My junior high school math teacher, Mr. Nishi, was a big man who always had a smile on his face.

In his first class, he wrote the numbers 2 and 4 in large print on the blackboard and said, “What beautiful numbers these are.”

Those numbers are pronounced “ni” and “shi.” Ergo, what he had written was his own name, which none of us kids would ever forget.

That was at a public junior high school in a small rural town in the late 1970s.

Life was easy-going back then.

Mr. Nishi would typically start his class by saying something like, “Today is Sept. 5. Add 5 to 9 three times, and you get 24.”

Very often, the answers to the problems he........

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