Tuesday, February 28, 2012

spare the rod

I kept thinking there was something I wanted to write about, something from way back, something colorful and constructive - but I couldn’t recall what it was or what I wanted to say about it. But as I started into this new notebook, I have recently undergone the ritual of note transference - torn-out sheets from notebooks past, stuffed into page pockets for future reference, moved from old books to new ones, sometimes repeatedly. I take a quick peek as I empty the old pockets so I’m not loading the new book with trash, but I rarely do much about the notes I’ve written to myself. But this time something stuck in my head - there was something I did want to write about. As I thumbed through those old notes, I found it - the last note on the bottom-most sheet: the thing I had been wanting to write up, as an incitement to re-embrace certain memories that, for some reason, I was reluctant to subject to the extinguishment of faded days and thoughts.

I don’t recall if they were good times or bad times or - most likely - mostly neutral. I’d started school, but it didn’t feel much like all that. They had us collaborating in groups and picking out letters from a banner that ran around the upper part of the walls, and there was plenty of time to play. They had outside playtime, and there were books of cartoons and mazes; there were board games and puppets and blocks… and also certain other blocks. That’s what I’ve been wanting to unblock for myself: the other blocks.

Mostly, blocks were for building things - forts and castles and little blocky houses, most anything featuring right angles and a flat roof. Some of the more careful children could build semicircular castles with keeps and Guelph merlons and all other sorts of delicate architectural elements. Not me. I could build anything that was rectangular and that was about it.  Sometimes I tried to put columns on top but those usually fell over pretty fast. I had to admit, blocks were fun but they weren’t really my oeuvre. Not the regular blocks, anyway.

But there were also the other blocks. They didn’t get stored higgledy-piggledly in the big wooden block box - they lived in a tidy cardboard container, with a snug-fitting cover and a special slot for every piece. It was easy, too, to see which one went where, because every block was just the same width and thickness, differing only in color and length. One group was just a bunch of little cubes, painted white and as high as they were deep as they were long. The next bunch was twice longer, like two of the cubes set end-to-end, and all a cheerful red. Then came a light green series, longer than the reds by the length of one white cube. The pattern went all the way up to a ten-unit shaft in vibrant orange, equal in length to ten whites, five reds, a light green and a black, a lavender and a forest, or the ever-popular brown with a red at the end.

Technically, they weren’t even blocks - they were “rods.” This technicality counted because these were technical counting tools that had come all the way from Belgium, home of technologues such as Georges Cuisinaire - a music and math teacher from an era before the dawn of the transistor age. He invented this series of colored rods to teach young Walloons to love math. I don’t know if it worked for them, and I wasn’t sure if it worked for me. I didn’t actively hate math in kindergarten, but I didn’t go out of my way to do any extra, either. However, I did really like those colorful little rods, and played with them frequently at the outset of my academic career.

I’d completely forgotten about them until I was visiting a friend’s house a few years ago and for some reason he pulled out his own complete vintage boxed set of Cuisinaire Rods. Everything about them struck a chord for me - the size and shape of the box, the font in which the product name was printed, the name itself - so disevocative of math toys that I recalled puzzling about it back in kindygarden, unable to read it for myself and sure I was getting it wrong even though I really wasn’t. The rods themselves were like sticks of candy - taffy or fruit chews or some kind of extruded treat. That day I saw those rods again, I didn’t give in to the immediate impulse to fall to my knees and build a colorful ziggurat or psychedelic rectilinear fractile or any of the other creations I so enjoyed making back in the day, but I sort of wish I had. Those Cusinaire blocks felt good in my fingers and triggered my creative impulses, despite their being so small and slender and limited in profile variety. Other blocks came with arches or cylinders or other non-squared-rod shapes, but I only built square things with them anyway. Cusinaire rods didn’t build structures, they built ideas.  They just seemed more interesting, somehow.

Even after reviving this recollection at my friend’s house not so long ago, I didn’t put 2 + 2 (or red + red) together and realize what they’d actually done for my thinking till only a few weeks ago, when my first-grade son was exploring some theoretical matters with me. He’s been doing a lot of arithmetic in school, and talking about basic theories of addition and multiplication and positivity and negativity and such. He was painstakingly explaining that any number plus itself must produce an even sum, but that an even number plus and odd number never do.  I had a little academic (or “acad") flashback on hearing this - to my own brainstorm moment at about the same age. I had imagined numbers as stacks of little cubes, all laid out in rows. An even number could also be laid out in two rows of equal length, but an odd number would produce two rows, of which one would be one cube longer than the other. If you put two odd numbers together, those extra left-over cubes could be alternated so they evened out - one left over in each row meant neither row need be longer, both rows match, and the total’s even again. Odd plus odd equals even; even and odd equals odd. Just like Z was telling me.

As he spoke, those little Cusinaire blocks were floating through my mind again. No, not again - still. That old Belgie’s math toy, those rods that were already twenty years old when I played with them in 1970, still seem to be shaping my thinking 42 years later. That is to say, a number of years equal to three oranges, two yellows, and a red. I could break it down a few other ways, too, and build a cool little pattern out of my years on this planet, but you get my point.

Cusinaire rods - not so much a memory to be preserved, as an aspect of my own intellectual structure, one of the ways I make the world make sense. And since I’ve come to recognize this enduring mental legacy, I’ve seen it reveal itself many times over, when working out problems and looking at art and other ways too. Frankly, I’m as surprised as I am pleased.  Now I’m thinking of getting a set for my boys to use at home. Maybe they don’t need them, won’t use them, already know what they’d learn from them and have internalized the lessons they objectify. Maybe not. I guess we’ll find out in 40 years or so.