Читать книгу Stories I'd Tell My Children (But Maybe Not Until They're Adults) - Michael N Marcus - Страница 21

Cullen S. Hodge had been an aeronautical engineer, a guy who designed airplanes.

The way he explained it, one day while sitting at his drafting table, he looked out of the window and saw a plane flying by. He was suddenly stunned, suffering with paralysis of the pencil. He realized that if he specified the wrong size screw, a plane could crash and hundreds might die.

He changed career paths, becoming an excellent high school physics teacher. He was dignified, scholarly and extremely knowledgeable. Mr. Hodge seemed overqualified, perhaps more suited to be a professor, not just a high school teacher.

His class was difficult, but he was fair; and if he was not liked by all of his students, Mr. Hodge was respected. He’s one of the few teachers in this book who gets a “Mr.” before his last name. I didn’t think about it. It happened automatically.

In addition to teaching physics, Mr. Hodge was advisor to the philosophy club, math club and chess club, and to the pompous and short-lived Committee for Research into Existential Metaphysics and Ethics.

Despite his often aloof demeanor, our class was not without laughs. He made coffee in a calorimeter and taught us to cook hot dogs by swinging them from a pendulum through the flame of a Bunsen burner.

One day a messenger came to our classroom from the principal’s office. He gave Mr. Hodge a square, flat package from the Columbia Record Club.

Mr. Hodge paused his lecture on the Brachistochrone curve to carefully slit open the container.

He removed, held up, and smiled at Mussorgsky’s A Night on Bald Mountain, and carefully slid the empty package across the front counter until it fell off the end and precisely dropped into the wastebasket.

Stephanie Abeshouse, the one girl in our class, started frantically waving her hand, and said “Mr. Hodge, Mr. Hodge, your bill is in the package you threw away.”

Mr. Hodge calmly replied, “Do not worry, Miss Abeshouse. They will surely send me another.”

Cool.