i'm home alone, listening to elliott (smith) and thinking about writing
i haven't actually been writing-- i'm just thinking about writing
even that's kind of a lie because i started off thinking about writing and now i'm thinking about my high school math teacher
it's not completely unrelated
(writing and my math teacher)
because i was going to write about high school
so first of all i just want to acknowledge that it's probably a good thing that i'm not thinking about my high school english teacher because i haven't fucking used a capital letter or correct punctuation since college-- and even then i just relied on microsoft word
anyway. high school. math teacher. right.
here's the thing about me and math-- we're not friends. we don't speak the same language. no comprende. luckily my high school math teacher was a saint.
he wore dockers. usuaslly they were brown or green but every once in a while he wore navy blue and the thing about the navy blue pair, was that they had this random red string on one of the seams that i always wanted to cut off.
and he also ate a lot of oranges which kind of intrigued me because he had this way of peeling them without getting that white shit all over his hands. (maybe there was some kind of mathamatical trick to it). it's something i will never know-- (much like the quadratic formula).
i can't say that i really tried to understand alegebra-- in high school i had other things to think about. i wanted to pay attention, but like, i couldn't....
i mean, i wasn't the only one-- the girl who sat in front of me was always obsessing about whether or not to "save herself" until she was married and the boy who sat next to me always fell asleep. at least he tried to fall asleep but the math teacher wouldn't let him.
that was the thing about my high school math teacher. he noticed things.
like in freshman year, that line at the top of the paper where you're supposed to write your name-- i used to write "the mega-loser". like i wrote it there in all my classes but my high school math teacher was the only one who used to write little notes back. always in red pen. i don't remember what the notes said, i just remember that he cared enough to write them.
he also cared enough to meet with me before school started (at some ungodly hour that was in no way intended for math) to try explain how in alegebra-- letters could equal numbers. (i told you he was a saint.) he tried his best to explain it before 8 am and i still didn't understand because i was always trying to figure out if there was coffee in the cup he was drinking from or something else. maybe it was orange juice?
it's weird how in high school, your teachers know all kinds of shit about you but you don't know anything about them. it's weird how in high school, you don't really want anyone to care about you, but you're kind of happy to know that someone does. like, care about you.
i guess that's why i cried when i found out he was leaving.
when you're in high school, you don't always say what you mean. like i wanted to say thank you (to my high school math teacher), for everything i already wrote and even some other stuff that i didn't write, but instead i gave him a bag of oranges.
15 years ago, a bag of oranges sufficed.
now, if i could, i would say thank you to my high school math teacher. i might even tell him that he was the single most important teacher i had there. not because of his mathamatic genius or brilliant teaching skills, (seriously i never used alegebra again-- not even in college) but because he sent me to the guidance office. he knew what was up and he knew i was down and he didn't ignore it.
anyway, if i could, i would tell him that i noticed, you know, like that he noticed, and that it meant a lot to me.
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