American Scientist

A full-color, full-page advertisement in the New York Times recently called for readers to “celebrate our teachers,” declaring “great teachers” to be “one secret to improved student performance in math and science.” The full text of the ad ran to only about seventy-five words; the page was dominated by an eight-times-larger-than-life-size drawing of a yellow wood-cased pencil, point down, with brightly colored flowers emerging from the top of its barrel, as if it were a vase. But what caught my eye first was the graphic depiction of the sharpened pencil point, which repeated the often encountered visual misrepresentation of how a hexagonal pencil looks when sharpened to a conical point. The ad’s graphic showed the area of wood cut away from the flats of the hexagonal casing reaching higher up the shaft than what was cut from the six edges, resulting in an upward curving scalloped border between the bare and painted wood, between the sharpened and unsharpened parts of the pencil.