When We Were Guinea Pigs

I was reading a book on geometry not long ago. I never took geometry in school, and it's a good thing I didn't, because I am hopeless at math. Hopeless. Tell me to add up a column of figures three times and I'll give you three different answers.


If only it had been this simple!

A mediocre student in all of my subjects except English, (I was a champion speller, for what little that was worth)  I nevertheless received only two "Fs" on my report card in all my years between first grade and high school graduation.

Both of those "Fs" were in math classes. In elementary school I was amongst a bunch of kids who did well on the IQ tests the shrinks were always giving kids in the mid-1960s, and as a result I got shuffled into a number of so-called "enrichment" classes.

Unfortunately for me, these classes included "enrichment math," in which I sank like the Titanic. Just because you're good at one thing doesn't mean you're good at everything. I flunked enrichment math in the seventh grade and had to be transferred to "dummy" math, a roomful of snickering little hoodlums whose loftiest aspiration was Juvenile Hall. I just barely squeaked by in "dummy math," and got invited to after-school fights by a number of up-and-coming bullies.

Four years later, in the 11th grade, I flunked basic algebra. I simply could not make sense of all those letters-that-were-supposed-to-stand-for-numbers multiplied and divided by other letters-that-were-supposed-to-stand-for-numbers.  I spent the fall semester of my junior year sitting in the back of the room, silent and hopelessly confused. Beneath my "F" the following January, my algebra teacher (who was also our school's varsity wrestling coach) checked the box marked "Apparent difficulty with subject." Duh. I transferred at midyear to Humanities, which was more my speed: all we had to do was look at paintings, read poems and essays, watch films of people like Toscanini and Jascha Heifetz and then write about what we saw and heard. Easy.

So why, this late in life, was I trying to swot up geometry all of a sudden?  Believe it or not, it was because of an interest in another discipline, namely, philosophy. I never took a philosophy course in college, and decided not long ago that this was a gap in my learning which I might be able to plug with a little self-discipline. I've been reading through Frederick Copleston's nine-volume History of Philosophy.  I'm up to Volume 5. Among the things I learned in Volume 1 was that the Greeks set a great deal of store by a knowledge of geometry. So I went to the public library and checked out a book entitled Geometry Civilized by J.L. Heilbron.

"Civilized" or not, I got as far as Chapter Three before I crashed and burned. Geometry as taught in the modern world involves algebra:

∆ABC≈DEF/HOL (XQG) (CBS/NBC)= (1+1/n)^n ( ≥ A™ C©) (PDQ) = B.S. See ya.

But perusing the early chapters of this popular book on managing triangles, rectangles, etc. I came across an abbreviation which gave me a chill followed by a flood of bad memories:


The slide-rule, obsolete now that everyone
has a calculator built into their iPhone, struck
terror into my heart when I was ten.

SMSG.

It stood for School Mathematics Study Group.

SMSG was the brainchild of 1950s educational do-gooders, in response to the federal government's panic over a perceived dropping-off of technical and scientific skills among American students in the period following World War II. The Cold War was underway now, and the Russians had launched Sputnik, getting into space before we did. Terrified that the Communist bloc was about to outstrip the United States in science and technology, the U.S. government launched an all-out offensive to "catch up."

Naturally, this began with the schools, and suddenly we elementary-school children of the mid-sixties, whose chief tortures until then had been multiplication tables and long division, (bad enough in themselves) were bombarded with what was dubbed the "new math." Each of us was handed a new math textbook, and an arcane, mysterious sliding ruler with tiny numbers and Greek symbols all over it, (of which I could never make head nor tail) and our teachers began hectoring us with things like Base Eight and the binomial system (upon which modern computer programs are based.) You know, the nuts n' bolts, everyday information that everyone needs to know.

Kids who already had a bent for such stuff took to the "new math" like flies to rotten food. The rest of us sat and tuned it out, as bewildered as we were bored. I don't need to tell you that I became hopelessly lost after the new textbook's title page.

Looking back, it was all so stupid. Life and history shake themselves out, and the kids who were destined to be engineers for Boeing or software developers for Bill Gates did well with this junk. The rest of us foundered, and it could have been predicted. Trying to teach abstract mathematical theory to a pack of eleven year-olds who can just manage eight times eight is 64 and have trouble remembering where to put a decimal point is a waste of time.

But that was the sixties for you. There was a general belief that the solutions to many of society's problems were to be found in government, which would issue fiats to school boards, which dumped them on teachers, who in turn had to deal with us little clock-watching scholars, who were waiting only for recess, lunch and 3:15, when we could all go home.

Then there was sex. With the war-baby generation (those born 1939-1945) inventing Free Love on college campuses all over the country, plus the growing popularity of Playboy magazine, the explosion of frank sexuality in literature which followed the lifting of the ban on Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in 1962 and a flood of suddenly-liberated sexual candor in Hollywood, the do-gooders panicked again. Children should be told the facts of life early enough to prepare them for our newly sex-soaked culture. Once again, this being the sixties, it was decided that schools were the best place for children to learn about such things. Parents couldn't be trusted with these delicate matters, only the pros could.

