163: Another aside.
Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home,” Chapter 4
4
ANOTHER ASIDE. It is, I think, quite possible that during the next several years, the most important part of our education came from learning to follow Mr. Simone’s schedules, with their complex branchings:
All those who have music on Tuesdays and Thursdays skip ahead to page six for your Monday and Wednesday afternoon schedule. Those with music on Mondays and Wednesdays turn back to page two for your Monday and Wednesday afternoon schedule.
alternative paths:
During the twenty-two minutes allotted for lunch, you may (a) eat lunch, (b) cavort in the school yard, (c) play dodgeball in the gymnasium, or (d) work in the study halls held in rooms 112 or 124, but when the period is over, you must all assemble by group in the auditorium.
and dependent relationships:
If you take wood shop on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the first half of the year, you must study either French [see note on page 12] or the Tonette on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the second half of the year.
It is indisputably true that the generation of students who learned to follow Mr. Simone’s schedules or others like them has produced a large number of adults who are remarkably adept at writing long and intricate computer programs and long and intricate sentences that establish relationships among ideas so widely separated that one wouldn’t have imagined that a chain of reasoning could have been forged long enough to link them. I think that there is a cause-and-effect relationship in there somewhere.
[to be continued on Thursday, December 30, 2021]
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
In Topical Guide 163, Mark Dorset considers Conditional Relationships from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.