Inside what is known as first hour the desks are smashed together in fours, each of us facing the other, a shared island of first day anxiety each student, in a way, groping the glossy sheen of their recently issued ADVANCED ALGRBRA textbook like a life vest for fear they might drown in a pawing surf of polynomials, littered integers and equations that always seem to start with a conspicuously planted x.
For the most part all the Christ Lutheran kids sit together and all the Calvin Coolidge and St. Marks kids form cadres of thought with their elbows.
The teacher in the front of the classroom is diminutive in stature and has black hair and glasses and could pass for a lesbian version of Mr. Peabody from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon say for a picture of her wedding planted on the corner of her desk. She has a gentle voice laced with what can only be described as feminine sandpaper. Purportedly the year before went by a different last name. Patrick will later joke that the only person who could possibly marry that mathematical Nazi is a Texas instrument. Everyone is still somewhat reticent and unsure bathed in a succinct sterility attached to the interior of Mrs. Donahue’s classroom. It looks like the inside of an arctic thermometer. Even the bulletin boards are rather bland featuring triangles and cutouts of protractors.
She commences to tackle equations on the board. She is calling on us randomly to walk up to the board and rectify the equation, to make the scrawled hieroglyphs balance out like a statue of Justice holding a diminutive scale.
Almost inexplicably Mrs. Peabody seems to have some sort of vendetta against our class. She is barking only because her voice seldom elevates above a gentle yawn.
Last summer Mom rented educational mathematical courses so I wouldn’t fall behind when I entered high school Algebra now I feel like eunuch. I feel empty. I feel that I don't know anything.
I look around, my countenance a periscope tuning Mrs. Donahue-Peabody out. She seems to have received some sort of preliminary record of our grades and is chewing us out from the outset of already being behind.
I tell him we had some of it at Christ Lutheran but that most of it is lexicon of digits.
There is one equation and no one can get it.
It is the first day of class and Mrs. Peabody is assigning what she calls remedial make up homework.
As the bell shrills into cognizance she tells the classroom that we can be prepared for a long year.
No comments:
Post a Comment