On Trigonometry
June 27, 2021
My favorite math teacher of all time was Mr. Tomlinson. Tomlinson was an old man, good natured, keen to pick on everyone. “Yes, Mr. Hot Chocolate, Green Tea, I mean, Coffey! That’s your name! Up to the board…” “Ms. Sioux, Arapaho, no, Cheyenne!” For whatever reason, this old man making fun of the names of teenagers while teaching them Trig/pre-Cal was one of the most fun things about my junior year.
Tomlinson had a unique teaching style, something closer to a college professor than a high school teacher. We opened our books maybe once or twice over the course of the year. All the homework assignments were problems he made up, written on paper in his own hand, scanned in and printed off.
The board races are where he really shined. He would have three or four students go up to the board to write out and work through a problem. I think his favorite ones had to do with a particular popular boy walking his two girlfriends to class without them knowing about each other. “Zach walks Britton to class down this hallway, then does this shortcut to walk Anna down this other hallway, what is the angle between the hallways.” Of course they’re silly questions, embarrassing, overly personal to each of the three students in the school that are named, but sometimes you have to take drastic measures to make a boring and esoteric subject interesting to people. Tomlinson knew none of us cared about Trig or Calculus. They’re esoteric subjects of little to no import in real life, and when something isn’t important, we don’t learn it.
One of the other popular problems Tomlinson invented has stuck with me ever since. Dalton (sitting in the class, and in the story, married to someone else sitting in the class), has a daughter and is building her a dollhouse. What angle did a particular piece of wood need to be cut at?
I was thinking about this the other day, trying to cut a particular angle so that I could put in a brace, having to figure out the right angle by trial and error. It’s really frustrating, time-consuming, and wasteful. Cut the wrong angle too many times, then the piece is too short, so you have to cut another piece, and so on. It’s much easier if you know Trigonometry. Then you can just calculate the angles and lengths, mark them off, and you’re good to go. But I don’t know Trig, because, try as he might, Tomlinson could just never convince me I needed to know it. I took the class and promptly forgot everything. After all, how was I to know I would want to do basic carpentry work?
Alas, the same is true for learning Scripture. Much of Scripture is as esoteric as Trigonometry. Surely you don’t use or need to know most of it. But then again, there may come a day when that strange story or line is precisely the help from God that you need, only you won’t have it if you never learn it. Sometimes, learning something is a long-term investment.
—John Coffey
