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November 2022 – And What Do We Find Inside The Box?
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?
- Who designed and made Felix the Phoenix mascot?
- 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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