The Gym Teachers Syllogism

The Gym Teacher’s Syllogism

I am sixteen and sitting in a civics class at Lowell High School.

I’m in a chair that isn’t super comfortable as it’s actually attached to the desk. I’m locked into a column so we can all see and hear the teacher and watch him draw stuff on the blackboard. I’m over six feet two now, and, well, the chair doesn’t move back for me. I don’t fit and it’s annoying.

We have Dick Tracey as our teacher. His hair is perfectly sculpted into swoops and waves but no Ponyo to run over them. Dick is nice, small-eyed, and is a “man’s man.” He usually runs PE but he gets to teach this class as well, and I’m not sure he appreciates the extra work. We’re getting our test regarding argument. The aspiration there is great: make good thinkers so you don’t end up with an idiot for, say, president, because that would suck.

He’s walking around talking and dropping tests off. He’s saying the scores are okay, and he drops off mine to me. I get a C on the argument test and am shocked. This is an easy-A class and the test was absurdly easy. I had received 2/5 on a key section. This section had no names, but five simple syllogisms like:

All men wear hats. Paul is a man. Therefore, Paul wears a hat.

True/False as the option and no further instruction. So, kinda easy and I look at my results. All my “true” answers are “wrong” and “false” answers are right. So the answers should have been all false for me to get “full credit.” Which is what I deserve and need and don’t give a flying fuck about, but I need to understand the thinking here to be sure.

I ask: “Why is question one false?”

Dick — and I’m so glad I don’t have this as a first name — says: “All men do not wear hats.”

So I was mistaken in my assumption. This isn’t argument and we should have been studying hat-wearing statistics instead to get ready for the test.

I ask: “Is this a test of argument or current events?”

Dick, who rarely gets mad, is mad and needs to tell me how a “man” sees the world. “Get your head out of the clouds. If you can’t know when something’s obviously false, you’ll have problems…” and I can’t hear this as my vision is turning red, not Marnie red, but red. I can’t resist: “I’d like to take this test to the math department and see what they score.”

That isn’t a great move and we become fast enemies at that point. He offers extra credit later, after I have a UCLA admission. I tell him to fuck off but use my polite terms and take a B in an easy-A class.