November 2005 Archives

I learned a lot about honesty in math class. Granted, that wasn't the intended lesson, but I learned it, arguably better than I learned the quadratic equation. I can't remember the quadratic formula, but I can tell when Dick Cheney is lying to me (pretty much always.)

Though it's hard to tell from my recent career, I had the good fortune to have excellent math teachers through most of my secondary education. I was also lucky to get two of them twice. Henrietta Patterson I had only once, alas; she was a terrific, non-nonsense teacher of geometry, still the only math I've ever really enjoyed, and I had her during my 9th-grade year at Grey Culbreth Junior High. At Chapel Hill High, I had Jim Tomberg, a laid-back hipster who read us Woody Allen pieces on Fridays, for both pre-calculus and calculus. It is a testimony to his skill that I escaped the latter with a B, because my brain flat-out rejected the concepts after we'd begun learning integration. The extra credit I earned may have helped, too.


Using the cover of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (seen here) as my template, I designed a mural for his classroom wall: a series of rainbow stripes being "refracted" off a transparent cone, showing the various conic sections. It was still on the wall when I last poked my head into CHHS, sometime around 1990, and I'm hoping it's still there (though I must admit it wasn't nearly as cool as the sine-wave dragon that Carol Hubbard painted on the other wall--THAT was art.)

Because he was young, somewhat long-haired, and funny, Mr. Tomberg reminded me somewhat of the guy who taught both my pre-algebra and algebra classes at Culbreth: Chuck Stewart, who introduced me to M.C. Escher and pointed me towards Richard Brautigan, though I wouldn't take up his suggestion to read A Confederate General from Big Sur for another twenty-five years. He later went on to serve as the first principal of McDowell Middle School when the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City School System decided it needed a third school between elementary and high school. A nice guy, very easy to get along with, and also the first teacher ever to give me a D; I was moping through the winter, having suffered a series of broken bones playing basketball for Culbreth's 8th-grade team, and wasn't doing much homework.

I also exacerbated this problem, as I've been known to do, by telling the truth; Mr. Stewart wouldn't take up homework, but would let us check it ourselves and simply tell him how many we'd gotten right. It was an easy system to exploit, needless to say, and many of my classmates would announce a number that had little to do with the number of correct answers they'd gotten. I didn't hesitate to do likewise at times, but I didn't like it; when I hadn't done my work, I would often just say so, and my lousy homework grades, coupled with my less-than-stellar quiz and test scores that winter, resulted in a grade in the low 70s. Since I'd been a strictly A and B student to that point, this caused no small amount of fuss in the Cashwell household, and my participation in basketball was nearly curtailed right then and there. (It was curtailed later, but by then I'd broken ANOTHER bone and had given up on the season.)

Truth is something we strive for here at Woodberry, to the point where it's a dismissal offense to lie. It's not always helpful, however, at least in the short term. I once applied for a job at the Carolina Theater in Chapel Hill; my good buddies Mike and Bryon worked there, and I'd even gotten to know the manager, an affable guy named Warren, so I figured my chances of obtaining a position were pretty good. As a matter of company policy, Warren gave me a pamphlet containing a four-page ethics test, and I dutifully filled it out.

I was honest--brutally, uncompromisingly so. The test asked about all sorts of workplace behavior and how I'd handle it--for example, whether I would ever consider taking popcorn for myself while working concessions. I made the frank reply that of course I would consider it if I were hungry; that didn't mean I would DO it, but consider it? Sure. I'd consider eating the other passengers if my plane crashed in the Andes, too.

I finished the test in the same absolutist mode and handed it to Warren. He went off to score it and returned, rather quickly, to announce that it was the worst score he'd ever seen on this test. Apparently I'd been a little too honest. He helpfully offered to toss it and let me take another one, but I thought for a minute about what I'd be doing: signing on to work for a company that didn't trust me to do the right thing without filling out a little test, but that was perfectly willing to hire me so long as I lied to them.

I thanked him, but I turned him down.

And that's sort of where I remain. I have long insisted that the day my employer makes me piss in a cup is the day I hand in my resignation. If he wants to know whether I've been shooting smack in the teacher's lounge, he can ask me like a regular person. He'll get an honest answer. He'd better be ready for it.

