Things my father taught me
I want to teach. I want to teach because I love people, I love learning and I love to talk. I also want to teach because I feel that I know so much that I ought to share it. I don’t mean to sound snobbish: most of the “things I know” are simple things, like why you should be patient or how to tie a shoe. I can’t remember where I learned most of the things I know, but many of which I do remember, my father taught me.
My father is a professor. He works as an engineer or a manager or some combination of the two, but at his core he is a professor. He is probably a very good manager, but he is a fantastic professor. My dad teaches as you live. I never learned anything from him because he was helping me with homework, I learned things from him because he was talking to me. My dad knows about numbers and physics because that is what he went to school for. Some of the things I learned from him where about this; many others came from the pages of whatever 700-page book he happened to be reading.
You probably have never thought about why you walk kitty-corner when you can. I mean, maybe you do walk from one corner to the one diagonally opposed from it to save some time, but you probably don’t think about it. I walk kitty-corner every chance I get. I dislike having to walk through plowed paths in the winter because you are denied the simple freedom of walking in a diagonal line between to corners.
When I was a kid, my sister, my dad and I were standing in a corner, I can’t remember where. I remember that three paths converged at the point where we were standing, or maybe there weren’t any paths and it was an open field: as I said, I can’t remember. In any case, there were two paths meeting at a right angle in front of us and a longer one that cut right through the middle of the angle. My dad asked us what was the quickest way to get to the other side of the field/street/wherever we were. My sister and I quickly answered that it was the diagonal path, but when he demanded to know why, our only explanation was to point.
My father explained to us that while the diagonal path is in fact longer than any of the two straight paths, it is shorter than both of them combined. He explained how, given the measurement of both of the shorter paths he could figure out the length of the diagonal. I was impressed. It’s Pythagoras’s theorem, he explained. And on he continued with a description of the formula.
Years later, or maybe months, I learned in school about Pythagoras’s theorem. The teacher drew a triangle with three sides in the blackboard to explain it. It lacked life. The sides were named a, b and c, for one thing. If you could name things anything you wanted, wouldn’t you choose better names than a, b and c? I know I would. That day I drew the triangle in my notebook and I wrote the formula, but when I think about it today (and I do) I always remember walking with my dad and I remember walking down the middle path.
My school was fooled into thinking that they taught me many other things that really I learned from my dad. They think they taught me about how checks are cleared. My school told me about it in a class, sure. But my father taught me. Thanks to his explanation, this is how I imagine checks are cleared: at the end of the day very big guys in suits from all the banks in the country sit in a round table. Then one guy says to the other that he has a million dollars in checks deposited in his bank that are really from that guy’s bank. The second guy says that’s ok and that he has a billion dollars in checks deposited in his bank that came from that first bank, so there. So they subtract a billion from a million and the first guy’s bank pays the second guy’s bank and then they move on to another guy and his bank and his millions of dollars.
I recognize that this is not a very advanced explanation. The guys don’t even have names and their table doesn’t have a name. I know that, but if there really aren’t any guys coming home late because they are subtracting a billion from a million, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.
From my father I also learned not to run in the rain. I don’t think that was what he intended to teach, but it is what I learned when I was nine, or maybe ten. We were leaving an event (Disney On-Ice, if you must know) and it was pouring outside. Like most of the attendees, we had parked very far away. To our right and to our left one excited child and one worried parent after another ran under the rain, in the hopes that their ability to sprint would guarantee them a somewhat drier arrival to the car. My sister and I were ready to run right along with them, but my dad stopped us. “No matter how fast you run,” he said, “you will get completely wet as soon as you are not under the roof anymore.” People running around in drenched clothing confirmed his point. Instead, we took the sweaters we were clutching and stashed them in a plastic bag. Then we stepped out, got completely wet in about one and a half seconds and walked to the car. I’ll always remember that walk. I hardly ever run in the rain anymore. Even though many years have passed since I was nine or ten, I try to keep my sweater dry as I walk in the rain.
In his peripatetic style, my father also taught me about work. What I mean here is not work as in “life and work,” but rather “work” as in “work equals force times acceleration.” I learned about that as we raced to the top of the stairs at a water park to partake in our own water sliding speed competition. Here I am using the word learned very broadly. More accurately my dad taught and explained, and I raced up the stairs to see if what he was saying was true. It was true and it was fun to watch the results, which were only occasionally spoiled by a contestant with an unfair weight advantage.
I never really put the concept of work into practice. I used it a couple of times in high school physics class, but since then I’ve hardly thought about it. I now think about words and poems and some of the other things I learned from my dad and from his books and from his occasional poets. I think about how I would rather think that I am close to arriving than actually arriving. I think about words and countries far away. And I think of my family and my dad. I think of how he likes how I write and I think of the things he has taught me. And I think Knowing That I remember What I've Taught Me will make him happy.
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