Walking into the Curtis lobby, Tom bumped into Lou Stout, the school’s burly principal, the latter dropping a sheaf of notes filled with algebraic equations. Stooping to pick them up, the skinny science teacher knew he would be guest teaching for an absent colleague.
“Goody Gootstein has a coverage for me. Isn’t there anybody else capable of filling in for the AWOLs?” Tom complained wearily.
“Look at it as a compliment. You’re a popular guy. Even Rosie Murray smiles at you in the hallways,” Stout replied.
“I wish she’d give me more than a smile. Never mind. I’ll do it. What about that assembly program on community volunteering for my friend Amon?” Tom replied, trying to arrange a quid pro quo.
“I hear you. But there’s a protocol to be followed for outside speakers in the schools. Once I get the go-ahead, we’ll do it.”
Later that day, Tom walked into a third-floor classroom carrying a large balance scale, along with several half-pound, one-pound, and two-pound weights. In a large shopping bag, Tom removed a couple cans of soup, a jar of peanut butter, and a large box of Wheaties. The skinny science teacher also had a deflated soccer ball. As expected, students reacted with a mixture of dismay, joy, confusion, and curiosity.
“What are we doing today? Learning how to cook?” Manny called out from the back of the room.
“Nah. Mr. Haley missed his lunch period. So now he’s gonna eat with us,” Barry chimed in.
“Not really. We’re gonna do some math. And hopefully show the connection between math and food,” Tom replied.
“I know the connection between math and food. If the number of calories you eat is bigger than the number of calories you burn off, then you get chubby … like Miss Bracelet over there,” Barry snapped.
“Shove it up your ass,” Lora responded, rattling her copper bracelets and anklets angrily.
“Enough, both of you. Suppose I wanted to weigh this big box of Wheaties with the balance scale. How would I do it?” Tom asked the class.
Ronnie raised her hand. “Put the Wheaties on one scale, and add weights to the other scale until they balance.”
Following the student’s instructions, Tom kept adding small weights to the pan opposite from the Wheaties until an equilibrium was achieved.
“It looks like it weighs a little less than a pound,” Ronnie observed.
“Well, the box says one pound,” Tom read.
“You sure you didn’t sneak some before class?” Barry asked Lora, who responded by throwing a wadded paper ball at the teenager.
“Maybe General Mills is cheating the public. Let’s weigh those soup cans,”
Manny called out from the back of the room.
The cans also seemed to weigh slightly less than a pound. Tom asked for a conclusion.
“Maybe your balance scales are inaccurate,” Wendy asserted. She was a pretty teenager whose intelligence was as noteworthy as her appearance.
“Well, these science apparatuses have been around as long as Curtis High School itself,” Tom replied. The St. George school was built around the turn of the century, as the formidable stone gargoyles on its facade indicated.
Barry raised his hand, and Tom got ready for a non sequitur. “When it comes to cereal, Wheaties and Cheerios come in different-size boxes. So how do you compare their prices?”
“That’s an excellent question. What’s the answer?”
Riner, a serious student, raised his hand. “I’d buy the larger box. It’s cheaper because companies save money on packaging.”
“That depends on the item. Sometimes the jumbo size is not cheaper. It’s a scam,” Lora exclaimed.
“You should buy the no-frills brand—they’re always cheaper,” said Marty, who seemed to know a lot about marketing and economics.
“Only cheapos buy no-frills stuff. I buy name brands like Wheaties, Skippy, Franco-American, Chock Full o’ Nuts, and Campbells,” Barry replied, reading the labels of the displayed items.
Marty mumbled something about welfare spendthrifts, and Barry got up from his seat and loomed over Marty, sitting at his desk. “What did you say about welfare? My family works for a living, chump!”
Tom sprang from his spot behind the teacher’s desk and inserted himself between Barry and Marty, the latter of whom remained seated but looked perplexed and intimidated. “Now sit down! Before I send you both to the dean.”
“Good. I’ll kick his ass on the way to the dean’s office,” Barry shouted.
“That’s your only answer to criticism—punching somebody in the face. Grow up already!” Lora yelled, shaking her bracelets and anklets loudly.
