The Importance of Rulers

Rulers are important because without them we wouldn’t know how long anything is and we couldn’t build buildings or make maps.  Rulers are made up of exact divisions of measurement, Imperial or Metric.  Imperial uses units called inches, feet and yards, Metric uses centimetres, metres and kilometres.  The Imperial system was mostly used in the last one hundred and fifty years but since then we use metric. 

Elizabeth scratched her nose.  At least she’d remembered that bit.  They’d done Achievements of The Empire last term.  She glanced around the classroom.  It was quiet with work, only the scribble of answers and Jason at the back, kicking his chair.  She patted her palms softly together under the desk as she read over what she’d written.  Tests were frightening until you got going, that’s what her mum said.  Mostly in History they had to remember Henry VIII’s wives and she’d spent ages after supper last night memorising the dates of the Roman Empire.  If only someone had told her it would be about measurement she wouldn’t have been so scared.  Rulers were one of her favourite things.  Her mum had one at her office that slid up and down the tilted board and made sure everything was straight.  Her mum was an architect and when Elizabeth was little, before school started, she used to spend blissful afternoons curled under her mum’s desk.  It was supposed to be annoying for her, at least everyone made a face like, poor you, we won’t be long, have a biscuit but she loved it; her mum scratching out lines with a razor, the scrape, scrape through the board, the carpet prickly beneath her cheek.  Then school had started.  That’s when everything had gone bad.  Having to get undressed in front of the swimming teacher.  PE in her pants and vest.  British Bulldog in the playground and being bashed by boys and picked on by girls.  Hiding in the library. Milk at break that made her gag.  Day after day in this classroom where no one learned anything and everyone was cross or loud or screaming or being told to sit still.  No more days under her mum’s desk.  No more mum hardly at all.  She was always at her office and Elizabeth was always here, and after school if her mum came home before bedtime it was a miracle.  At least there were weekends when she could see her, save up her week in stories about what she’d learnt and what she’d achieved.  A good mark in history, that kind of thing, something that got her mum’s attention.  She picked up her pencil and carried on. 

This is because most of the rest of the world uses it.  The metric system is based on tens.   The Imperial system is harder to understand but in the United Kingdom we prefer it and always talk about miles not kilometres.  In France they use the Metric system.  You would need a very long ruler to measure a mile, a mile long ruler in fact!  But most rulers are 12 inches long.  If we didn’t have rulers it would be very hard to make charts for timetables or chores and we’d have to use books to draw straight lines.  Also geometery needs rulers.  It would be very hard to draw a square, for instance.

She was pleased.  Everyone else was sucking their pencils and scrubbing out sentences except Jason who’d already asked for a new sheet and probably wouldn’t finish anything.  She read over her work, crossed out the ‘e’ in geometry and looked at the clock.  Ten to three.  From her satchel she pulled out her sketch book and with it balanced on her lap, carried on with her drawing of ants. 

She’d already drawn almost a complete colony in cross section.  It looked like the sketch of an ant-thropologist on a study in Africa.  Her mum had made that joke and after she’d explained it Elizabeth had laughed, mostly to show she was capable of complicated wordplay.  She drew a new passage from the ant nursery buried at the bottom to the surface where a cricket was being dragged towards the hole.  She loved ants.  They weren’t complicated at all.  They looked as if they were all over the place but actually they were organised.  Each one was important, they all got on and they had a mother, a queen who was there all the time, who took care of them, who ruled them – she stared at the title of the composition that their teacher had written in fat letters on the blackboard.  The Importance Of Rulers.  Then she looked at her answer.  The big hand of the clock ticked to exactly three o’clock.