REFLECTIONS UPON A PERFECT SQUARE

By J. R. Salling

My pleasant mood shaken by the obvious inattention of the class upon questioning, I took a slow breath and decided to explain the concept again. It never helps to show impatience. Not all of my students were fooled. I slapped the markers on top of the overhead with a little too much authority, my voice a little too saccharine. Once I began to break down the algorithm again, however, my audience almost didn’t matter. I lost them in the multi-colored haze of mathematics projected above me, lights on a stage.

After a short time, I cut off my careful exposition mid-sentence. The students failed to notice, their heads turned toward the hall. I snapped the cap back on the marker. “Your eyes need to be up front,” I suggested with a long sigh, “or you’ll struggle with these problems on the test.” Their whispers died down. Then I noticed. Outside our door an argument was taking place. I recognized the two antagonists without difficulty, Mr. Heely, who taught science in the adjacent classroom, and Josh Evans, his voice so unusually deep for a 14 year old that it was unmistakable. They had knocked heads before, but I had never heard the child so upset. He bellowed a slur of words I could not translate, the language of a clubbed seal, his distress echoing down every corridor.

Five minutes later the classes rotated. Josh shuffled in and squeezed under his desk, his frame every bit the match of his voice, oversized, blunt, coarse. Our eyes met for a second, his reddened and watery, mine cautious, suggesting that I was prepared to react to any outbursts, but sympathetic to their cause.

At least I felt sympathy. Mr. Heely may be a more experienced teacher than myself but struck me as one to play favorites, even to antagonize the “ruffians,” as he called students like Josh, without cause. It fuels my speculation that I was once considered something less than a model student myself and well remember how a slap at home seemed to invite another at school. For too many children the cycle of ridicule, rejection, and alienation is continuous, a future of nothingness all they see ahead of them. That’s why I teach. That’s why I’m here. To break the cycle, if only for a single student.

Josh’s classmates said nothing, not even to one another. They had never been so quick to open their texts, so focused and waiting for direction. His implosion sucked the life from everyone. Normally I would have been elated at such obedience, albeit superficial, and jumped right into the lesson. Distracted by the problem of how to help him without calling greater attention to his state, I hesitated to begin, unable to remember the topic. For each moment that passed, the odds grew that my students would fill the void with private conversations. I straightened papers and risked another glance toward Josh. He remained passive and detached; a stranger to me. He had never sat so still in my class before, even for a few seconds. His features, I recalled, always seemed a blur. Now I saw them, really saw them, crisp and clear.

Observations have minds of their own. We make associations and assumptions that often go unchallenged and unspoken. The first thing I noticed, indulging the common human weakness for physiognomy, was the shape of his head. His close cropped hair drew attention to the flatness of the cranium, which was a neat reflection of his rectangular jaw. And, most surprising, the whole appeared to be as wide as it was tall. At that very moment a simple synaptic collision occurred, causing the topic of my lesson to come back to me. If only I had managed to look away again. But there I was, our eyes connected, when my face erupted into a broad grin.

His troubled brow darkened.

Josh could not be blamed for misunderstanding. With that ill-timed, inappropriate expression I became just another authority figure to him, another intolerant adult, if not inclined to punish, then to mock. Instead of helping to tear down the barrier he had been building around himself, a castle of exile, of isolation, of bitter loneliness, damn it, I had cemented the capstone in place.

How could I explain that it was not his troubles which amused me? A solution elusive, I moved on with the lecture. “Today, class...” I started, then paused to clear my throat and dig my fingernails into the palm of my free hand, my gaze as far away as possible from the face of Josh’s peculiar head, afraid all I would see were its four ninety-degree angles and parallel sides. “...we will be looking at the perfect square.”

You have so little time to influence an individual student when, after all, you see a hundred in a day. Every subtle interaction means so much. I failed him. Now that I sit here, attempting to plan tomorrow's lesson, strategies occur to me that might stitch his wound. But I suspect it already suppurates. My thoughts drift to what Artaud once wrote in an essay, No More Masterpieces, “that the theatre is the only place in the world where a gesture once made can never be repeated.” Nor, he might have added, can a stupid one be taken back.

 

END

J. R. Salling, a mathematician and historian, prefers the traditional glazed donuts if you happen to be going by the Krispy Kreme. Look for additional stories in Facsimilation, The Small Pond, Opium Magazine, BlueMag, The Green Tricycle, The Edward Society, Insolent Rudder and Subterranean Quarterly.