How Can a Pencil Be So Important?

Back in 1960, working in the Burris Laboratory School at Ball State University—and before the age of the word processor on a computer–I was using this little Scheaffer lead pencil a lot. If I needed to write something, I would get my trusty yellow legal pad, and have at it. I liked the idea that if I made a mistake, I could just erase it and start again.

Through an amazing series of events, I had an opportunity to later move to California and co-author a 3-6 grade elementary school mathematics textbook series. My Sheaffer lead pencil went with me.

For two years I used that dear little pencil to write pages and pages of manuscript on my yellow pad. Yes, I erased a lot, and started again. But somehow, I had confidence in that pencil. Not that it provided exciting ideas for those books, but it hung in there, as I did, and my part of four books (1,628 text pages) was born.

These books, that ushered in some non-traditional ideas for teaching kids mathematics, were each used by 1.5 million children in North and South America, and went on to form the basis for a K-8 Series that was used at one time in over one third of the elementary school classrooms in the United States.

So that Scheaffer pencil, finally succumbing to the word processor on my 1973 computer, did its job… and what a job it was!