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Sideburns and Screaming Yellow Zonkers

By Dave Hand

I had failed.

Of course, at that point in my life, it didn’t matter to me. I was a young fifteen-year-old kid who didn’t want to worry about being responsible or consider how performance in high school mattered in the adult world. My grades were always rather mediocre in high school, so when I got that ‘F’ in first semester algebra, I didn’t worry. The school, however, considered the matter of grave import and insisted that I give the matter my top priority. To do so, I was required to repeat the fall semester of algebra in the spring and take the spring semester over the summer, before my Junior year. This distressed me, but I figured, what the heck. Nothing much fazed me for long in those days.

The first day of the spring semester found me in the class with other students who had similar performance issues with algebra. Brad was a big guy whom I had known for many years and sometimes bordered on being a bully. His close friends Will and Phil, who always ran together were there as well and the group all at in a cluster toward the back of the room. There were also five or so other students that I did not know. The name on the schedule said Kukis and I sighed. I was familiar with the name of the teacher as my sister had been in his class the previous year. Her assessment of this teacher as “weird” raised my eyebrows, but I was going to reserve judgment until I saw him for myself. The assessment seemed accurate as the tall, gangly fellow strode into the room like Icabod Crane, carrying a pile of papers. He had a shaggy mass of brown hair in a disheveled heap atop his head and wore sideburns that looked more like muttenchops. His clothes were an eclectic amalgam of colors and styles that defied categorization, other than to say, weird.

I would later find that this eccentric individual lived as he dressed. He owned a Volkswagen Beetle that he had attached pieces of short-pile carpet to the exterior of the doors, apparently to parody his own sideburns. He also refused to wear matching socks as an apparent rebellion against conformity. The word eccentric failed to fully fit this odd person.

Once he began to teach, however, I began to understand. One couldn’t be intimidated by this guy. It was hard to even take him seriously. He was more than just a weird guy, he understood how to make a terribly dull subject such as algebra interesting. He described the canceling of like variables in terms of “this x turns into Gamma rays and filters out into the atmosphere.” He used the candy known as “Screaming Yellow Zonkers” as a teaching aid. Other ways of identifying with a recalcitrant audience who really didn’t want to learn algebra endeared him to his class. We all found that despite our collective distaste for math, that we all looked forward to his class. He showed the formulas that had previously been nothing but abstract concepts that defied understanding, as puzzles that needed solving. In this light it actually became fun to solve for x. You got a sense of accomplishment from working the problem and “relegating those unnecessary variables to science fiction.”

It wasn’t so much drudgery for him to teach either. While many teachers drag themselves up to the board and recite their lesson verbatim from the textbook, he relished the teaching experience. You could see his eyes light up when a student finally understood what he was talking bout. He would get excited and prance up and down the chalkboard frantically drawing his illustrations or jotting down the equations, all the while relating the lesson with his unusual perspective.

He also didn’t subscribe to the prevailing trend of burying his students in homework, a practice that, more than any other, was the reason for my poor grades. I tend to catch on quick and repetition bores me. So when he would assign only five problems per section rather than the twenty-five or more that other teachers gave, I was delighted to complete my homework. My end grade for the class was a resounding ‘A’. A far cry better than the ‘F’ I had entered with. Sadly, the semester I had to take in summer was taught by another teacher who followed the pack and my grade, once again, fell. But I did pass, thanks in large part to Mr. Kukis’ teachings. Now, while I wasn’t the only one who got so much out of Mr. Kukis’ class, some students didn’t appreciate the eccentric stylings. Brad, Will and Phil all managed to pass the class but didn’t identify with the methods that Mr. Kukis used. Of course, these guys would rather have spent their day racing their hot rods up and down the Rankin Road than sit in a class room. They, as a group, would lounge back in the plastic and metal chairs and poke fun at the Screaming Yellow Zonker jokes, or claim to not understanding “science fiction” and how it related to variables, all the while laughing amongst themselves at the disruption they caused. Mr. Kukis didn’t let them faze him, though. He went on with his lesson as soon as it became apparent that they weren’t going to take the lesson seriously.

I have many teachers that stand out in my memory. My senior English teacher, my journalism teacher, my art teacher in the tenth grade are all ingrained in my memory, but none so deeply or vividly as Mr. Kukis. He did more than teach algebra, he made a lazy student realize that working a problem through could actually be rewarding experience.