Home CDHS History CDHS History Forum November 2022 – And What Do We Find Inside The Box?

  • November 2022 – And What Do We Find Inside The Box?

    Posted by Stephen Nelson on November 1, 2022 at 10:26 am

    For many CDHS or CHS students, it might be many decades ago since we saw a tin case which rattled when we shook it. It wasn’t a Christmas present or a birthday present, at least I hope not. If you didn’t get it as a hand-me-down, chances are it was purchased from a department store or a school supply store.

    To some, it was dreaded and to others it could be a prized possession. It was a geometry set. Inside the neatly packed box were the instruments and tools concerning geometry. A strangely shaped plastic semi-circle would be explained to us as being a protractor which measured angles. 

    Two dangerous metal pointy things were the ends of a compass, not the kind to prevent you from being lost, and a set of dividers with two sharp points which allowed you to measure a distance between two points. By the way, that metal geometry compass usually didn’t lead me in the right direction.

    A plastic six-inch (pre-metric in my day) ruler was supposed to “help” the student determine distance as well. It also could be held down against the desk edge and pulled up to make a loud noise when it hit the desk.

    A small pencil and small pencil sharpener were in the box. You might wonder why they were there, when everyone had pencils, but you needed a small pencil to put in the receptacle of the compass when you needed to draw an arc or a circle. Larger pencils didn’t fit. When you used the pencil sharpener to sharpen the small pencil, there wasn’t a container to hold the shavings as you used the sharpener. Depending where you used the sharpener, the area could look like you had been whittling away for a while as the shavings piled up.

    In the 1970s, there was also a clear plastic stencil of the geometric shapes in the box. This saved a lot of time when attempting to draw a triangle, circle, rectangle, square and trapezoid. 

    Apparently, the word “trapezoid” is Greek for “table-shaped”. When in school, it made more sense to think it had something to do with a trapeze. Isn’t it amazing what you learn after leaving high school? Haha.

    Does anyone still have their geometry set? What decade were you in CHS or CDHS?

    1. Who designed and made Felix the Phoenix mascot?
    2. Find out the answer in next month’s newsletter.

    Last month’s answer: In June 2019, it was presented to Cassidy Tizzard for being a  secondary school student who achieved the highest academic average in all Grades 11 and 12 courses.

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