Ridgewood High School - Arrow Yearbook (Ridgewood, NJ)

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TI-IE ARROW Class Poem I stood one day upon a barren rise of ground Looking towards the scarred hills and the steaming town. Looking towards the tossing trees and quiet sky And watching the grass bend down and the wind die, When all at once a man approached and said, Could you tell me, please, what is there just ahead? . Ahead? I said, Why nothing but the brook And farther on the clamor of the town which I forsook. You'11 find it nicer going, though, If you would take the dirt road to the right, Then cut across the fields and climb the runway to its height. And if you reach the top in time I envy you the sight Of sunshine pouring from the clouds in bars of panelled light. And then it was I turned to see his eyes transfixed upon the wood. Slowly he said and thoughtfully, You too misunderstood. B. ROBERTSON, '36 Farewell To Ridgewood . Our days of high school are about over and we look back at them as days we shall never see again. The good times we have had in the past three years have been firmly rooted in our memories. Little did we realize what high school meant to us until we passed through its portals. To some of us it has been just a higher step in the progress of education, to others the sole preparation, for the world ahead. Nevertheless it has been a very vital and important step in our lives. In looking back not one of us would have been willing to change schools with anyone. Ridgewood High to us isn't just an ordinary high school. The very sight of its beautiful campus gives it a college atmosphere. In this school we formed many friendships, some of which will last forever. The faculty was not as severe as we had anticipated the first day. In fact most of us rather enjoyed being with the teachers and found them to be very friendly. So to Ridgewood I-Iigh we bid farewell with a tender feeling somewhere within us. We deeply regret our leaving so much that many of us would gladly relive our past three years. I'm sure we all feel that we have accomplished a great deal and that we hope the future classes will benefit by our school as much as we have. WALTER RAFFETTO IU

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, BETTY CRAIG Was' Howden? F -VVILLIAM SCHMIDT Eaffor-110-C'l1ief' Class Offlcers TILB RIXFFETTO DEANS Yfeasurer JEANNETTE MEADS .Yecrelary U Pfesidezzf 1936

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Gut' Undistributed Ivliddleu The Undistributed Middle , as your college addict will tell you, is the simplest of all fallacies. tlncluding the blonde fallacy.l Your own observa- tion will remind you it is the most dangerous-and most universally disregard- ed--of all the mental banana peels. Murders and lawsuits, not to mention wasted millions, result from ignoring it. Take the Undistributed Middle in its simplest form: Cows are animals. This is a cow. Therefore, this is an animal. That is correct. Now, misapplying the geometric axiom that two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other, try it backwards: Cows are animals. This is an animal. Therefore, it is a cow. Your animal, of course, may not be a cow. It may be a wooly lamb. Or a blood-sweating behemoth. Somewhere, sometime, the primal eldest mathematician made a mis- take and ever since gens have been patching it up although nobody has yet discovered exactly what it was. That's my slogan. On that rock was mathe- matics built. The mathematicians, on being assured that they are going ahead correctly, simply smile. THEY KNOW. Betz's Algebra For Today tSecond Coursel actually is embarrassed about the whole thing and in a series of Historical Notes confesses any number of startling things that a callous algebra or arithmetic book would never own up to. Read this: . . . for a long time the idea of a fraction caused much trouble, even among intelligent people like the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, and the Romans. Now try this other syllogism in its popular form: . . . for a long time imaginary numbers were viewed with suspicion even by the greatest mathematicians. tNow, I ask you, if that isn't a complete give-away . . . l Ridiculously enough, the whole structure of our present mathematics sys- tem is built to an astounding degree on one variation or another of this fallacy. Dogmatic credos pay. Everybody concedes that. But dogmatic mathematicians, presumably, are a smaller circle than all mathematicians. Therefore, when you obtain a blanket endorsement of mathe- matics by stretching a small circle to include the large circle, you not only shock the college addict taking logic, but offend the sensibilities of your- self, which knows full well that cats and dogs are not cows. CI hope this is all perfectly clear because I haven't the time to explain it.l The enemies of arithmetic must be vastly entertained to see its leaders at each others' throats about negligible refinements of origin, while airily unin- terested in the vital essentials of mathematics itself or, themselves. BILL SCHMIDT 1 TI-IE ARROW