Needless to say, this touched off a nationwide firestorm of hissy-fits on both sides. Some parents did not agree that their children should be learning about sex in the classroom. They should be learning about it the way their parents did: from their peers in the street.

It's been almost 50 years since all this brouhaha blew up, and no doubt educators have become more sophisticated in their methods. But we were on the front lines, we ten-year-olds of 1966, and let me tell you, our teachers and administrators were, to put it mildly, all at sea.

They had been told to teach this stuff to us, but given minimal direction as to how to go about it. And remember, in those days our teachers and administrators were people born between World War I and the Depression, when girls who kissed on the second date were considered loose women, and writers like Hemingway and Norman Mailer were forbidden to use the word "fuck." As those playing cat-and-mouse with the censor will, they came up with an expedient: spelling the word wrong. Hemingway writes of "the mucking tanks" in For Whom The Bell Tolls; 20 years later, in The Naked and the Dead, Mailer did his own end-run by simply foreshortening the word: "Fug you." But by 1963 writers no longer had to resort to such half-measures, and educators soon had themselves a mucking problem: they had to teach us about the birds and the bees and at the same time cope with their own squeamishness about the subject.

Right away they decided that segregation was in order. Little boys and little girls must not be taught about such delicate things in one group. My school was issued two separate and distinct sex education pamphlets: the girls got one called A Girl And Her Body. We boys got one called A Boy And His Physique. The girls were lectured about things such as menstruation in one room; we boys were harangued -- in very vague terms, as I'm sure the girls were too -- in another room. We were strictly enjoined not to discuss with the girls anything we had been told, and the girls were told the same. In other words, our school had been instructed to teach us about sex, but allowing us to talk about it amongst ourselves was where our teachers could draw the line. No guidelines had been issued regarding any such hanky-panky, so it was forbidden.

And of course the prohibition was ignored. By the end of the day some of my playground pals had acquired copies of the "girls' book" and were flashing it around privately, sniggering.

Yes, unfortunately for our teachers, all of this came a bit too late. By 1966 Hollywood had been bombarding the country with push-the-envelope films for several years. The popular James Bond movies, then starring Sean Connery, were notorious for their "sexy" content, and by the time we sat down in "sex ed" class, four entries in the Bond series of films had already hit the silver screen, not to mention then-racy fare like Tom Jones starring Albert Finney and Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. There was no movie rating system then (it wouldn't come along until 1968) and many of my friends had seen these films, although my own mother was very prudish about such things; I wouldn't see my first Bond film for another year.

But the truth is, we kids may not have known about chromosomes and egg cells and sperm cells and DNA and all that jazz, but we were more savvy than our teachers gave us credit for, and the very popular culture for the shock of which they were trying to prepare us was responsible. For us boys of that era, slipping across the street to "the canyon" to hide behind a bush and take peeks at a copy of Playboy that one of us had swiped from his father's den was already a rite of passage.  Dirty talk on schoolyards was as old as schoolyards, and given the prevailing climate, it should have surprised no one that we youngsters already knew a bit about what penises and vaginas were used for besides urination.

To this day I pity the school nurse who had to get up and address us. We sensed how nervous she was with the same acuity that barricuda have for smelling blood. One of my particularly nasty classmates, a freckle-faced, leering little smartass named Dick Shumacher, (think Eddie Haskel) decided to give her a hard time. After she had mumbled her little speech about sperms and eggs, Dick raised his hand and asked, "How is the sperm transferred to where the egg is?" He grinned as he asked this, of course.

And he got the reaction he wanted: the poor old lady nearly choked with embarrassment. "Well, ummm, it comes with mating," she managed to stammer, then changed the subject as quickly as she could. Kids can be so rotten.

Whatever it was that school boards, administrators and teachers were trying to accomplish with all of this, their efforts ultimately served little purpose. What good is teaching ten-year-olds about chromosomes and egg cells? None of us believed that babies came from a vegetable garden; we all knew, even at our tender age, that fucking had something to do with it, and that was the only part of it, at that stage of life anyway, in which we were interested at all. Genetics could wait until college biology class.

Ironically, the only part of the whole deal which aroused (no pun intended) our genuine interest was the one part that our teachers were determined to avoid talking about. Instead, they lectured us on the physical changes in your body which attend puberty (already being experienced by some of us.) Yawn.

Yes, it's true: when we sixth-graders of Kellogg Elementary School in Chula Vista, California, circa 1966, took our seats in the cafeteria to face our first sex-education lectures, we watched our teachers and our school nurse, following the guidelines of our intrepid principal, Mr. Larry P. Blocker, accomplish the impossible.

They managed to make sex as boring as algebra.