I was never much good at math, science, or any other subject based around understanding much beside actual human-compatible prose. Most of my life, I’ve been viciously envious of those gifted souls with the mental wherewithal to understand pages of symbols, equations, and anything I’ve lumped into the broad category of “symbolic logic” — ranging from accounting and statistics, over computer programming, to calculus and physics.
The common response to this sort of thing, especially when it’s so general, is “math is hard, you should have studied more” — but to be honest, at some point, the miniscule return from comprehending a differential equation after hours spent staring at it in anguished frustration starts to pale in comparison with, well, all that anguished frustration. Ten years of high school, college, and graduate school nonsensical scribbles adds up to a lot of that.
Fair warning: the next time I catch some twerp mouthing off about how business school is easy because the math is so basic, I swear, I will cram an accounting ledger up his backside. The old-fashioned, leather-bound kind.
And it is with intense gratitude that I see things like this page, which make formerly impossible concepts forehead-smackingly clear — geez, I wish the Web had existed 25 years ago. That said, I probably never would have actually learned anything, just carried around a laptop and looked it up. Which, to be fair, is pretty much what I do now.
Thankfully, during my time in high school, I hadn’t yet arrived at the point of deciding, “screw it, I’ll never get this”, arriving instead at the start of every academic year with armloads of fresh notebooks and all the best of intentions — study hard, read ahead, grok the material.
That usually lasted until some jerk (like my Southern Baptist fundie maniac math teacher, who’d decided early on that I was a brain-dead reject, destined for a rewarding career in the custodial sciences) started inundating me with basic concepts that my classmates appeared to be merrily picking up. Meanwhile, I tried to put on a brave face and take notes like a responsible trooper, but being the easily frustrated drama queen slacker that I am, I inevitably ended up staring at the blackboard in puzzlement, lost in even the shallowest of academic waters.
I’m still working out how they let me graduate.
Enter Mister Bissett — our high school advanced placement chemistry teacher. That’s right, at some point I had gotten the seriously addle-brained idea that I might flourish in a honors course. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t such a terrible idea, since I most likely would have been equally confused in the regular class, but without the excuse of a slightly advanced pace of instruction to blame my cluelessness on.
Our class took place in a windowless second-floor lab — standard American one-person school desks in neat rows, overcrowded, laboratory benches along the naked brick walls, one entrance from the hallway, one emergency exit at rear, and a small room behind the teacher’s desk where his assistants would loaf about, ostensibly grading papers, but indubitably up to no good. In retrospect, I can’t imagine high school students so diligently spending session after session, quietly doing their homework while a class took place outside. Infrequently, this would spill over into some lecture about exothermic reactions or whatever, such as the time one of the goons dunked his hand in a beaker of methanol, lit it on fire, and ran screaming through a stunned classroom, shouting OH MY GOD OH MY GOD HELP ME I’M BURNING before legging it out the main door.
Mister Bissett bred llamas, and wore silly bow ties and suspenders, complements to his stringy combover. Lore had it that he endured a several-hour commute from somewhere in the Sacramento River delta each morning. In my memory, he is portlier and jollier-looking than he most likely was in real life, but somehow the image of a beardless, happy Santa Claus type fits better than what he most likely actually looked like.
The man did, however, have a propensity to clasp his hands over his belly, or to grasp his braces, thrust out his chest and give off a loud “ooOOoh” — that said, perhaps I’m also imagining him a bit more swish than he really was, but the overall image was undeniably unconventional. Especially when considering that he, upon lamenting the decline of respect for teachers and classroom manners, began to require us to stand next to our chairs when he entered in the morning, and to answer his cheerful “good morning, class!” with a unanimous “good morning, Sister Immaculata!”
Our very first day, Mister Bissett walked into our classroom, silenced us with a wordless glance about the place, switched off the lights, and let out a maniacal laugh, followed by a massive airborne fireball a few feet across, reflected off his thick glasses. With no further comment, he turned the lights back on, and started teaching. If I ever suffered a massive lapse of judgment and took up a career as a teacher, I’d be sure to have an ample supply of flash powder in my desk, too.
Mister Bissett wasn’t too enthused with the fact that I was the first student in the history of our high school to score below a 4 on the AP chemistry test (I got a 2), a fact that indirectly led to my having to spend an extra semester at university for the sake of fulfilling a science requirement, all my finely-honed abilities as a world-class bullshit artist to the contrary. Quite possibly, the fact that I went into my usual idiot-trance while trying to work out some chemical reaction or another, and ended up explaining it as “magic”. But that’s another story, and not a particularly interesting one.
Still, he seemed genuinely shattered when I failed to be accepted by either Reed or Brown, swearing to never send another students to those bastards. Again, everything went better than expected, and I can at least claim to be a proud product of the California public school system, without having spent a decade in student loan debt servitude. I can’t help but wonder whether this was at least partially due to his never discovering my complicity in setting off a vile, sulfurous cloud of gas during a lab, and forcing an evacuation of the third floor. Sorry about that.
At that, he was one of the most entertaining, intelligent, and dedicated teachers under whose tutelage I had the fortune of witnessing.
Sorry, Mister Bissett, I still don’t really like chemistry, but thanks for the memories.
