Mr Crane was quite possibly the first person I ever met who was nearly as wide as he was tall, and he was tall enough to be a strikingly large figure. He economized on movement as much as possible, and taught chemistry class on a stool in front of an overhead projector. He was a reasonably good teacher, as I remember; he spent exactly three days on each lesson, writing out and solving problem after problem on those little plastic sheets.
On day one of a lesson, I'd follow along as he worked the problem until I had the process down, then I'd try to solve the thing as soon as he wrote it down. Because he spent so much time explaining each step, I spent a lot of time just sitting there, waiting for him to finish so I could see if I had the right answer.
One day he noticed, so he asked me why I wasn't writing anything down. I told him. He got a bit upset, gestured to the class, and asked me if I thought I was smarter than everyone else. I really didn't want to answer that, but I felt stuck- a teacher asking me a question, and there's really only one answer I thought was true:
"Yeah, if it takes them three days."
So much for socialization.
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