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 havenāt 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 Partridgeās calc class?
Anthony was definitely the sort of person who planned on āāāseeing the worldāāā 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 hadnāt 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), Anthonyās life revolved around imparting knowledge to the next generation.
(āThe next generationāāsome of those kids were less than a decade younger than him, had been his neighbors, children heād babysat, family friends invited over on summer evenings. But already he felt so much older, so distanced, felt like heād learned so much since when he sat where they did now.)
(Heād learned nothing, not yet.)
And the thing isāAnthony was good at it. Teaching, that is. He liked it, too, was passionate about āthe future of public education in America!ā
Sure, heād go off on tangents in his lectures, and a lot of what he talked about wasnāt 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 āto HECK with the core curriculum, weāre talking about [cool development in the Math World] today,ā 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 leastā¦he never swear at school if we exclude The Library Incident.)
Most of the students referred to him Partridge or Dr. P, but to someāthe 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 twoāhe was āTony.ā
(āTony,ā 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 āTonyā are a few select family members and, in variations of the timeline where they meet, Mateo Morales (who just canāt be stopped, and probably also uses the name āBentin Quarloweā to Ben/Quentinās face).
(Some of the Plasticity kids definitely also call him āTonyā in timelines where they know him; they remind him of his old students, and sometimes he forgets that it isnāt just another classroom, that none of those children are there by choice.)
I know that overhead projectors werenāt being used in schools back when Anthony was teaching but letās 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. (āToday weāre 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 itās missing.ā)
Anthonyās 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 AnthonyĀ āTonyā knew her and loved her.
There was a running tally of how many kids had accidentally called Anthony āDad.ā
There was a running tally of how many kids had purposefully called AnthonyĀ āDad.ā
Anthony didnāt 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 didnāt mean they werenāt learning.
(The explanation would have gone better if Anthony hadnāt been holding a half-eaten bagel at the time.)
Dungeons & Dragons wasnāt 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.Ā
Being Anthony Partridgeās TA was a coveted position and the seniors usually ended up fighting for it.Ā
He absolutely had a petty interdepartmental feud going, probably with a teacher in the history department, and would pull kids out of his rivalsā 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 canāt erase that yet, some of the students are still taking notes).Ā
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 theyād cobbled together in shop class bearing the inscription ā#1 Math Manā 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 Helenās 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.Ā
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