7:51 PM

Post-EHS Report:

For the last two falls, I've been one of the faculty supervisors for Rapidan, Woodberry's outdoor program. We start the season with intensive kayaking instruction, then (as the weather starts cooling off) move to the school's indoor climbing wall to train the boys in rock climbing, then move outdoors to the Alpine Tower and Carolina Climbing Wall at our ropes course, then head up to the cliffs of Little Stony Man in Shenandoah National Park for real rock climbing, and finally hit the Ridge Trail of Old Rag Mountain to cap off our off-campus activities. But that's not the last thing we do outdoors; no, along with the skeet team and the guys from WFS's Personal Fitness program, it's our duty to comb the forest for fallen limbs, dead trees, and various bits of kindling to build the Bonfire.

The Bonfire is in many ways the most important tradition at Woodberry. It's built on the Tuesday before the EHS Game, with the help of many willing hands, two tractors, two good-sized flatbed trailers, and a member of the grounds crew with a chain saw. Depending on the weather conditions leading up to November, we may find little in the way of fuel on the ground, which may force us to take down a dead tree or two. This year, however, thanks to a fairly brisk hurricane season, we found plentiful amounts of long branches and toppled trees lying in the leaves, and it was the work of only an hour or so to load both trailers to capacity. (Actually, slightly beyond capacity--one trailer's load shifted on the hill and about half the wood fell off.)

This year's fire was built around a core of wooden pallets, which we had piled into a rough pyramid on Monday afternoon. Against that we braced the shorter logs and branches--those up to about ten feet long--forming a conical shape around the pallets. From there we moved on to the longer branches and trunks, setting the thick ends against the base of the fire and walking it into an upright position in much the same way the Marines raised the flag on Iwo Jima. This year we went for height, nabbing several dead trees of at least twenty-five feet, which made the 2005 Bonfire a tall and imposing structure indeed.

On the Friday night before the EHS Game, the entire student body gathers outside the Leonard W. Dick Gymnasium, forming two files along the hillside toward the Bonfire. Along each line are stationed oil drums, each of which is loaded with several dozen torches. The torches are constructed earlier in the week by the New Boys, who must wrap one end of a four-foot piece of two-by-two in burlap, nail the fabric down (you really don't want loose ends burning out of control), and wrap wire around the whole business end. That business end is then soaked in kerosene.

Bonfire Night begins well before the end of study hall, as students find excuses to stop studying and dress up (or down), paint themselves (primarily in our colors, orange and black), and/or climb into Halloween costumes; I've seen everything from a velvet pimp suit to a Sugar Plum Fairy outfit to a full-body Holstein cow costume, complete with bulging pink udder. At 10:00, when study hall officially ends, many, many alumni, most of whom are cheerfully taking advantage of the fact that school rules about hair length, shaving, and smoking no longer apply to them, have already gathered along the torch route. Within minutes, the varsity football team and the cheerleaders take up their torches in the Dick parking lot, then pass the fire down each file until a corridor of flame stretches from the gym to the Bonfire. Then the team and the cheerleaders march down the corridor; as they pass, the students on each side fall in behind them. As each student reaches the fire, he hurls his torch at (or at least toward) the Bonfire, which, because it has been liberally soaked with kerosene and/or heating oil, ignites quite quickly and is soon a massive cone of flame.

It's waaaaaaay cool.

This year's game, alas, didn't go as well as the fire. The Goons abandoned the pass-happy attack they'd used all season, setting up in the power I formation and pounding the ball through the Tiger defense on the way to a 28-7 victory. The broadcast was an interesting experience, I must say. We were, for the first time, broadcasting from an actual press box, which kept us out of the elements. Alas, I was tucked into the far corner of the box, whose sight lines were, to say the least, not ideal; I was completely unable to see the scoreboard, and any plays inside the twenty yard line were likewise invisible, unless they were run down the far left sideline. We were also directly behind the EHS student section, which meant that we had to stand up through the entire game because all of them were standing up through the entire game. They were also, I think it's safe to say, one of the loudest student sections I've seen in recent memory, which meant that a) they produced a lot of background noise for our audience to enjoy, and b) Greg and I were almost unable to hear each other's calls. We were thus occasionally prone to repeat one another's comments, or else to make complete non sequiturs, but that's what makes live radio interesting, right?

If you'd like to hear for yourself, you can now hear the archived broadcast by clicking right here or just going to www.woodberry.org and following the broadcast link.

