Painting Chinese by Herbert Kohl

Author:Herbert Kohl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2007-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

By my fourth semester, I had become part of the landscape of the school. Parents nodded at me. Joseph had told a few of the older students that I was a professor and a writer, and every once in a while they asked me a question about getting into college or about my work. One Wednesday, Grace, a sixth-grade student who was in a more advanced painting class, was doing her homework in the outer room while waiting to be picked up by her mother. I had never said a word to her before, but she called me over as I was about to leave and asked me to help her with her math homework. Of course I agreed, thoroughly confident I could still do sixth-grade work. After all, I had minored in math at Harvard in the 1950s.

As best as I can reconstruct it, the problem, which was in the advanced challenges section of Grace’s algebra book, was:

Given a and b as labeled on the diagram, find the length x.

I sat down and started to work on the problem. Clearly, the characteristics of right triangles had to be involved in the solution. I began to fiddle around with the Pythagorean theorem and with labeling all of the other sides of the diagram. And then I panicked. Grace was watching me, and waiting parents were watching me. I felt sure that Joseph was watching me, too, but the next week he reassured me that he wasn’t paying attention and that the event wasn’t important. But it was important to me.

I could not develop a solution to the problem and gave up. I apologized to Grace for my ineptness and muttered something about old age and forgetfulness as I left the storefront with my head down. I had failed miserably in their presence, and it humiliated me. My calm cover had been blown; I had slipped back into that tense, insecure, competitive mode that Joseph’s teaching and my painting had begun to liberate me from.

During the next week, I carried a copy of the problem in my pocket, and the more I tried to solve it, the harder it seemed. I even entertained the idea that the textbook had an error or that I had copied it down incorrectly. Most of geometry had slipped out of my mind, as I never had occasion to use it. I behaved the way many of my students do when they experience initial failure. Failure provides frustration, which leads to additional panic and reinforcement of the feeling of failure. Finally, I asked some friends to help me with the problem, but geometry had slipped away from them, too. It would have been wiser for me to ask some sixth graders for help. In fact, I asked Grace about the problem a few weeks later, and she told me that one of her classmates had helped her solve the problem the evening she had asked me.

This was not the first time I had forgotten something I had once known.

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