The whisper of the axe

[james_davis_nicoll]

[Inspired by someone on my flist exercising caution based on experience and thus not dying in a horrible car wreck]

The closest I've ever come to just being flat-out no take-backs killed involved the route I took home from grade one. We lived in the tutor's residences on Columbia Street. My school was five or six blocks away up Columbia [1] and there were train tracks about a third of the way from home to school. One day I was walking home, tripped just short of the tracks and as I stood back up, a train came through. I could have covered the distance between me and the tracks in the time it took me to get up.



1: Or much longer via a "short cut" I discovered, which looped all around UW campus and took me by the Tuck Shop in V1 (which was only useful if I'd remembered to hide my money: the teacher used to confiscate any loose change the kids had for some charity or other].

Comments

[kuangning]

... I do not even know what thought process makes that possible. 1/3 is, all by itself, just a little more than 3/10, so why would adding 2/7 to that ever add up to 3/10?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's obvious: 2 + 1 = 3 and 7 + 3 = 10. The teacher also didn't have any kind of feel for what fractions represent.

If the kids were lucky, it was not the kind of teacher who sees a correction as an attack. I well remember the heated disagreement I had with my grade four teacher over whether millipedes literally have one thousand legs or not, which is what led to me dumping a bag of them on her desk so we could count legs together.

It's probably a good idea to precede dumping a bag of millipedes on someone's desk with a phrase like " I am about to dump a bag of millipedes on your desk."

[kuangning]

*laughs.* Yes, I would imagine so.

[mr-mediocre.livejournal.com]

One grade five teacher insisted that the street I lived on was not Poplar but Popular. I don't recall any particular consequences of our disagreement other than annoyance, doubtless mutual. A couple of years later I had to haul in an encyclopedia to get my science teacher to grudgingly admit that he'd been wrong about the definition of some term - "blue baby" IIRC.