School days, school days, dear old golden rule days,
Readin’ and ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic…
Yeah, right. We’ve arrived at ‘rithmetic with The Swinging Algebra Teacher.
The Swinging Algebra Teacher was a low stakes Jekyll and Hyde whose life was split between his milquetoast professional persona of mathematics teacher by day and polyester clad hedonist by night. While the sun was shining, he put in the minimum effort to make sure his students could muster enough math credits to get them into one of the local colleges, but after dark, he lived to do what he felt he was born to do — DANCE! He couldn’t wait to hit the dance floors of the greater Philadelphia area. Legend has it that his weekend started earlier than everybody else’s — possibly Wednesday, definitely Thursday — as he would rush home after class, catch a disco nap and then hit the clubs to trip the light fantastic until last call. This probably explained his lack of energy in class and his utter lack of enthusiasm for algebraic equations.
I initially started working on this with night leading into day, but I flipped it feeling it would make more sense.
It was the 1970s after all and while most of the teachers I remember were married with spouses, kids and suburban homes, there were a number of teachers I suspected of being very much of that time period. If asked if they were married or an allusion was made as to a spouse, the question was met with a cryptic grin. They may have had the libertine bent of the time and probably would not have turned down an invitation to a key party if it were ever offered. They may have missed out on the ’60s, but they were going to party hearty with whatever the ME decade had to offer.
Once again, I used Affinity Designer to produce this piece. This was a lot of fun, and I listened to a lot of disco as I worked on it to get me in the right frame of mind.
My swinging algebra teacher’s appearance isn’t based on any one teacher in particular, but like my librarian, he is sort of a composite of a number of teachers and staff. Not all of them were math teachers.
I’m still lousy at algebra. I was hopeless trying to help my son with his homework. I hope Mr. So-and-So was a good dancer.
LOL, yep, there were a few of both sexes that were ‘out and about’ on the weekends!
I was just leafing through my yearbook to get a feel for the time period and the personalities. There were more of these characters than I remembered!