Tom wondered why the current crop of kids were so prone to fighting at the smallest provocation. He remembered his own high school days, when fisticuffs were rare occurrences. Of course, he was in the honors “x” class, where arguments were mostly verbal and concerned the merits of rival baseball teams and occasionally entered the political realm. With the backdrop of the raging Vietnam War, Tom’s generation seemed to be focused on peaceful means of settling differences. Notwithstanding teenage passions and rivalries, his classmates seemed to genuinely like one another. With the current racial, ethnic, class, and political differences wracking the country, social cohesion was notably absent in 1970s America.
Glancing at Mrs. Murray’s notes, Tom asked the class about unit price.
“It’s the price per pound,” Wendy answered.
“That’s correct,” Tom said, turning to write the unit price formula on the board: Unit Price = Price/Quantity.
Next, he placed several unit price problems on the blackboard:
Ex 1: Compute the unit price of a 12-ounce can of soda that costs 52 cents.
Ex 2: Compute the unit price of a 16-ounce can of soup costing 77 cents.
Ex 3: Compute the unit price of an 18-pound turkey that costs $11.69.
The class was given a few minutes to work out the solutions, and then Tom had Lora, Barry, and Wendy place the answers on the board:
Ex 1: 4.3 cents/oz
Ex 2: 4.8 cents/oz
Ex 3: $0.65/lb
“So what are you gonna do with those balance scales, weigh Lora?” Manny called out from the back of the room.
“How about weighing your balls? They’re probably weightless,” she responded, jangling her copper bracelets.
“Why don’t you come back here and see for yourself?” Manny responded with a snarl.
At that point, Tom dispatched Manny to the dean, incurring protests from the boys that he favored the girls—especially his pet, Lora. Ignoring the uproar, Tom wrote an algebraic equation on the board: 2X – 13 = 25.
“To solve this equation, we are going to use the principle of the balance scale—whatever you do to one side, you have to do the same thing to the other side.”
Tom demonstrated the principle of algebraic equivalence by adding a pound to one side and then adding the same weight to the other side to restore the balance. He further demonstrated the equivalence principle by removing equal weights from each side of the balance scale.
Lora raised her hand. “Can we weigh my copper bracelets and anklets on your balance scale?”
The skinny science teacher agreed, and the cute coed removed her bracelets and anklets with great ceremony, aware that all the boys’ eyes were riveted on her when she slipped them off her plump legs.
After prancing to the front of the room, she plopped them on the left balance scale while Tom carefully added weights until a balance was achieved.
“Altogether your copper bracelets and anklets come to 2.5 pounds,” Tom announced.
“Wow. That’s a lot of weight to carry around. You’re one strong girl,” Barry commented.
“Getting back to the algebraic equation: 2X - 13 = 25, how do we solve it?”
Riner raised his hand. “First, add 13 to both sides, and then divide by 2. So the answer is 19.”
Tom wrote a second equation on the board: 3X + 11 = 47 and asked the class to solve it.
Wendy raised her hand. “First, subtract 11 from both sides, and then divide by 3. The answer is 12.”
Tom was about to write a third equation on the board, when the bell rang, bringing the contentious lesson on unit price and algebraic equations to a close. As he gathered up his materials, he gave Barry the box of Wheaties, Ronnie the peanut butter, and Lora the two cans of soup.
“What about the soccer ball?” Barry asked.
“I was going to weigh the soccer ball with no air in it and then reweigh it fully inflated. It would weigh more with the air in it because air has weight.”
“Why don’t you show us now?”
Tom weighed the soccer ball empty, filled it with air, and then weighed it again. Sure enough, the air-filled ball weighed half a pound more.
“Way to go, man,” Barry squealed, shaking Tom’s hand.
“You’re the best, Mr. Haley. But I wanted to ask you when your friend Amon is coming to speak at Curtis,” the curly-haired Lora asked.
“Soon, because time is running out.”
“Why is that?” Lora inquired.
“I don’t know. I’m just repeating what Amon himself said to me last week.”