Math Paper

Mr. Urquhart was a fat man who had two suits which he rotated throughout the week and by the end he was a little stinky from fat man sweat. Not the smell of sweat like after you work out in the same clothes time after time, but the smell from the way you sweat when you get just walking around when you are big like he was. He wore white shirts and boring ties that were never quite knotted properly and I wondered how he could tie those wide scuffed up shoes. Maybe someone else did it for him. I had heard he had a wife and 2 sons but it grossed me out to think about that.

He had a wide swagger when he walked into math class each day, the kind of wide swagger you have to adopt when your thighs are so far apart from each other. He had very thick dark hair, caterpillar eyebrows and heavy glasses framed in black plastic. He also could have used a manicure at any time. Serious hangnail issues.

Everyone loved Mr. Urquhart, except for me, mainly because he didn't like me back, and that is what you get when you dislike a 13 year old girl. He was loud and told jokes and paid special attention to the bad kids and the popular kids. This was his way of getting attention and being popular, himself, because the bad kids and the popular kids liked him right back.

To me he was just plain suspicious and mean.

For me, math was bad enough as it was. I didn't understand it and I still don't and he was quite wrong, I am doing just fine without a secure place in my brain where simple functions are performed with out the use of a calculator or dinner partner (for figuring out tips, of course). I had him twice, in 7th and 8th grade math, back to back years of confusing digit hell with the Fat Man.

One thing I did like about math, was the pad of paper they gave you at the beginning of the year. Math paper, they called it. It was a very light greyish brown bland color, with tiny, very tiny flecks of brown sprinkled on it, and it had a texture that loved a good Number 2 pencil.

I did alot of figuring and erasing and failing on the paper on that pad, but I did enjoy the pad itself. I liked the way lead pencil marks looked on it, and the feeling in my fingers when the pencil scratched at it. It made me feel like a scientist or a discoverer, even though I had no idea what I was doing. And so I used that paper for other things, too. I drew pictures and wrote goofy poems and once used it to start my first novel, "Mr. Huffininkle", which was intended to be a biography about my pet turtle of the same name. The cover came out pretty well, and so did the first chapter (well, paragraph), but it has yet to be published.

When Mr. Urquhart gave tests, he passed out the questions on freshly mimeographed sheets, cold and fumey, with purple typing. We would have to hand those sheets back in at the end, of course. Then he told us to take that math paper and fold it down the middle, making two columns. In the left column, you would do your figuring, and in the right column, record your answer. I suppose this made it easier for him to grade the papers without having to review the method of those kids who he knew would get the answers right anyway.

I failed one of those tests, and I was so upset and embarrassed, that I laughed and laughed and whispered to my friends directly to the north, south and west of me what I had done. They smiled uncomfortably, but I was determined to show everyone how brave I was, how cool I was to not be upset about this.

Mr. Urquhart called me out. He looked down at me, over those greasy glasses sliding his chubby nose :"It's really not funny, Linda. There is nothing funny about this."

Laughter quickly gave way to a hot red face, tears rimming my eyes, and feeling as if I had been locked in the stocks, up front, for all to see and make fun. God I hated that man.

Two weeks later, after a great deal of study and effort, we had another test. It was given on a Friday morning. On Friday afternoon, during Study Hall, I asked for a hall pass to check my test score in the Math Teachers office, and when he told me I had received an A+, he delivered the news with the same patronizing tone as he did when I had failed. I was thrilled for one moment, and sick the next when I realized what was going on.

He thought I had cheated.

I don't remember my final grade that year, or any year for that matter, until my freshman year in college, when my final grade of D was granted only because dear Mrs. Logan let me gain extra points by writing a math paper (her husband was my writing instructor, admired my work, and I believe he had a hand in this). The paper was about games you could play with numbers, though I never really understood the games, I told about them and it was well written.

Many of us think back on teachers who touched us, motivated and inspired us, but I really did not have too many of these. How messy to help an already awkward young teen to feel bad about herself, shame on you.

I think about that pad of paper every once in while, though, and while it was useful to some for solving problems, it was useful to me as a canvas for anything, anything other than

MATH.