WILLIAMSTOWN — They weren’t exactly a “fad” (you couldn’t wear one, a barber or hairdresser couldn’t shave or sculpt one), but slide rules nevertheless became what might be called academically fashionable in high schools in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. My first encounter with a slide rule occurred when a 17-ish high school student recruited by my parents to “babysit” (how we hated that word) my sister and me brought one to our house on Southworth Street along with a daunting pile of textbooks and notebooks. She was, I recall, an honor student, a member of one of the first classes to enter the then-newly constructed Mount Greylock Regional High School.

The slide rule attracted my interest because I’d formed the impression that it was a newfangled device capable of solving math problems practically instantaneously. I was wrong on both counts: The slide rule was developed in the 17th century and was primarily a tool that helped mathematicians work on solving problems, though it didn’t provide answers after a simple slip here and a slinky slide there. You still had to “show your work.

” Being deeply math-phobic from an early age, I found this profoundly disappointing. It meant that I had to continue my quest for a way out of doing math, which I regarded as an annoying impediment to my education. Later, in junior high school at Mount Greylock, I learned from a classmate (who went on to become a high school math teacher) how to use the slide rule to multi.