Before I begin to ramble, allow me to share with you some extremely important information:
Today is Sunday February 21st. It is the first Sunday after Valentine’s Day and is consequently a date of huge significance and importance. My father, who seemed to me to know most things and to have an opinion on everything, insisted that the first Sunday after Valentine’s Day was the first day of the year when we had Tea without the lights on. Even if Valentine’s Day fell on a Saturday, Tea the next day was lightless. I don’t know how well this is a truth universally acknowledged but at least you know now.
Of course, this does not apply in the Cayman Islands where the time of sunset varies by only about an hour over the course of a year.
I assist at our local primary school on two mornings a week. I am not paid but I enjoy being there and I hope that I am of some benefit to some of the children. One of the classes that I help is a Year 6 (ages 10-11) group. I don’t really help the entire group as 90% of my time is spent sitting next to Rozzard and prodding him, often literally, into doing some work.
Ms Hunte, his teacher has told me that on the days that I am not there he usually does nothing at all. He is very hard to assess academically as he won’t do any kind of assessment task.
If he were a pupil at the school in Muswell Hill, North London, where I used to teach, his parents would have long ago argued that he is a misunderstood, special-needs student requiring every kind of support imaginable. That would include full time one-to-one support, extra time in assessment tasks, a scribe, school-provided lap top, a Caymanian/English dictionary (they’d find one) and so much other help that if he didn’t come out top they would be firing off letters of complaint to the Chair of Governors of the school and to the local MP too.
But Cayman is not like Muswell Hill – thank God!
I can always tell what sort of morning I will have as soon as I walk in. If Rozzard looks me in the eye and smiles, we will achieve a lot but if he looks away or buries his head in his arms on the table top, I will have problems.
The other day, not only did he smile but he leapt from his chair, rushed over to me, grabbed me by the arm and shouted, “Mr Terry, Mr Terry, are you coming to Sports Day tomorrow?” All the primary schools, the largest of which has a roll of only 420, rather pretentiously, I think, use the national stadium, which has a seating capacity of around 10,000, for their sports days.
Ms Hunte told me that it was scheduled to begin at 8:00 a.m. before it got too hot. That was much too early for me and so at 9:30, armed with my genuine Panama hat, “hand woven in Ecuador,” a bottle of water and a camera, I arrived. The first thing that struck me was not that proceedings were yet to begin (8:00 ‘Island Time’ is about 10:00 real time) but how many spectators there were. There must have been more than 500 family, friends, and me.
I asked the Headteacher if I could help in any way. In my fantasy I hoped she would ask me to do the announcements on the public address system. I fancied that my clear, mellow, mellifluous, perfectly enunciated speaking voice was just what she wanted for such an important job. Other possible options at her disposal were to be a timekeeper or the rather anonymous rôle of shepherding the competitors in their pens where they were waiting to race.
“Ah Terry,” she said, obviously relieved and delighted, “I’ve got a vital job I’d like you to do.”
“This is it.” I thought and I started to rehearse the little witticisms that I would intersperse among the announcements.
“You see those chickens?” She pointed to a group (a nuisance) of about 20 feral chickens pecking furiously at the track on the first bend.
“Yes,” I said cautiously.
“As you’ve got a sun hat, will you stand on that bend and shoo them away just before the start of every race?”
So that was my job for the morning and very important it was too.
Rather unusually, perhaps, the first event of the day was the Year 6 girls’ 800 metre race. There was a problem in that I and all the parents, thought that it was a 400 metre race and everyone went beserk as the competitors jogged down the home straight for the first time. I thought that something was amiss as no one made any attempt to sprint for the line. When the girls carried on to run a second lap there was much confusion in the stand.
Rozzard ran in the boys 400 metre race and won it but rather spoilt it by doing a Usain Bolt “Lightning” pose immediately after crossing the line.
After an hour or so, I had done such a good job with the chickens that they had left the entire complex. (Dispersing chickens is probably a transferable skill and I will offer my services to Sebastian Coe for the 2012 Olympics. If it works with chickens, it will work with pigeons too).
I moved to the shade of the main stand and watched from there.
It was then that the children from the Year 6 class that I am attached to spotted me. They surrounded me and demanded to know which House I supported. I explained that I was independent of houses but by inclination I was a Swift but then again, philosophically and ideologically, I was possibly more of a Nightingale.
