Phares O’Daffer

Back in 1960, as a teacher at the Ball State University Burris Laboratory School in Muncie, Ind., I used this little Sheaffer lead pencil a lot.

It was prior to a word processor on a computer, so if I needed to write something, I would get my trusty yellow legal pad and that pencil, and have at it. And erase and start over when I needed to.

Through an amazing series of events, I had an opportunity to move to California and coauthor an elementary school mathematics textbook series, published by Addison Wesley.

For two years I used that trusty little pencil to write pages and pages of manuscript. Between my co-author and I, four books, amounting to 1,628 text pages were born.

It wasn’t that the pencil was creating the exciting ideas for those books, but It seemed to be a crucial psychological connect between what was going on in my head and its hand transfer to paper.

Those first four books ushered in some non-traditional ideas for teaching children mathematics, and were each used by 1.5 million children. They went on to form the basis for a K-8 Series that was eventually used in over one-third of the elementary school classrooms in the U.S., and in several other countries in the world.  

All written initially with that Sheaffer lead pencil, until it was finally retired in1973 to make way for the miraculous word processor on my Apple II computer.

But my special lead pencil did its job… and what a job it was!