on disappointing weather (plus a Proustian digression on elementary school)

On a lighter note… It just figures that of my 4 days in Alexandria so far, there would be 3 days of perfect weather, and then on my birthday there would be this muggy hothouse of a day, which has even the city natives complaining as I speak to them.

My only consolation is that Cairo is usually about 10 degrees hotter: in the Fahrenheit system, that is. I’ve never learned to use celsius for anything other than school lab experiments and bottles of soft drinks. This was perhaps the most notable failure of the U.S. educational system during the 1970’s, when the loudly predicted shift to metric happened for science but not at all for everyday American life. I remember being told by our teacher in 1976 that by the time we were in high school, everything in the USA would be in metric. And with the reverence children feel for their elementary school teachers, I believed it completely. It didn’t happen, obviously.

Continuing the Proustian digression, and speaking of that teacher, she was really good in many ways, but she also did some unnecessary things to confuse me and others. She was one of those people (assuming there are others) who insist that the fruit is called “orange” but the color is pronounced something like “ornj.” I’d never heard such a thing at home or elsewhere. At that age you can ask your parents about it later (I did), but even when your parents back you up on the issue, you still have such respect for the teacher that you can’t just tell yourself “the teacher is completely wrong.” Instead, a certain minor contradiction in the fabric of reality takes shape. And knowing the words for basic objects and colors is such a key cognitive achievement for young children that I remember feeling that confusion almost physically, no matter how trivial the issue looks this many years later.

Oh yes, she was also one of those people (but this was more typically “old school”) who said that “what” should be pronounced as if it were “hwat,” with the h first. Even as an 8-year-old that struck me as fairly stupid and I simply ignored it. Somehow I could sense the pedantry of that point even at a young age. But the orange/ornj distinction was more deeply troubling. I think it was because those words are so basic to the language that I was in disbelief that either I or she could have been misinstructed on such a primitive point.

Another weird thing about her was her combination of imaginative teaching techniques with stern legalism even in a play context. We studied Nigeria for awhile that year. The culminating exercise was that we were asked to take construction paper and scissors and cut out mockups of various typical items of Nigerian produce… I would say gourds, green vegetables, various fruits, cocoa, etc. By the end each kid in the class had maybe 40 or 50 produce items. We were then supposed to simulate bartering by going around the room and trading various pieces of food for various others. Somehow, the teacher even came up with flashy Nigerian clothing to wear that day (and she was otherwise as “Anglo” as it gets).

But after all that work, I remember her being incredibly stingy in her trading. She kept driving really hard bargains with the kids, and in fact demanding ripoff prices for her paper gourds and melons, which of course as the teacher in the class she completely got away with. At the time it felt vaguely strange, but in retrospect it was really bizarre.

She must have just had a principle about not going any easier on kids than on adults, since I also remember her destroying me in a game of chess once (I was reasonably good for a kid, but am terrible now). Instead of going easy on me as many people would with kids, she totally steamrolled me. An interesting person, but in some ways a rather strange one.

She also brought a dental hygienist to class once to tell us, among other things, that toothpaste is worthless. “It just makes your mouth foamy,” she said. Much learning occurred in that class, but in some respects it resembled a parallel universe.