Automatic Arithmetic
This laundry facility
in my apartment
building will
now close daily
at 10:00 pm
and reopen daily
at 9:00 am. (Find
your honesty. Be
a good person.)
I wrote
a poem
in 4th
grade.
It was
called
“Math”
and my
5th grade
teacher, per-
haps even un-
beknownst to me
entered it into some
sort of scholastic state-
wide contest. I don’t
know
if I have a copy of the poem
presently, but I remember many
of its lines (the first two of which
were “Math is hard, very hard/
Addition, subtraction, division.”)
which, for me, is pretty unusual (to
remember a line from anything, that is
and it rhymed: ABAB, ABAB; the word
hard was paired
with guard, division with
supervision, etc.). When I was in 7th grade
I learned that the poem had won,
that it had
been published in the winning
anthology. I
thought it was cool, but I had pretty much
moved on from poetry by then.
All of my
science and math teachers were also coaches
(football, basketball, gymnastics, etc.) when
I was in 7th grade. Mainly coaches or Primarily
coaches are two
phrases which immediately come
to mind. We students even
addressed them as “Coach
[so and so]”. When I was
in 7th grade, my science teacher,
the high school football coach, turned beet red with anger
(at something I cannot remember) and threw an entire desk
(complete with the chair, like the desks in pretty much
any classroom of that particular era) out the window
and onto the grass that grew next
to the building that housed the high
school which I
attended.
