Goines On: Casting out 9s

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In the hours after Goines’ muse reminded him of the “casting out 9s” method of double-checking arithmetic calculations, he remembered where and when he had first heard of the method. Because Goines had been his high school’s “bright boy,” his math teacher (and the schools future principal), Mr. Loren Court, invited him to attend a teachers’ retreat in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas during the summer break of 1959.

Good on you, oh my reader!

Your sincere travail will not go unrewarded. Some recent critical references to “institutional education” on another blog made me realize that I very much cherish my own such education. I learned to form clear letters from dear Mrs. Zelpha Bennett, my nuturing third-grade teacher, learned to cherish ancient learning from Mr. Morris Knudsen, my cosmopolitan high-school Latin teacher, was introduced to “The Great Books” by Mr. Charles Albert King, my visionary high-school history teacher, read Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and novels by Thomas Hardy and others for Miss Lois Thompson, my devoted high-school English teacher, acquired a love mathematics and proofs from Mr. Loren Court, my passionate math instructor, majored in philosophy at Yale University (which Mr. Court recommended I apply to), where I immersed myself in Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other philosophers, read a smattering of the world's religion texts, and discovered the work of Sigmund Freud, Leon Festinger, and a number of others. I feel richly blessed by my institutional education and its book learning. A friend shared with me today that he and his wife went through a phase with their homeschooled son in which he would do nothing but read for hours on end. His wife told the local principal, “I don't know what to do. He won't do any of his workbooks. He just reads.” “He reads?” said the principal. “Don't do anything!” I also feel richly blessed by my intuitive learning, which often “overcomes me” out in the garden—while I'm raking leaves, mowing grass, digging holes to plant, moving rocks to line paths. Life and learning are glorious, and institutional and life learning can come together in a beautiful, mutually supportive mosaic. At least, I feel that my own learning experiences have done so. Perhaps I am unusually blessed, but I can hardly credit that conceit. Good on you all, to overrunning cup!