Learning how to write mathematics
I was five or six, sitting at a school desk that was somewhere around the third row, middle column of the classroom. Colégio Santo Antônio, named after Saint Anthony of Padua, was an imposing red-brick edifice at downtown Ourinhos, a small city in the state of São Paulo, southeast of Brazil. It was a big school — enormous for a small kid.
It had once been run by nuns, but it had since adopted a secular education system. The religious order still owned the building, though, and encounters with grumpy-looking nuns were frequent in the hallways. Their presence was sometimes used by teachers who had lost their authority to appeal to the students’ moral conscience or threaten them with divine punishments.
Nothing special about that day, except we had a substitute teacher. I couldn’t hide a fleck of disappointment because I loved my original instructor. She was gentle, patient, funny and the reason why, for a brief period of my childhood, I was determined to be a teacher when I grew up. As my classmates and I used to brag to the kids in the other classes, we had the coolest and most beautiful teacher in the whole school. To us, she was like a gracious fairy with the magic power of education.
The sub must have known she didn’t stand a chance of pleasing that crowd and wasn’t making much of an effort. She announced the next lesson would be…
