Saturday, March 24, 2012

On the road again

Eloise bought a travel pillow at the rest stop. (I had considered bringing one I had bought for for a seventeen hour flight to Asia- but decided it wasn't worth shlepping around for a three hour cheese bus ride to Albany.)  Our basketball team won  the city championship for the small school division and we were off to watch them play.
They lost.
On the return trip Eloise was surprised to find the pillow did nothing to make the incessant chatting of the surrounding students disappear.  She could not sleep.  And delivered a five minute loud monologue about it as we crossed the George Washington Bridge. My standing up and moving in front of her seat also did not interrupt  the monologue. Neither did my report that we were forty minutes from home.

It had been two years since Eloise, the former math teacher and the  others had left the city limits, together,  for points north.  I wrote about the last time here.   Eloise has acquired a job at a retail shop allowing her to make purchases like-travel pillows.  Audrey has passed algebra and geometry and is onto trigonometry. And the  former math teacher has gone on to the Leadership Academy and is training to be a principal.

On the outbound trip Audrey was complaining to him about trigonometry.  Someone asked how much longer to Albany.  We had just passed a sign that said Albany forty miles.

Mr.Former Math Teacher: If the bus is traveling 60 miles an hour, how many minutes will it take us to get to Albany?

Bus riders:

Mr.FMT: If the bus is traveling 60 miles an hour, how many minutes will it take to go one minute?

Audrey:  We don't do ratios any more, we're in Trig..

So Mr. FMT, asked how that was going, and Audrey replied, not well, and anyway, she didn't see why she needed trig to be an actress.

I figured she at least needed to know if you get paid $8 to wait tables, how much would you get paid before your first callback, but I let Mr. FMT do the talking.

Mr. FMT:  What if you got a role to play a math teacher?

Audrey:  What are the odds of that happening?

And I reminded Audrey that was in fact a math question, that could be answered, by finding out how many aspiring young actresses there are and how many roles for math teachers come up every year.

Then I turned on the GPS on my phone.  33 minutes to final destination.  The discussion had taken seven minutes.

I've been playing the role of math teacher for a very long time.





                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

1 comment:

  1. Sorry your team lost. I think it's time to plan our next field trip and it might even be time for ices.

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