You Say Apothem, I Say Opossum

Today I am sharing with you a little blast from my past. Have I always had a thing about opossums? No, I tell you, NO! I’m a cat person!

But then, thanks to the miracles of social media, I recently reconnected with my geometry teacher from ninth grade, and she graciously supplied me with images of a spoof geometry textbook a friend and I had concocted and gave her as a present.

Was it a present? In it, we poked fun at math, geometry, and her. The jokes were all stupid. It is a testament to her good-naturedness and easy sense of humor that she was able to laugh with us. She could see that creativity impelled our spoof, not anything that resembled real dissatisfaction with the subject, the class, or our teacher. (Indeed, we all adored her.)

And she actually kept our little gift after all these years. Seriously, it was spring of 1981 when we finished up ninth grade and geometry class.

So, it was two of us who made our little spoof geometry book. Here’s what we looked like in 1981.

And here’s our spoof alongside a copy of the actual textbook we were using. Notice that I reversed the design of the original book. (How did I do that? Did I use a mirror?)

I’m omitting the names of everyone here to protect both the innocent and the guilty, plus I’m long out of touch with my co-conspirator. He might be a lawyer or politician or something these days, or even have some kind of respectable career, and we don’t want his shady, geometry-ridiculing past to haunt him. What if he became a mathematician? Horrors; he might never live this down, you know?

But when you’re a ninth grader, how can you not make fun of stuff like sober, humorless definitions of the things like “lines” and “points”?

And then they go and name something in geometry an “apothem.”

AN APOTHEM!

Come on! They were just asking for it.

There’s a HILARIOUS photo in our junior high yearbook (yes, where I found the old pictures in this post), no doubt taken within five minutes of the picture of our geometry instructor above. It shows four of us while we’re sitting in geometry class. WHAT is going on with our expressions? We look despondent, horrified, bored, disbelieving! Yeah, that’s my head in the upper left, and it looks like I’m rolling my eyes. (Yeah, I have eye alignment problems in a lot of old photos, but I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the case by ninth grade.) It just cracks me up! Seriously, we didn’t usually look like this in class. At least, that’s not how I remember it. Maybe some other math classes, but not geometry. We all liked geometry.

Okay, maybe we were reacting to a student photographer being in our class. Or maybe it was our usual look about an hour after lunch. We all ate hamburgers, hot dogs, or pizzas, with french fries and a sea of ketchup, every day at lunch. It’s a wonder we didn’t get scurvy. (Or indigestion.) But this was just months before ketchup was deemed a bona fide vegetable, so maybe we were ahead of our time.

I’ll have you know that I did okay in math, including geometry. It’s true, however, that one year of high school math was as far as I got. Boy-howdy, that was my limit. So I jumped for joy when I successfully tested out of math in my college entrance exams, so my undergraduate GPA didn’t have to suffer. Hallelujah!

Anyway, remembering this spoof book (and others I did later on) makes me think that a career in book publishing maybe wasn’t such a stretch for me. The surprise might be that I went into editing instead of graphic design.

Because, yeah, there were more. In high school English class, when we had to go to the school’s Language Arts Resource Center and check out paperback copies of whatever novel we were supposed to be reading, I’d always select a copy that had a completely destroyed cover, or one that was missing.

I would use some card stock and some pens and watercolors to sort of reconstruct the book cover, but I’d do something different. Like when we read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, I copied the cover design exactly, but I had my copy say “As I Die Laughing.” I’d use contact paper to laminate the new cover and affix it to the book. I was really careful. These were sound, decent book covers . . . except for the spoof. I can’t remember any others, but there were a lot of them.

I’d always nonchalantly return them to the LARC at the end of the unit, with a perfectly straight face. I’d make sure my copy wasn’t on the top of the stack, however. But what were they gonna do to me? They were actually in better shape than when I’d gotten them. When I checked them out, I’d note “Condition: no book cover.” When I checked them back in, well, now they had a cover!

Today I wonder how I had the time to do all this nonsense . . . but look at me blogging now, about this and that.

. . . Everyone needs a hobby, huh?