The Protractor, A Young Person’s Guide To Precision

We are the tool-using animal, it is our distinction.

There surely is more to the human species than that, but to go without mentioning this unique skill of ours would be to neglect a lot.

Tools extend our reach, sometimes literally, but always figuratively, and offset the weaknesses of a species that admittedly excels at none of the other animal skills like running or swinging from trees and so has used its intellect to compensate.

And compensate we have!

Look around you; the world you see, in all its complexity and enrichment, is largely the result of our tool-building ambition and our tool-using acumen.

You will read now and again of another species that has learned to poke at an anthill with a stick or bang on the wall with a rock, and the fine people who study these species say, “see, I told you we weren’t the only tool-using animal!”

But come on. This isn’t really much in the way of tool-using now, is it?

To take but one instance, compare that to one of the tools that adorned the early years of our education, the protractor.

You can find one in any department store, or even in a good grocery store that has a school supplies aisle.

Pull it down from the shelf for a moment and take a look at the intricate array of numbers, the precision of the layout, the crisp presentation of the data, the exactness of the alignment of the angles.

Do you have any idea what you can do with this tool, this simple tool from a schoolchild’s backpack?

You don’t?

I was hoping you did.

I don’t.

In truth, I have no earthly idea what the thing does.

You’re sure you don’t know? Not at all? Nothing’s coming back to you now that we’re talking about it?

I didn’t know at the time what a protractor did, this period in grade school that I speak of, when the young mind really starts to bloom, for some of us, though no doubt I was tested on it and was expected to be able to employ it in some damnable math problem or other, and I don’t know today.

What in the world are those numbers for? The spacing between them means something, but what that something is is beyond me.

Taken in at a glance its half moon shape briefly resembles a display of the Zodiac, or a representation of the ancient skies that you might see constellations laid out upon, each waiting to be named some absolutely ridiculous thing or other, but there are no Zodiac signs, nor no constellations, so it cannot be either of those.

The subdivisions of the numbers into fifths – or maybe fourths, it depends on how you count them. it could be thirds – is surely significant and says to you that you hold in your hand an instrument of precision, that’s for sure.

Like any such instrument, holding it makes you feel precise yourself for a few moments, a feeling that is entirely undercut by the rest of your life.

You are the least precise person on the planet as a matter of fact.

You approximate like a madman in matters of numbers, words, ideas, notions, concepts, relationships, time of day, month of the year, year of the decade, current century, and nearly anything that you present to your mind for internal discussion.

These rigorous back and forth discussions in which you carefully state one side of a point to be debated and then the other, and then let them start wrestling one another in a death match, start to vaporize quickly at the margins and then work its way inward, this vaporization process that I speak of, till there is nothing in the way of an idea left at all, or even simple thought waves.

A common thing to say to yourself at the end of such a mental bout is along the lines of “now what was it that I was thinking?”

Maybe if you held a protractor in your hand at the time it would help firm up some of these notions before they atomize and drift away like morning fog.

In this regard, using a  protractor or even holding the damn thing in your hand is like reading a smart book about a smart subject – say the Periodic Table – which exists not for knowledge or the transfer of knowledge – God knows the facts and figures scarcely take up any residence in your brain at all and are gone on the next train out of town – but which for a moment makes you feel as if you too are smart.

A happy illusion and well worth the price of the book, but you no more know what the Periodic Table is these days than you know what a protractor is good for.

By recollection it makes a mediocre Frisbee, and is near worthless as an ice scraper for a windshield.

I wonder what the damn thing does? I wonder, wonder, wonder. It nags at me.

It may work in concert with this other device you can find in any grade school student’s pencil case.

This thing looks a bit like a man who unaccountably is wearing a woman’s high heel shoe on one foot only. If, in some universe, it walked its way across the table, it would do so in a marked clomping manner, pausing after each step with the low foot to bring the higher foot forward, and then setting off to do it all again.

A small yellow pencil is affixed into one of the legs, and the other had a pointed end, perfect for gouging designs into a wooden desk.

The purpose of this instrument is much easier to work out than the protractor. After all, it is called a compass.

By throwing the device up into the air and carefully following the manner of its landing, you my observe which way the pointed end — not the pencil end! That is a common mistake — you may determine which way the pointed end directs you eye and therefore which direction is Due North.

That is not the end of its powers.

Using the pencil as your tracing element you can also, starting with the legs as close together as possible, first trace one perfect circle then, with the legs minutely spread wider apart, trace another, then another, then another, until you have an image of multiple concentric circles, each slightly larger the former, separated by uniform, precise, distances.

Precise! There’s that word again!

Now, why you would want to do that, I have no earthly idea.

I think in an adult’s life it would be useful in a submarine movie to unroll a map of the ocean floor over an official-looking flat surface of some sort, carefully place the fixed point on certain coordinates, and then, in a series of jumps, not dissimilar to, again, the forward progress of a man who for some reason — perhaps he has lost a bet — is wearing a woman’s high heel shoe on one foot, as you take the second leg and place it further along some axis or other, then let it be the fixed point, then lift the first leg and swing it around in a precise fashion, then, repeating the motion, bring the previously fixed point around and swivel the device again so that this point takes up residence a few inches further on.

You do this until you run out of map or table, or pencil lead, or until the submarine lurches, or until you look up with an expression of fixed horror on your face and gesture to where the fixed point has finally landed, and step back for everyone else to see and draw the same dire conclusions that you have.

So that’s another thing you can do with it.

You can do the same thing on a map at home as you plan your vacation, either drawing circles further and further out from a fixed point – your home base – or leaping along the map in this hop-legged jig that I have taken some trouble to describe in laymen’s terms, technical though the subject matter may be.

I don’t know why you would want to do this since you’re really just planning to hang out around the house this vacation since you are out of money, but perhaps it will make you feel useful in some demented way.

It is good, isn’t it, to touch base with the first fine instruments that most of us ever held in our hands?

Precision, as we have discussed, is a wonderful thing and truly sets us apart from the lower species.