creativity and he said that this class was certainly not about that. | disliked and

creativity and he said that this class was certainly not about that. | disliked and feared him. He seemed to feel (and wrote a note to my parents to the effect) that, being “too arrogant” | needed to be “brought down a peg or two.” | had gotten the best grades in the first two exams and was enjoying the role of after school tutor for some of my friends. | suspect | was getting pretty egotistical. In class, | found myself eagerly shouting out answers without holding up my hand, behavior that Mr. Kirby met with his characteristic look of fatigued disgust. Twice | was thrown out of class for my introjections. He then began to give me problems that | could not do, for which | was not prepared. This left me standing at the blackboard until the end of the hour, after all the rest of the students had solved theirs and sat down. On parent’s night, Mr. Kirby told my father that | needed more “social and intellectual discipline.” Inspired and personally directed hard work and socially defined correct behavior were not synonymous to this arrogant 13 year old who had already brought chagrin to his mother, the conservatory classical piano instructor, with his satirical pianistic jazzy composition called “How High the Moonlight Sonata.” | was also a secret reader of the book on the top back shelf in my father’s library by Jack Hanley called “How to Make Mary; A Gentlemen’s Guide to Seduction.” In Mr. Kirby’s class, inspired by the book, | sometimes reached behind me, through the crack in my desk seat, to caress the inside part of the long smooth legs and sometimes moist panties of a well developed, tall and beautiful brunette girl behind me. | was never caught and she pretended that nothing was happening. In fact, she never talked to me outside of class. | felt then, vaguely, and now, more specifically, that a content enriched, instinctually titillated and excited unconscious could lead me to the solutions of intellectual challenges if it were both sufficiently indulged and untrammeled, left alone in its work of being itself. Mr. Kirby did not see things that way. Since then, among my graduate and post-doctoral students in the neurosciences, | have learned that the Mr. Kirby’s of modern American educational practice have ruined generations of potential mathematicians and physical scientists. Worse, they have created generations of very bright math phobics who 161 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013661