causing me to view an internalized, private, digital short feature without even using my iPhone. Or put quaintly, I took another walk down Memory Lane.
My sojourn began when I noticed that a lot of the shrubbery in West Nashville nowadays is neatly trimmed into geometric shapes. There’s a sphere, here’s a cone, over yonder is a rectangle. What has happened to neatly trimmed, “natural” shrubbery? Must every landscape element be a precisely rendered geometric object? I hate geometry! I’ve always hated geometry.
To find out why I hate geometry, Sherman, we must jump into the Way Back Machine. Once we’ve traveled back, picture a 15-year-old (me, bangs in eyes, unnatural hair color courtesy of Clairol’s “Summer Blonde, full braces). Now, picture that boy being led out of the classroom, into a high school hallway and told, “Bend over and grab your ankles” and subsequently paddled with vigor.
I do not remember how many “licks” I got. Yeee-ouch. That particular whipping really hurt. And why, you might ask, was I being paddled? It was punishment for my being a “smart ass.” A recurring consequence of my repeated insolence was getting my posterior beaten. It happened to me frequently between the ages of two and 16. Usually I was whipped at home, but I got paddled at school a few times, too.
This particular paddling was administered by my Geometry instructor (it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to call him a teacher), who was also a football coach. He had called upon me to define an Isosceles triangle, calculate the volume of a right triangular prism, or perform some other equally (to me) ridiculous task.
Of course, I wasn’t prepared to answer his question. I did not have an answer because I did not study geometry. I thought it was dumb. But geometry, of course, is not dumb. Only the callow youth who refuses to study geometry because he declares it “dumb” is actually dumb.
When “Coach” called upon me in class for an answer, I was, of course, unprepared. If he had hoped to embarrass me, he succeeded. I could have said, “I’m sorry Coach. You might as well be speaking Swahili because I don’t understand anything that is said in this classroom.”
Instead, I said, “My good man, I have no earthly idea what the answer to that question might be. Furthermore, who cares? I will never use geometry in the real world!” Are you getting a clue yet as to why the Coach might have wanted to embarrass me?
Of course, I can’t imagine why a football coach would “pick” on a boy who didn’t care a fig for sports, wore braces, dyed his hair, smoked Benson & Hedges 100s, carried GQ magazines and Jacqueline Susanne novels in his stack of schoolbooks and had a posse of girls from classes 9-12 doting on him.
But coach, if you’re reading this, you’ll be happy to learn that my prediction of geometry’s personal uselessness would prove entirely correct. I wound up with a husband who majored in chemistry and is a math whiz, So, although the “proof” to back up my statement was not there (How was I to know I would be married to a genius?) my prophecy was nonetheless correct. I got paddled though I spoke the absolute truth. Hey, no hard feelings, but I still hate geometry.
Mark My Words 