So despite the fact that Anthony Partridge is a teacher/professor of some sort in almost all of my fics and AUs (including several that I havenât written anything for and might not ever write things for), I somehow frequently manage to completely forget that he was also canonically a high school math teacher before he worked for ODAR. Here are some thoughts about that era, because can you IMAGINE being in Anthony Partridgeâs calc class?
Anthony was definitely the sort of person who planned on âââseeing the worldâââ after he graduated college (starry-eyed, that one, much as he likes to position himself as the voice of reason), but somehow he wound up back in his home town for a few months, which turned into a few years, which may have been a lifetime if he hadnât begun the predictive algorithms project and gotten himself noticed.
But before predictive algorithms, and even in the early days of the project (back when it was just him scribbling numbers during his lunch break or late at night when he should have been grading papers), Anthonyâs life revolved around imparting knowledge to the next generation.
(âThe next generationââsome of those kids were less than a decade younger than him, had been his neighbors, children heâd babysat, family friends invited over on summer evenings. But already he felt so much older, so distanced, felt like heâd learned so much since when he sat where they did now.)
(Heâd learned nothing, not yet.)
And the thing isâAnthony was good at it. Teaching, that is. He liked it, too, was passionate about âthe future of public education in America!â
Sure, heâd go off on tangents in his lectures, and a lot of what he talked about wasnât exactly necessary for kids to know, but it was interesting. Anthony was under no illusions when it came to the way most of his students felt about mathematics. He saw it as his job to help them engage with the subject in ways that made sense, made it feel worth learning. And if that meant saying âto HECK with the core curriculum, weâre talking about [cool development in the Math World] today,â then so be it.
(A quick aside: Anthony did not swear at school. He was even more cautious about it there than he was in the early days of aP. At leastâŠhe never swear at school if we exclude The Library Incident.)
Most of the students referred to him Partridge or Dr. P, but to someâthe ones who had taken more than one of his courses, the seniors and the math kids and the students who had never been good with numbers but feel like they finally understand them after being in his class for a semester or twoâhe was âTony.â
(âTony,â said in that peculiar, occasionally mocking but mostly appreciative tone used only by high schoolers calling teachers by their first names)
The only other people allowed to call Anthony âTonyâ are a few select family members and, in variations of the timeline where they meet, Mateo Morales (who just canât be stopped, and probably also uses the name âBentin Quarloweâ to Ben/Quentinâs face).
(Some of the Plasticity kids definitely also call him âTonyâ in timelines where they know him; they remind him of his old students, and sometimes he forgets that it isnât just another classroom, that none of those children are there by choice.)
I know that overhead projectors werenât being used in schools back when Anthony was teaching but letâs be anachronistic for a quick sec here to imagine a scenario: Anthony Partridge, who will later in life literally build time machines, utterly incapable of operating a projector and refusing to acknowledge it. The record for the most time he ever wasted in class trying to get one to work before somebody intervened was 22 minutes.
The next day, his students walked in and the projector was in pieces on his desk. (âToday weâre going to figure out how these things work. A little learning experience for me along with all of you. Extra credit to whoever can correctly assemble it before someone notices itâs missing.â)
Anthonyâs office hours were whenever a student needed help, even if it meant he was missing lunch, or staying late, or coming in at the crack of dawn.
Sometimes Helen just showed up at the school. All of the students who call Anthony âTonyâ knew her and loved her.
There was a running tally of how many kids had accidentally called Anthony âDad.â
There was a running tally of how many kids had purposefully called Anthony âDad.â
Anthony didnât care if people ate in class as long as they were still paying attention. He had to explain to the principal that just because the advanced stats class organized a weekly brunch potluck didnât mean they werenât learning.
(The explanation would have gone better if Anthony hadnât been holding a half-eaten bagel at the time.)
Dungeons & Dragons wasnât around at the time, but if it had been, Anthony absolutely would have hosted one-shot sessions for his smallest classes and gone through all sorts of hoops to justify it as relevant. Instead, he hosted occasional class strategy games, usually after exams.Â
Being Anthony Partridgeâs TA was a coveted position and the seniors usually ended up fighting for it.Â
He absolutely had a petty interdepartmental feud going, probably with a teacher in the history department, and would pull kids out of his rivalsâ classes to retake tests and whatnot whenever he got the chance.
Anthony wore the absolute tackiest suits and jackets imaginable to work. Somehow, his ties were even worse.
If he ran out of room on the chalkboard he was not above drawing with chalk on other handy surfaces (he canât erase that yet, some of the students are still taking notes).Â
He never ever won a teacher of the year award, or any equivalent, but one time a group of students presented him with a plaque theyâd cobbled together in shop class bearing the inscription â#1 Math Manâ and it hung above his desk for years. (He even took it to Polvo, where it mostly stayed in a box. After he went to the Blackroom, it eventually wound up in Helenâs possession, along with some of his other personal belongings.)
Although he never knew it, Anthony was one of the people who inspired Sally to become a professor.Â
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