Terry Tales

It Figures

I learned to do math with pencil & paper, beginning in first grade with a Big Chief tablet. It came with wide-ruled lines printed in landscape format on rough newsprint paper. We had to ask our teacher for permission to leave our desks to use the wall-mounted pencil sharpener. It felt like a grown-up privilege to walk to the corner by the supply cabinet and operate the crank. Our bright-yellow No. 2 pencils wore down quickly, and needed sharpening often, but then the sharp point would tear through the low-quality paper. And the pink pearl erasers were awful. We made many mistakes and the erasures left ugly gray blotches. A second erasure would often go through the page.

We arranged the numbers in columns, carefully aligning the digits by ones, tens, and hundreds. We’d draw a line under the last number and then add up the ones column, carry over to the tens, add those up, and carry again. The steps were repeated for each column from right to left until the result appeared at the bottom. Subtraction was similar, except for borrowing from the left instead of carrying from the right. The borrowing seemed much more difficult than the carrying. I don’t know why that should be, but it’s still true today.

Addition and subtraction were fairly intuitive, it was easy to see how they were based on simple counting. We could always use fingers & toes if we needed a hint. Still, the practice of two plus two occupied us till 3rd grade. That was when we were introduced to the deeper mysteries of multiplication and division.

The most advanced educational theory of 1965 consisted of rote memorization. We wrote out the times tables on those Big Chief tablets over and over until we developed wrist cramps. The only respite came from Mrs. Garbe’s hi-fi. She had a collection of 45 rpm records that had all the multiplication tables from twos to twelves set to music. Just imagine a classroom full of eight year-olds singing along to ‘eight times eight is sixty-four’. And, the strangest thing was that we enjoyed it. Everyone preferred the sing-along to the hand cramps.

Multiplication turned out to be a sort of shorthand for multiple additions, and division was just shorthand for multiple subtractions. Add, subtract, multiply and divide. Those four functions were all we needed for the next six years. The numbers got bigger, but the basic process remained the same. And, since copying the times tables continued to be assigned as discipline for bad behavior, I wrote them out hundreds of times during many missed recess periods. I’ve forgotten many of my grade-school lessons over the past fifty-plus years, but I will never, ever forget the times tables!

Pencil & paper served until high school and my introduction to the slide rule. A couple of moves to line up the numbers and then the answer could be read directly, without columns of numbers to add up. And not just multiplication, but trig functions, logs, and square roots. I still marvel at how much math is contained in those graduated scales.

But the slide rule quickly gave way to an LED display when my uncle Willie gave me a simple four-function pocket calculator in 1974. It was my personal introduction to the space age, just five years after the first moon landing. And then my dad gave me a Rockwell 63R calculator with scientific functions as my high school graduation present. I know now that it was as crude as using an abacus, but I felt then as though I were joining the crew of the starship Enterprise.

My current smart phone is about the same physical size as that pocket calculator but has more computing power than the room-size mainframe computer that I started using at college in 1976. Looking back, it seems mind-boggling that I went from using a pencil for long division, pretty much skipped over the slide rule, and began writing computer programs in the space of about three years.