Pencils and Parallelograms

9 5 10

by joyceholt

by joyceholt

During the first weeks of summer vacation, 2024, our grandson Simon came over several times -- a five-minute jog for someone his age, even burdened by a backpack bulging with math handouts.

No, he wasn't doing make-up work or remedial summer school.

A seventh grade grad, he had brought home all the course materials for eighth grade math. If he could complete it over the summer, Simon could take ninth grade math when he entered eighth grade in the fall. Ambitious kid!

His mom (our daughter) had taken one look at the challenging problems and suggested Simon ask us for tutoring.

Each time, after spreading out the handouts on the table, Simon would check his bag and say, "Oh rats, I forgot my pencil again."

No worry. An office drawer with nearly fifty years of accumulated odds and ends meant plenty of pencils. Our electric pencil sharpener had lasted maybe one decade, the hand-cranked one a little longer. Now all we had were the little dime-store gadgets you twist around the tip of the pencil. (Dime store. That really dates me.)

I'd sharpen one pencil or two, and we'd set to work deciphering the math concepts. Set theory. Linear equations with two variables. Stuff I hadn't seen since I was his age. Good thing we still had a a few math books on the shelf.

While I was still grappling with the concepts, Simon would say, "I get it," and set to work. I'd reread, crank the brain, do an online search to fill in the blanks, and scan his work mere seconds before he flipped the page for a new challenge.

At some point there would come a mistake. Simon would swap the pencil around and try to erase, then give me an exasperated look.

Yup, we had petrified erasers.

I'd dig out the old grade school eraser, the stubby pink kind which has a parallelogram for a cross section. It too had a petrified outer layer, but I'd filed one end down to the fresh rubbery pith beneath.

Soon there'd be eraser chaff all over the table from the flipping of corrected pages.

These fun but challenging sessions petered out once Simon's mom discovered the school's tips and training for the course online. Now he could do it all at home.

Again our pencils lie unused in the drawer. The filed end of the big pink eraser slowly hardens once more.

prompt: eraser

Thank goodness for online searching abilities. Google served as the file to scrape through age-stiffened mental processes to memories from my youth -- the good old days when I devoured one math concept after another. Google, the un-eraser of the mind.