If You Want To Be a Better Writer, Read “Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve”
by Ben Blatt
Stan White would roll over
When I was a junior in high school, I was going to prove to myself that I could do high-level math. I signed up for Advanced Algebra with the legendary Stan White. My mother had gone to school with the man and repeatedly told me that he was a GENIUS. True, he was known throughout high school as a brilliant man. He was also known as an inept teacher, one of those people who were too smart to come down to the level of us not-so-brilliant kids in his classroom.
I can still see him standing at the board, his hand poised at the beginning of the equation. He would repeatedly pound the board with his yellow chalk in a frantic kind of Morse code. “See that? It’s right there,” he’d say as if the constellation of chalk stars exploding in front of that formula would explain it all.
The miasma of chalk stars did not speak to me, but Mr. White’s inability to articulate those formulas didn’t matter because the brainy, math-minded kids got what he meant. I didn’t.
An out-of-place word nerd
I was a word nerd as out of place in that class as buck teeth on a supermodel. The whole year was a struggle for me, going home to work…
