Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 85: Debt 55, equations, homework


Happy end of the week, y’all. Here is this week’s list of three things I noticed I noticed that made me happy or grateful.

                             

1. Debt 55 
 
I have a long list of unpaid debts that I am working on. One was entered the day in 1980 my Grade 10 physics teacher, Mr. Nowak, cornered me in the upstairs hallway at O’Leary High School. He had done the math. I was going to fail Physics 10 unless some force stronger than the gravitational pull on my mark appeared to pull it north of the Yellowhead. He offered me a deal. I would get a 55 if I promised not to enroll in Physics 20. He knew I wanted to go to university and that a failing grade wouldn’t help. I took the deal. Deus ex machina really happens.


Why was I so lousy at physics? Kinematics couldn’t really have been more opaque than the Faulkner we read in English. But velocity and acceleration were difficult for me. I couldn’t see how it applied. My heroes were writers, not scientists. What I loved was how Arlo Guthrie sang the line about feeling the rumble of the wheels ‘neath the floor of the City of New Orleans. Not beneath. ‘Neath. The thought experiment where I had to imagine tossing a ping pong ball off a moving train and explain why it wouldn’t just drop to the ground, yeah, no. In fact, as I tried to solve that puzzle, all that would drop was the memory of how thrilling it was as a boy to press my face against the window of the games car and catch a glimpse of the locomotive hauling us around a bend somewhere on the way to Winnipeg.
 
             

Larry Nowak died a couple of years ago. His obituary celebrated his love of basketball. He played for the Golden Bears. This is from the obit: “His knowledge and skill of the game allowed him to be both a strong and fair official, which he enjoyed for a number of years.” Strong and fair and, on occasion, merciful. I learned from him that mercy falls at 9.8 metres per second per second. I just wish I really understood the per second per second thing. What does that mean, per second per second? Argh².



2. Equations 

Pedalling alongside my friend the good doctor Bob last week, I blurted out the idea. I had been considering it for awhile—the idea and the blurting. Doc, I said, I’m going to enroll in Physics 10 to upgrade my high school mark.  I told him the story of my passing grade four decades earlier. I told him the story of how earlier that very morning, before our paths crossed, I had been pedalling up 142 Street holding a spent banana peel, looking for a roadside trash can to toss it into and how, when I approached one, I came to a stop that Hamlet would have envied. I could not decide at what point ahead of the garbage receptacle, given my forward momentum, I should release the peel so that it hit the target while I glided by, which I didn’t end up gliding by, because I am psyched out by physics. 


“What you’re trying to determine is what is the rate of acceleration of the banana peel if it fell straight,” he said. “If you know that, you can figure out the number of metres before the drop zone.”


Bob warned me that there were still equations to memorize in physics, and I would again have to come to terms with the authority of equations. I told him I was good with that. I told him that I was riding my bike alongside him thanks to my unconscious command of some kind of physics equation. The deal that got me out of Physics 10 was a humanitarian equation that achieved a kind of balance for both teacher and student. A simple equation was not going to intimidate me anymore. It’s not the boss of me. Except it kinda is.  And, so, I will accept equations as gifts, as bits of code for how the world works. It’s the only world I know, with some certainty, I will get a chance to learn about.



3. Homework 

Heartened by Dr. Bob’s tacit encouragement, I announced my intention on Twitter: “I would like to upgrade my Physics 10 mark. I got a 55, but it was mercy. Can I find an online course somewhere?” I got some good replies. My buddy Greg raised me with his 51 in Chemistry, also mercy. Graham predicted a mark in the high 80s if he redid Psychics 10. Vanessa, who knows a guy who teaches high school physics at Ainlay, told me to check my email the next day. Powell would send me a study package, a book of test questions and answers and an offer to help me on my way to understanding what he called the elegance of physics. He would stress he’d be happy to help with any questions I might have about motion in real life. He would reveal he played basketball at NAIT and there got to know a fantastic referee—Larry Nowak. My benefactors, Vanessa and Powell, put me back where I started—in debt to a physics teacher. Which, if I am starting to understand things, makes my displacement zero. 

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