The Math Pencil
By Dan Wier
Sarah hopped in the car in the pick-up line at her school.
“Hi!”
“Well, hello, daughter,” said Jacob with gentle formality. “Anything exciting happen at school today? Did you give that check to the cafeteria?”
“No, I forgot, but…”
“Do that tomorrow, or they’re going to get cranky about it.”
“No, I forgot, but we have this really cool assignment, see?” said Sarah, shoving a paper at him from the back seat.
“Wait ‘til we get home.’ He had to practically yell to be heard above the car honking behind him. “Cafeteria’s not the only ones who are cranky this afternoon.”
Jacob, sitting on his couch with Sarah, read the assignment aloud. “Research and create a presentation about any topic you like, except don’t do it from the perspective of a 3rd grader. For example, what perspective would a snail have when researching a gardener? What kinds of questions would the snail want answered?”
Jacob had gone to school at the tail end of the five-paragraph essay, add, subtract, multiply and divide era of education, so he really didn’t know what the hell they wanted, had, actually, a much more succinct name for the assignment, but Sarah wasn’t confused by it at all. In fact, she was more excited about an academic aspect of school than Jacob had ever seen her.
“I checked out this book, Ten Super Hard Math Problems That Seem Super Easy. I like this one,” she said, assuming he could see what she was looking at. “It’s been solved, but I bet I can do it quicker – more elephantly.”
“Do you mean ‘elegantly?’”
Talking deliberately so she got the big word right, “Yeah, from the per-spec-tive of someone who doesn’t think about math the way we do. I think I’ll do that tonight. Have you seen my new pencil anywhere?”
“No… What new pencil? Where’d you get it?” If Jacob had been more observant, he would have noticed that Sarah shrugged ever so slightly at the question, with an even slighter flicker of a smile, and totally ignored it.
“It’s black, with a black eraser in the green and yellow can on the end.”
“Oh, yeah, it’s sticking out of your backpack in the kitchen. Say, where’d you get…?” But Sarah was already half way down the hall to her room, backpack in tow.
Sarah worked hard for about an hour, writing in her green spiral notebook (she was especially proud of the friendly red dragon she had drawn on the front). She turned the notebook, this way and that, writing furiously, a simple drawing at first, then weird squiggles on the margins of the page, all of which made perfect sense to her. She finished with a flourish, and grinned broadly.
She went to bed with two thoughts. She was sure that the guy who had thought up this math puzzle had a pencil like hers. He must have misplaced it before he could write down the answer. She was also sure that he had been teased a lot in third grade, especially with a name like Fur Mat.
Jacob looked in on her about an hour later – she was fast asleep. In the glow of her Pooh Bear nightlight, he saw her notebook and the pencil on the wooden TV tray that served as her desk, and quietly went in to look.
The pencil was as black as a hole in space – he wasn’t sure it wasn’t a shadow. He expected it to be really heavy, but it felt like an ordinary pencil. The sharpened end was just that – a pencil. The eraser felt like rubber, and the metal thing holding the black eraser – the ferrule – was metallic green and yellow… Hell, it was just a Ticonderoga pencil, albeit one of the really cool ones. Except for the words on the barrel, that kept shifting around, mesmerizing, really, changing in ways that almost looked like a pattern, just beyond his grasp, swirling, symbols that had some hidden meaning… He shook his head and the vision cleared. So did the twisting letters. What was left, on the barrel of the pencil, in green letters that sparkled in true points of light, like distant stars, was Sarah’s name – this pencil was hers, and hers alone, that much was clear to him. It was also, as noted on the pencil, an HB 2.
The drawing was pretty simple: 3rd grade versions of three triceratops, what appeared to be their dachshund, Bentley (4 different action shots), and 5 pretty good renderings of starfish – from Finding Nemo, maybe? They filled most of the piece of notebook paper, with what looked like vaguely geometric figures in the left margin of the page. The doodles almost filled the margin, but, at the bottom, she had drawn a triumphant, winking happy face with curly black hair. Her self-portrait.
Since Sarah could talk she’d had conversations with all of the nonhumans she thought would listen, but tended toward (what Jacob assumed were) one-sided talks with a stable of plastic My Little Pony denizens who lived next to the bathtub, and a whole civilization of stuffed animals that lived on her bed. She rarely did that, anymore, so Jacob was surprised, but not terribly alarmed, at the whisperings from his daughter’s room at 3:00 AM:
“It’s very cool, thank you! … No, you can’t have it back! It’s got my name on it, and everything! … Oh, thank you, I was worried there, for a minute. … Why, thank you! I try to be kind and polite to everyone! … Look at my iPad? What about it? … OK, I pushed the thing that looks kind of like an N … Oh, that’s horrible! … Those people would make me do math to help them do all of these terrible things? I don’t even like math that much! … Maybe some day, when we’re ready? You’re right, that’s a much better idea! … “
Third graders are great. What they think is important differs from what adults think is important in such a way as to make their motivations for doing things virtually incomprehensible to adults, and vice versa. And what Sarah thought was important the next morning was to impress her friends, in a way that only other third graders would understand. That way did not include solving any more math problems.
“Look at my new pencil!” she told everyone at lunch within earshot. She pulled it out of her pocket. Amidst all of the “oohs” and “aahs” and “How did you do thats” she proudly said, “I sharpened it all the way down to the metal can thingy! It’s the smallest pencil in the world! You can’t really write much with it any more, but isn’t it cool?”