Mr. William (Bill) Savage, math teacher hero.

Mr. Savage, my 7th and 8th grade math super-teacher, is retiring at the end of the school year and now I'm so very sad. I can't remember professors' names from eight months ago, but I still remember (most) everything that Mr. Savage taught us about the Pythagorean Theorem and can recite the Quadratic Formula because he made us recite it all the time in 7th grade Algebra. 

I still remember that for some scheduling reason or another, we had 7th grade math on the stage at the end of the cafeteria for the first semester. Second semester we had math class in an art classroom. 

His favorite book was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I always remembered that and finally got around to reading it senior year of high-school just because I wanted to read Mr. Savage's favorite book. 

When he got mad, he used to take this huge tub he had of those orange goldfish snack things into the hallway and crush them. It was his meditation and when he calmed down, he'd come back into the room and carry on with whatever proof we were learning that day.

Every year he got what was likely the most annoying group of kids to be assembled into one middle school class that year. That's because he had the distinction of teaching the one section per grade of super-advanced math (where advanced math was one year ahead in the curriculum, we were two years ahead). Do you know what happens when you put a few dozen 12-year-olds in one room and tell them they're the smartest of the bunch? They become unbearable. This past school year I volunteered a few times in various middle school classrooms and the 'advanced' sections were always the hardest to deal with — they have attitude and they want to prove their smarts. Silly kids!

But seriously, Mr. Savage. He's the greatest. Oh, his pants and hands were always, always covered in yellow dust from the chalk. I have no idea how he accumulated so much more chalk dust on his clothes than every other teacher in the school. 

One day he taught us nota bene. I've been throwing NB's in my emails and notes and GChats ever since. 

I had nine years of education after having Mr. Savage for eight grade geometry. And while I can tell you that Mr. Savage made us watch "Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land" (which Wikipedia says was released in 1959) and can explain to you the golden ratio because of that movie, the names of even my favorite college professors, whom I followed around for several classes, escape me. 

I did not mean to write that much about Mr. William (Bill) Savage, the greatest middle school math teacher ever. In summation: middle school teachers probably do not get paid nearly enough for the awesome impact they have. 

Hostage or president

According to some man on CSPAN radio today, President Obama is, like Carter before him with real hostages, "being held hostage by the economy." 

Except, what? No. These sorts of digressions, while I'm sure fascinating for the pundits and commentators who make them, are worthless. What is being president if not to take some responsibility when Americans are taken hostage because of your foreign policy or when the economy continues to suck because you bungled up the recovery and are seen as being amenable to the big bad banking guys. That's not being a hostage, that's being a mediocre president. 

Superpowers.

I used to think of my ability to concentrate on reading in the most unlikely and uncomfortable places was something akin to a superpower. For example, sitting outside yesterday for several hours, oblivious of the mosquitoes. But behold, on waking up this morning I find out that every bug in existence has taken a feeding turn at my skin, sucking out blood and leaving me with a dozen itchy blotches that I'm going to scratch until I go crazy. 

View from my kitchen table.

Character.

Good posture had always been important to him, the sort of posture most boys his age didn’t bother with. A full beard covered his youthful face, making it harder to pin him down in age, but his shoes — often Toms, the au courant signifiers of hipness, often in bright colors — suggested something of youth, a spot of nonconformity in an otherwise rule-abiding life. It was this that had initially attracted his ex-wife to him; it was also what pushed her away two years into the marriage — when she realized that a whole life couldn’t be built around only spots of interest and spontaneity. Having lived her own life within the lines, a bit of the subversive lived inside her. A career and robust coffers gave her an out, a chance she tried to take. For three months, she was able to pretend that she was chasing a dream.

Aspirations — from the Latin aspirare, from ad- ‘to’ + spirare ‘breathe.’

She would fail, this was obvious from the beginning — don’t bother with words like fate or destiny; this wasn’t inevitable, it was merely the only option. If she’d known more about what it was she was trying, this is information she would’ve had before she quit her job and tried to make a go of it, before she eschewed the identity of her previous ten years and tried to make a new one modeled on a concept she misunderstood. Not having a corporate job, not wearing a suit, at first felt like freedoms, decisions she had made about her life on her own. But, would you believe it, in a few weeks it no longer felt like a privilege. Sweatpants may have been comfortable, but, where on the first day she wore them while sitting at the kitchen table, back straight and lips curled in a perma-smile, twelve weeks later she had lowered her standards on the sniff test and in unwashed, coffee splashed sweats she was still in bed at noon.