Logic 101

In high school I failed Economics. Passionately! It wasn't that I was stupid. I can't admit to that but I do to having placed myself in an adversative position against my Economics teacher, Dr. Klein. Well, that's stupid as attitudes go.

Attitudes and capacity are different mechanics. The former is affected by a choice while the latter is our fortune that we're more or less stuck with. If the wise-assed challenges to teachers would disappear, students' capacity to learn would find an unmolested level from which interests would find their way to vocations.

It wasn't Dr. Klein's fault that I did so poorly in Economics. There he was, at the desk looking out on his flock every new season and his job was to turn the ignorant into would-be economists. He got a good one out of our gang, Bob Damerjian, who rose to prominence in the Philadelphia business community. Maybe there were others. So, he was a success as a teacher.

Edwin Stein has died. His recent passing was noted prominently in the newspapers because he was good, both as a teacher and as author of teaching methods of Algebra, of texts that had great circulation. Dr. Stein was tough, abrasive and demanding. He pampered the girls in class and we, the boys, supposed him to be a flirt and we were annoyed by it. Actually he was a wit and no-one avoided his attention.

"Stuckert, what are you doing?"

"Nothing."

"And that's what you get." He marked down a zero, calling it a "goose-egg." Laughter.

Hey, that's my friend and we were at war with Dr. Stein. We, thirteen year-olds supposed him a wise-ass. That's stupid. Too much of this "attitude" raises suspicion about what is an attitude and what our capacity to understand might be. Retreating from logic and hiding in a nest of goose-eggs has its own defense. "What do I need from Algebra (or any math)? After all, I don't need all that for what I plan to do in life."

What?

The retreat had a false-face that wrongly was assumed to be aggressive. Here's math moved from grammar school tables to higher forms and all of it is absolute logic. That's made for young un-cluttered minds and their teachers give them instruments, papers and pencils and sliderules,that become weapons to do battle for logic. It's too bad that some fight the messenger instead of the secrets begging to be unlocked.

Per-be each home from whence these little children come to be tutored has to reflect each day's learning by encouragement if not by matching kens — an unlikely and unexpected gift. Too often, though, indifference turns sharp little minds dull and they are subtly set adrift. O, shades of Skinner, society needs familiar discouragements and chance bad influences to keep us all from being bright. For who would be our un-skilled labor and garbage men and farm-food pickers and caddie toads and orderlies and janitors to pick up the slop of the advantaged and be fodder for guns abroad and at home?

To us, the boys in eighth grade, Miss Friedman was sheer perfection. Miss Friedman was our home-room teacher.

What a treat to start the day. Anyone with blood in his veins would agree to that. Barbara Kelly, Joan Janavel, Virginia McClay, Madeline McCrae, Ginny Schubert, and Nancy Adams, all our peers, fell to insignificance when Miss Friedman came into the room. We blabbered about her to (really) even our parents. Sheesh? Puppy love reigned.

Whatever the great were, the Dr. Kleins and Dr. Steins and the likes of Miss Carlin (Latin's gift to its catechumens), they fell undeservedly before Miss Friedman. Whatever she taught, then just out of college and in subsequent years, is not known to me. Then we were little kids who thought we knew a good thing when we saw it. That's proof that we were little kids. Hopefully she grew beyond pretty charms. I'm sure she did because teaching then, with its inadequate pay, was a great vocation. No doubt she's retired. Maybe she's a frumpy great-grandmother and maybe she has a thirteen year old great-grandson who doesn't have a clue about what other thirteen year olds idolized her for a zillion years ago. He loves her for a more legitimate reason.

My failure to see greater beauty was expensive. As I grew older my ability to absorb knowledge became more difficult. Thirteen year olds do have some advantages, to be sure. If I have a headache and reach for that child proof aspirin bottle, I wish a thirteen year old was around to open it.

Miss Friedman, as we knew her and worshipped her, has disappeared. But Isidore Klein and Edwin Stein and Miss Carlin (and probably Miss Friedman as we didn't know her) left better imprints when children( suppressing queer attitudes gathered from less savory sources) gathered in their teachers' thoughts with enthusiasm equal to their not quite carnal fantasies.