Next year, I think we can build a Bonfire to rival this year's, and we should be able to tweak the Game broadcast to improve it. We've also got a good chance of doing better in the Game itself; this year's varsity team had only 19 seniors and 44 underclassmen, so next year's squad will be experienced. Better yet, they'll be joined by the top members of the WFS junior varsity, who spent the afternoon of Bonfire Night hosting the JV squad from EHS; I hope we'll be forgiven for licking our lips in anticipation when we think about our JV's 42-0 victory.

1:18 AM

It's EHS weekend, and all hell is about to break loose...

You've got to understand a few things. First, Woodberry and Episcopal High School are participants in the longest continuous high-school football rivalry in America. This will be the 105th consecutive version of the Game. Yes, it's capitalized, just like the Bible, the Bomb, and the Pill. Every year at 2:00 on the second Saturday in November, the Game is played, here at WFS in even-numbered years, in Alexandria in odd-numbered years.

That meant, among other things, that back in 2000 we got to host the 100th Game, which was a to-do like you wouldn't believe. Sure, the schools play in different conferences and interact only occasionally, but this is Tradition. That gets capitalized around here, too, like God, Country, and the Dick. (Actually, that last is the shortened name of the Leonard W. Dick Gymnasium. But we're an all-male school, so we'd probably capitalize it anyway.) Our tiny expanse of bleachers was augmented with portable stands that increased our seating capacity from maybe a thousand to over five thousand, and we not only filled the joint with alumni from both schools, but spilled about another five thousand onto the grounds around the field. Many appeared with open mouths to swig from hip flasks and open wallets to lavish donations upon their alma maters. That year we Tigers took particular pride in defeating the Goons (as the EHS Maroon are affectionately known around here), and I'm sure our team's effort on the field brought in a few extra dollars for the endowment to boot.

This year it won't be quite as big a deal for the schools. For one thing, neither squad has done well this fall; we've got an undersized team and a new coach who's putting in a new system, so we go into the Game with seven losses and only one win under our belts, while EHS is 2-6. The lack of a major numerical anniversary means we'll probably have only a few thousand spectators, but I know from experience that the tailgating will be prime, and there will be tents spread with lavish delights that Kublai Khan would probably find to his liking, though he might find all the deviled eggs kind of puzzling. Our entire student body is getting bussed up to Alexandria, and many will meet their families there and spend the night off campus, celebrating. What I don't know about that will probably be good for me.

I'll be there, too, and that brings me to the point of this entire exercise: I'm one of our game announcers. Yes, I and my partner, physics teacher Greg Jacobs, will be broadcasting the Game live at Woodberry's website, www.woodberry.org , at 2:00 p.m. EST. You can click on the link there and hear the entire webcast in streaming audio, and if you happen to miss it, it'll be archived and available to you later.

Greg and I have been webcasting WFS's home baseball games for two years now, but this is only our third outing on the gridiron circuit, so we're a little less blasé about this weekend than we might be if this were a baseball game. That's largely because Greg's expertise in baseball is astonishing; not only is he the kind of baseball purist who insists on keeping a scorecard at every game, but he's a professional statistician to boot, keeping tabs on televised National League games and contributing to the pool of statistics gathered by the league for various media outlets. I know nothing about baseball, but my years of radio experience have come in quite handy, and I like to think that between the two of us, Greg and I keep the patter meaningful and entertaining for both the dedicated fan and the novice.

Greg's the play-by-play man and I'm on color, both for baseball and football; this frees me to toss out nuggets of trivia and outright non sequiturs, while he does the yeoman's work of actually describing the action. I'm hardly an expert on football, but I'm a great deal more knowledgeable about it than about baseball, so I'm hoping not to make too many errors. If nothing else, I feel sure I can offer a more intelligent analysis of what we're observing than you'll get from listening to Joe Theismann. Then again, I think Kublai Khan could probably do a better job in the booth than Joe Theismann.

"Mike, this is exactly the game plan the Horde used in last week's contest against the Han army: pound the center with the pikemen to make the secondary respect the infantry, then hit them with the cavalry."

So if you're around Saturday, or even afterwards, feel free to click on the link right here, follow the link on the WFS page, and give us a listen. In fact, if you listen closely, I'll bet you can even hear us pronouncing that capital G.

4:23 AM