Page 114 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
an editor, was the editor-in-chief of the Penguin. Perhaps because of nepotism, I did get some pieces to write but none that I can remember with specificity. That’s just about it for the strictly academic memories, except for trying and failing in math class to master the slide rule—a seventeenth-century ruler-like device (based on logarithms) that was used for multiplication and division (no more tables to memorize!) and was mastered only by those who wore pocket protectors—a device that was, in any event, totally eclipsed by the pocket calculator.
I suppose that there were four other memorable things that I learned from the Hudde teachers, but none of them was entirely academic:
First and foremost in my educational development was the social studies class, in which all of the boys learned very little history, but not for failing to be attentive; they did pay a great deal of attention to Miss Brachfeld, our teacher, who was much younger than the women whom we encountered as our teachers in elementary school and a good exam- ple of what the girls in our class might become, assuming, of course, that they received the proper nourishment.
Second, there was typing class, where I learned to place my hands on the keyboard such that if I rapidly alternated using my left and right index fingers, which is about all that I recall doing, I could produce fjfjfjfj without much difficulty, but also without much use (except in the unlikely event that I would someday be writing to my parents from Norway). I never got to the point where I could flawlessly produce “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” in less than thirty seconds, which might have improved my grade.
Third, there was my stint in the class designed to train the Andries Hudde Junior High School Orchestra, which was roughly coextensive with the period during which I took private lessons on the B-flat clari- net, which period, the attentive reader will recall, was abruptly, and thankfully, terminated when I fractured my left thumb. It was fortunate that it was not the right thumb. For those of you who are not classically trained, I point out that the left thumb operates both a tone hole and the register key of the clarinet, and is thereby crucial to the sound that is emitted, while the right thumb does nothing other than to brace the
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