| As though I weren't having enough trouble learning to tell time, here came Mrs. Noe, my third grade teacher at the Walton Elementary School in north Philadelphia, who accused me of fudging the answers in multiplication quizzes. I liked Mrs. Noe. She taught us to spell "the", an article I had been particularly fond of since I had started reading. Now that I could both read and write "the" my literary horizons seemed boundless, but there was still the problem with numbers.
Unknown to Mrs. Noe, or anyone else for that matter, I had invented The Rule of Threes, an unknown precursor to the widely-adopted binary system. I used The Rule to help me get by when attempting addition or subtraction.
Say I wanted to add eight and seven. From practice I knew how many threes were in each number. Eight, then nine, ten, eleven, then twelve, thirteen, fourteen, then fifteen: Voila, the answer! It worked pretty well for subtraction too. I was very good at it and very fast, and until today no one ever had any idea what I was doing.
But then multiplication and, shiver, division entered my life, and the game was up. I worked hard on my Rule of Threes, - I now call it The Trinary System - but at the time I couldn't bring it up to speed for such advanced mathematical concepts as multiplication and division. I could probably do it now, but why in the world would I want to? I have a pocket calculator, you see
Mrs. Noe watched my fumbling and laughable attempts at multiplication. My answers in the quizzes were by far the most original in the class, but this was mathematics, not creative writing, and that good teacher saw that something had to be done.
"Have you memorized the multiplication tables?" she said to me. Shades of snarling clock-faces!
"No," I said.
"You must have drill," she said.
Aaaargh! Drill! I told my friend, Juny, short for Leroy, Jr., about my having to do drill. He saw how worried I was about the prospect. He thought about it for a moment, then his visage darkened, and he spoke, haltingly.
"I can...get...some boys...from the York Street gang. We can...beat-up...Mrs. Noe."
I was aghast. "You can't do that!"
"I always help you."
"But I like Mrs. Noe."
"Sure?"
"Yeah."
Juny looked immensely relieved. He had never in his life beaten-up anybody and probably never would. He was a good friend.
I did memorize the multiplication tables, passably. Seven eights are 56, right? Plus or minus three? All this I accomplished under Mrs. Noe's tutelage. I never told her I had once saved her from a mugging.
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