Parents' Algebra

Many a parent who confidently sits down at the parlor lamp to help his offspring tackle his homework finds that he has attempted more than he can handle. Published last week in Philadelphia was a convenient 236-page treatise, Algebra for Parents* calculated to save elders considerable embarrassment when asked to explain anything from simple addition to the binomial theorem. It was as ingratiating, discursive, and adroit as its author, a 59-year-old Philadelphia lawyer named Samuel Bryan Scott.

Philadelphians know tall, grey Lawyer Scott as the senior partner in the firm of Scott & Burton, a specialist in real-estate practice, the onetime (1907-15) independent Republican floor leader in the Pennsylvania Legislature. His neighbors in Chestnut Hill know him as just the kind of devoted father who takes naturally to doing homework. More than two decades ago Lawyer Scott began answering questions for his daughters Nor (Eleanor), Winkie (Sylvia) and Net (Henrietta), soon extended his advice and counsel to his nephews, Edward and William McKendree Scott Jr. When they were very small, Lawyer Scott taught them to count the seven buttons on each of their shoes, told them the shoes together had 13 buttons, then waited to be rebutted. He started on algebra when Daughter Nor was 12, changing schools, and terrified of the subject. Father Scott took her out in a canoe and brushed her up so well that Nor graduated from Vassar without any further trouble with algebra, at 28 has just finished her interneship at the Philadelphia General Hospital. He wisely started Winkie earlier, taught her to solve algebraic equations at the age of 5 by telling her that the equal sign was like a seesaw and the numbers on both sides were like children. Father Scott coached Winkie for the geometry in her College Entrance Examinations for Bryn Mawr, in which her mark was 99. Net gave no trouble until, out of Bryn Mawr and married to a wholesale druggist, she tried to do her husband's double entry bookkeeping. Father Scott straightened that out on a two-hour walk along the Wissahickon.

Author Scott explains that he wrote Algebra for Parents because "ordinary school books are written to be used under a teacher. If a parent is moved to bone up on the subject, he is repelled by the usual textbook . . . seldom more than a skeleton of instruction and a mass of exercises." Although professional textbook writers may accuse Author Scott of oversimplification--trigonometry is covered in 17 pages--he tested his explanations by solving correctly all the College Board algebra examinations from 1916 to 1931. Says Lawyer Scott: "Teaching is a profession and everyone magnifies his own profession." But he is anxious not to have his book misused for the benefit of young idlers: "The function of the home helper is a rather special one. . . . His task is to slay some lion in the path whose fierce mien is absorbing a dangerous amount of nervous energy. . . . The task of the parent instructor begins when the child is stuck. Never before."

Lawyer Scott attributes his own intellectual self-reliance from his early badgering of his teachers at Princeton, where he graduated in 1909. One day when he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania Law School he tried to get into a football game free by offering to play any instrument in the band which lacked a player. He was handed an E-flat tuba with the music for Hail Pennsylvania in another key, and transposed it by reading the bass clef as the treble and subtracting the proper number of flats, later working out an explanatory equation. Today Lawyer Scott plays the French horn in the Germantown Symphony Orchestra, owns a 16th Century cello that once belonged to Virtuoso Hans Kindler. His favorite instrument, at the moment, however, is a "probosciphone," a small metal device that fits over the nose and on which he can produce a shrill tune by blowing hard. So far neither Mrs. Scott, the former Margaretta Morris, nor anyone else can play the probosciphone which Mr. Scott bought from a street vendor for a dime. Lawyer Scott also enjoys philosophical speculation. He thinks there are "at least 50,000,000 people" who cannot define a "unit." His own definition: "A unit is anything that anybody chooses to consider as such."

*Magee Press ($2.50).

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