Telegram for John Watson
(A collge student tries to break the system)
Screen 1 of 3John Watson always sat in the back row of our college algebra class at Western. We were seated alphabetically, starting from the front of the room, a system which put John near a rear window. With the name Travelstead, I too sat near the back, immediately in front of him.
John was not a good math student. We all knew it, and so did he. Because of this, we felt sorry for him toward the end of the semester when he began to worry about the final examination. He could not pass it, he said, and was sure the teacher, Miss Elizabeth Strayhorn, would fail him in the course. If this happened, he told us, his father would make him drop out of school and come home to work on the farm. But we could not do much to help John, and it seemed to us that he was doing very little to help himself.
The river problems in algebra apparently gave him the most trouble. For example, we had one problem that asked: if a man can row a boat three miles an hour in still water, how long would it take him to row the same boat ten miles upstream in a river which flows at a rate of two miles an hour? It also asked how long it would take him rowing at the same rate to make the return trip downstream? John's usual answer to such problems was, who cares?
He also could not seem to understand the time problems about work, such as: if it takes a man 2 and one half days to build a brick wall, and it takes his son 3 and one half days to build the same wall, how long would it take both of them working together to build that wall?
Such hypothetical problems simply did not interest John at all, and yet he was certainly not stupid. Once in class, Miss Strayhorn asked him a question she soon wished she had not asked: if a 75 foot telephone pole fell across a highway with l5 feet of the pole sticking out on one side of the highway and 9 feet sticking out on the other side, how wide is the highway? Without hesitation, John told her with all the class listening that it was a silly way to measure the width of a highway--and besides, he added, the question was not answerable unless you knew whether the pole fell straight across the highway.
Examination day came, and John was in his usual seat near the rear window of that second-floor classroom in old Potter College building. The examination questions, dittoed dimly in purple on thin sheets of white paper, were passed out, one to each member of the class.
Soon we were all quietly at work, some painfully trying to figure out what the questions meant, others already writing the answers in the blanks following each problem. The instructions made it clear, however, that all calculations must be done on the back of the sheet, in order that the teacher could tell how we had arrived at the answers put in the blank spaces.
After about an hour had passed, we heard a gentle knock at the classroom door. When Miss Strayhorn opened it, we could see a Western Union messenger boy in his regular delivery uniform standing just outside with cap politely in hand. "I have a telegram for a Mr. Watson--Mr. John Watson," he announced. "Is he here, m'am?"
Miss Strayhorn said yes, she believed he was there, pointing back to John who was by then holding up his hand. She allowed the messenger to take the telegram to Mr. Watson. He did this quickly and quietly, and after getting John's signature acknowledging delivery, he left.
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