Of little gentlemen serving as groundsmen, and Patricia, math geek who fell by wayside

Math equations on a blackboard. [iStockphoto]

Now that the nation is in the grip of exams fever, witnessing real-time the spectre of student grades that turn from A to B with the ease of a camouflaged chameleon, I call to mind those days of our lives when we ate, slept and dreamt grades.

I was still in lower primary, a bit distracted, like most students who sit by the window, so that what the teacher said was flavoured by the background noise. My math teacher, one Mrs Kiragu, instilled fear of the Lord in us and prophesied that if we couldn't hack the math, we'd work as farmhands for Patricia, who was the brightest in class.

Patricia's father was a teacher in a nearby school and being the daughter of a teacher, she carried herself with a certain dignity. I'm not saying about her natural beauty, lest I am accused of objectifying her. Let's just say Patricia was a model student in the way she performed in class, as well as her popularity within the community.

I left that school before Patricia graduated, because I was restless, but moving from the window did have some benefits: I started to enjoy math enough to pass convincingly, before returning to a window seat in high school.

The long and the short of it is that my performance in the subject through high school was so dismal, I spent more time penning pan-African messages in my term papers instead of working out Calculus or algebra.

My old math teacher has been long deceased and I don't know what happened to our dear Patricia, the pretty girl with brains who beat us in the subject.

What I picked on the grapevine, thanks to sitting by the window, was that she did not graduate from high school.

She got a few babies in quick succession. That's a generation ago.

Now I apply math to fiction writing - stories, even when invented, must be logical - and I apply the other skill to count cash, and it hasn't been much.

That's how I ended up as storytellers, telling tall tales, real and imagined, because that's what chaps who sit by the window do.