That was no good to them and there followed two or three minutes of intense canvassing. This ceased when a girl produced an adult sized T-shirt with a distinctive picture of a Man-o-War, or Frigate bird on the front and MOW printed on the back. She demanded that I put it on. The Swifts, Swallows and Nightingales were equally adamant that I should not. I was in a quandary but in the end, I did put it on and that means that next Thursday I am going to be ostracised by three quarters of the class.
Between events I was sitting, gazing out over the track when I was prodded so hard in the back that it was more of a punch. I looked round to see an elderly, grey haired lady who was firmly gripping a small boy by the arm. “He’s a winner,” she informed me. I watched as she carried on along the row of seats, dragging the boy with her, punching everyone in the back and showing off her grandson to them.
At last we came to the events we were all waiting for – the novelty races. In the first one for Year 1 girls, they stood next to a plastic container forty metres from the finish line and facing it. They ran to a beanbag on the track some ten metres away, ran back to the container and placed the bag into it. Then they ran to collect a second beanbag twenty metres away to put that in the container and so on.
When the first girl put her last beanbag into the box the crowd erupted into applause but there was obviously a problem as the officials came running up and were talking very earnestly to all the competitors.
It soon became apparent what the problem was: the race was not over until the runners had picked up the full container and carried it over the finish line. There was a winner but I am not sure if it was the same girl who had been the first to put her last beanbag into the box some two minutes earlier.
Another novelty race that was fantastic and has potential for future Olympics was the ‘triathlon’ (Run, Throw, Calculate). In this the competitors stand next to a container and then, on the word, “go”:
1. Run ten metres to where two beanbags are placed on the track.
2. Pick up one bag, throw it to try and get it into the container next to where they started.
3. Pick up a pencil and piece of paper on which a maths problem was written.
4. Solve the sum.
5. Run back to the start line and hand in the paper.
6. Repeat the whole process.
Five seconds were added for every missed throw and five seconds for any incorrect answer. The tension was immeasurable.
Just imagine it as an Olympic event! The throw could be 50 metres and a cricket ball would be thrown instead of a beanbag while the problem might be, "What is the volume of a sphere, radius 6 centimetres? (No calculators allowed)."
When it came to the boys’ Year 6 race, Rozzard let down everyone very badly indeed - himself, his family, his House and most especially, me. It was a 100 metre race but the novelty was that every 25 metres they had to put on an item of clothing.
The boys started barefoot and at the first stop they had to put on shoes, then a T-shirt and finally long or ‘tall’ trousers as they call them here. I was watching Rozzard closely as he sauntered up the track to the start. I saw him stop by the trousers, pick them up and then put them down but I thought nothing of it.
The race started and Rozzard and two other boys were in close contention when they reached the all-important ‘trouser’ stage of the race. Putting on tall trousers quickly is an exercise that has many possible techniques. Do you sit down or do you hop about on one leg? Tenths of a second saved here are vital.
Rozzard used a technique that was brilliant in its conception and simplicity. When he had picked up the pair of jeans on his way to the start, it now became clear why: he had done up the waist button and made sure that the zip was fully down. Then, 25 metres from the tape, as the race neared its climax, instead of putting his legs into the appropriate openings, he had put the trousers over his head and around his neck with the two trouser legs hanging down his back. He crossed the line a full ten seconds before anyone else, which in a 100-metre race is a colossal margin.
When he was disqualified he was most indignant and protested vehemently that all they had been told was to put the trousers on – they were never told to put them on their legs. I thought he had a point, and said so, but nobody listens to someone in a Man-O-War t-shirt when that is Rozzard's House too.
Answer to Rozzard's number sequence from June 20th:
6, 12, 48, 768, 196608, _______________
Rozzard’s Way
6² = 36
36 ÷ 3 = 12
12²= 144
144 ÷ 3 = 48
48²= 2304
2304 ÷ 3 = 768
768²= 589824
589 824 ÷ 3 = 196608
196608² = 38654705664
38 654 705 664 ÷ 3 = 12884901888
and so that is the next number in the sequence.
Fibonacci 146 = 1454489111232772683678306641953
31 digits, so don't bother counting them!
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