about the third R
Habits, habits & perspectives: perfected over my years of life, I have odd habits and ways of seeing things. For sample, you and I don't see this picture the same way; you see a beautiful fluffy cloud touched with pink by the rising sun, StAndrewsBay with boats already this morning, scaffolding, and maybe the bars in my window. There's red tape on the scaffolding, maybe you see that too.
It started in high school, at Bay Hi, in my fascination with two subjects only: Math and Band. I loved Bill Weeks, my character of a lifetime, who taught me American History as a freshman and World History as a senior, and he liked me as a student; not the way as Coach Weeks he liked the history students who were on his baseball team, but anyway. I've told that story any number of times, here and in sermons and in my mother's funeral homily. With an average start and my mother straightening Mr. Weeks out on Parents' Night 1949, after which straight A's in History both freshman and senior years and a good relationship; but History did not intrigue me as did Band and Math, especially in that Music is actually a Math subject. I don't remember my Band grades on report cards, but four years of Math at Bay Hi straight A's all the way through. Apparently not as high as DN, as it turned out, and no sour grapes, but I thought I was going to get the Math Award on graduation!
On a billboard or other sign I count the letters and divide them into groups of Three and groups of Five, and counting them out in my mind as if Mr. Whitley were waving his baton, and yes, we learned 5/4 Time (five beats to a measure, a quarter note gets one beat). Or if that doesn't fit, into groups of Four: ONE two three four ONE two three four ... Sometimes, to make it fit, it's necessary to include the spaces between words in the counting, And letters per group x number of groups tells how many letters in the subject, the sign. Nobody cares but me, and yes I'm that eccentric, odd.
But the picture. You see scenery, and so do I. But since returning to 7H, mainly I see Math, plane geometry that is to say. Angles. Lines, squares, right angles, rectangles, triangles, trapezoids, parallelograms. Right triangles, scalene triangles, and potentially an isosceles triangle, acute angles, obtuse angles. There's at least one shape, quadrilateral, with two right angles, an acute angle and an obtuse angle; and if I expand to include all the angles in the shapes around it, surely I can work out the degrees of angle in its acute and obtuse. There's an adjacent right triangle, for example, that appears may be isosceles, or at least I want it to be (it's my picture, I can do what I DWP); and if that's an isosceles triangle, then the angles in my target quadrilateral are 90° 90° 45° 135° but I'm fooling myself, aren't I, that's only an isosceles triangle if I say it is.
Senior year math teacher, Miss Holliday. In our class either that year or another was her niece Virginia, a very pretty girl with long brown hair. I was 14 and 15 and 16 and 17, life was a beach, and Math was fun and good!
So, Rithmetic
T+
It started in high school, at Bay Hi, in my fascination with two subjects only: Math and Band. I loved Bill Weeks, my character of a lifetime, who taught me American History as a freshman and World History as a senior, and he liked me as a student; not the way as Coach Weeks he liked the history students who were on his baseball team, but anyway. I've told that story any number of times, here and in sermons and in my mother's funeral homily. With an average start and my mother straightening Mr. Weeks out on Parents' Night 1949, after which straight A's in History both freshman and senior years and a good relationship; but History did not intrigue me as did Band and Math, especially in that Music is actually a Math subject. I don't remember my Band grades on report cards, but four years of Math at Bay Hi straight A's all the way through. Apparently not as high as DN, as it turned out, and no sour grapes, but I thought I was going to get the Math Award on graduation!
On a billboard or other sign I count the letters and divide them into groups of Three and groups of Five, and counting them out in my mind as if Mr. Whitley were waving his baton, and yes, we learned 5/4 Time (five beats to a measure, a quarter note gets one beat). Or if that doesn't fit, into groups of Four: ONE two three four ONE two three four ... Sometimes, to make it fit, it's necessary to include the spaces between words in the counting, And letters per group x number of groups tells how many letters in the subject, the sign. Nobody cares but me, and yes I'm that eccentric, odd.
But the picture. You see scenery, and so do I. But since returning to 7H, mainly I see Math, plane geometry that is to say. Angles. Lines, squares, right angles, rectangles, triangles, trapezoids, parallelograms. Right triangles, scalene triangles, and potentially an isosceles triangle, acute angles, obtuse angles. There's at least one shape, quadrilateral, with two right angles, an acute angle and an obtuse angle; and if I expand to include all the angles in the shapes around it, surely I can work out the degrees of angle in its acute and obtuse. There's an adjacent right triangle, for example, that appears may be isosceles, or at least I want it to be (it's my picture, I can do what I DWP); and if that's an isosceles triangle, then the angles in my target quadrilateral are 90° 90° 45° 135° but I'm fooling myself, aren't I, that's only an isosceles triangle if I say it is.
Senior year math teacher, Miss Holliday. In our class either that year or another was her niece Virginia, a very pretty girl with long brown hair. I was 14 and 15 and 16 and 17, life was a beach, and Math was fun and good!
So, Rithmetic
T+