The “Frangent”

I was lucky enough to have Mrs. Davis for two years at Killian. I was entrusted by Francine with the honorable duty of retrieving bagels for the class, but also to signal her when she may be getting too off topic during the course of the class. As any student of Mrs. Davis knows, when she would get asked a question about anything, she would often use it as an opportunity to talk about EVERYTHING! One day, after a class in which one of her responses took the majority of the class period, she took me aside and told me to signal her by holding my hand up when she may be getting too far off topic. I forgot what the exact conversation was, but I think I told her that I didn’t want to stop her from talking because we all enjoyed her tangents so much. After all, these were not any normal tangents by any other teacher, these were Frangents. I don’t remember who said it first, but I do remember the smile and laugh that followed. In the following days, I became the Frangent flag for the class. I was to hold up my hands and make an “F” with my fingers to signal her when I determined that we had entered Frangent territory. That later evolved to the FrangOMeter, created by Leah Volpe, which we used to add more detail to the Frangent scale. This was a color coded meter with an arrow pointing to one of three sections, Green, Yellow, and Red for the most extreme cases. As you can guess, it was almost always in the red. While my post might be riddled with punctuation and grammar mistakes and breaks all the LINKS rules Mrs. Davis drilled into our brains, I remember so much from my time as her student. She forever changed my life and so many others with her kindness, warmth, and humor. I’m so grateful for the time we spent together. Love you so much.