Posted in Unexpected

After Hours

Posted on by tq1695

The Internet destroyed mystery
and debate
who was the greatest ballplayer
Ty Cobb
Babe Ruth
Joe DiMaggio?
IPhone + Google + stats = unarguable answer
in seconds.
Backup crew for Apollo 11
scroll…. 3 names
the drummed out drummer
dumped from The Beatles for Ringo
screen flash : Pete Best
obviously not.
And for teachers
homework
that required thought and deduction.

It was a gifted class
top stream
high school mathematics
take home problems
to extend
to challenge.
A priori
impossible to solve with present knowledge.

One pupil does
always
irrespective of difficulty.
His father helps candour admits
as the year progresses
and difficulty
a solution, the correct one, returns each morning.
One day very impressed
she asks is your father a computer program or engineer?
“No Miss, he’s a butcher
he just really likes mathematics.”

Advertisement

Author:

Most of my life has been spent on the bench, occasionally called into the game by extravagance or attenuation. Waiting has turned a loner into a recorder - nondescript and inconsequential, more not noticed than overlooked - the non-vantage point of children not yet considered old enough to understand. Orphaned Islands (Un)poetry is a lifetime of picking anecdotes up and not throwing them away. Stories collected like odds and ends placed in a box in the basement, the garage, the garden shed - uncertain as to what their use might be but knowing that one day there might be one.