The World of Knowledge 1

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1. I loved high school. If middle school was a somewhat lonely time on the margins, high school would bring only positive memories. "Here's to you alma mater, Fort Lauderdale High!"

While my mother generally drove me to school in elementary and middle school, my dad generally drove me to school in high school. We used to joke about him dropping me off a little away so that he could give me a kiss on the cheek. I really didn't care... that much.

I seem to recall that I needed to be there at 7:40. We had a tight schedule. Get up. Shower. He would have a bowl of cereal waiting with mom still sleeping. He would ask me things. In my grogginess I wouldn't always answer the first time. Then I would blurt out, "YES!" to his question. Then I would apologize for raising my voice.

2. As I recall, I was in honors English and Biology. I would graduate valedictorian of my class with all As for every semester in every class (I did get some Bs in the quarters but pulled them out for the semesters, by God's grace). There were a lot of AP and honors opportunities, so my GPA was something like 4.6. If I find out I'll correct this.

For honors English I had Mrs. Gauss. My mother and I went to an open house with her the first week of class. Mrs. Gauss basically said, "This class is hard. If you aren't willing to work and can't cut the mustard, you should get out now." I took it as a challenge. I believed I could rise to the challenge.

It was a tough class. This was before the internet. The book she used was New Building Word Power, a book I still have although it is in tatters. Interestingly, my sister Debbie had Mrs. Gauss with this same book as a senior some four years earlier. Debbie mostly did high school at Hobe Sound Academy, but she did the first semester of her senior year at Fort Lauderdale High.

What made the class/book so hard was that we didn't really know where to find the answers to some of the questions. My mother and I at times spent hours trying to track down questions like, where did the word bedlam come from, or the expression to "carry coals to Newcastle." Ironic that I would spend three years of my life later just a half hour from Newcastle!

I've sometimes wondered how much more I might know now if Google had been around in high school. On the other hand, it's just as likely I would have been distracted by social media and a host of other things. When I started blogging, you might argue that my scholarly writing decreased, although my popular writing increased. Perhaps in the end I should be grateful that my life was so boring in the early 80s.

We studied English grammar too, as I recall, in Mrs. Gauss' class. I had found English grammar difficult in middle school, but it began to click the second time around. Having Latin also helped. I heard once of a school that taught grammar by teaching Latin and I see the value of the thought. You probably do indeed learn English grammar the most by studying another language. To learn the categories of a new language, you often fill in gaps in your knowledge of English categories.

At the moment I am only remembering one book that we read in Mrs. Gauss' class, Watership Down. It was a social commentary based on a rabbit community. The rabbits who could think abstractly were viewed as a threat to the community. :-)

2. Another class I took was Geometry. The future salutatorian, Christina Carusi, was in the class with me. It was interesting because we were not in the honors section of geometry. We were in class with tenth graders. I've always wondered why. The teacher was very nice, but Christina told me once that she had mostly learned geometry from the questions I asked in class.

I've had a theory for many years that there are geometry people and there are algebra people. I was an algebra person. Algebra came extremely easy for me. I did well in geometry but it was much more challenging. I think it is, to some extent, the difference between a more inductive subject (geometry) and a more deductive one (algebra).

In my mind, these general skills also map to other subjects. Differential calculus was very easy for me, like algebra. Integral calculus was more like geometry--much more difficult. It seems to me that Greek is a lot more like algebra too, and Hebrew more like geometry.

3. I had a very nice teacher, Mrs. Nixon, for honors biology. We dissected a fetal pig, as I recall. The smell of formaldehyde still lingers in my memory. I was never a huge biology fan. I have warmed up to it a bit in more recent days as I tried to help my daughter in biology at Pepperdine. They cancelled the twelfth grade AP biology class before I got there. They dissected a cat. But it was not meant to be.

I believe I had American history with Mr. Packard my freshman year., although it could have been as a sophomore. In those days I had trouble getting history to stick in my mind. I think the main problem was that I had no real point of reference. I'm now in New York and I had the same thought this week that I've had before. How much easier it must be when you study American history and live in the northeast, where all these things took place. I thought the same when I was in England and Europe. How much easier it must be to remember these things when you can go and visit the places they took place.

I am not a detailed person by nature. I need a system, a structure to put minutia into. I remember the structure, the connections far beyond most people. The names for things have always been much harder. I am an off the chart N by Meyers-Briggs. I am a savant at the big picture. I must work hard at the details, and there is a rush when I have assimilated or processed them, as you would expect of what they call the "inferior function." Of course once I have assimilated a detail to the structure, I almost have it forever.

4. My uncle Paul would die in November 1980, my first semester of high school. His mother, Grandma Shepherd, had died the year before in a nursing home in Rossville, Indiana. Paul had developed myocarditis after an infection and had not given his body the proper rest thereafter. My last memory of him was in August of that year after Frankfort Camp. He was mowing tall grass on the site that was to become the new Trinity Wesleyan Church in Indianapolis. Why was he doing that when he had a heart condition?

He died Thanksgiving day. He ate Thanksgiving meal, laid down on the couch for a nap, sat up with a start and then died.

I remember studying for a test over the Civil War, I believe, on the trip to his funeral, the whole way up and back. The Battle of Bull Run. It was so hard to get the minutia to stick. I hadn't seen much snow in Florida. There were a few traces on the ground during the trip.

My uncle Paul's death was hard on my mother. They had been close. In fact, until we moved to Florida, he and his wife Betty had largely moved around Indianapolis as my parents moved. He had such a great heart. He was a selfless soul.

5. One of the final segments of Mr. Packard's class was required by law to be about the evils of communism. I remember him somewhat mocking the requirement. It seemed somewhat antiquated by that time. But it was the first time, I think, that I was exposed to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

We still lived under the threat of nuclear holocaust at that time, but it didn't seem as urgent as it might have in previous years. My family was exuberant at the election of Ronald Reagan, who seemed to make a lot of Americans feel better about the world. In keeping with the Republican background of my family, they had been fans of Richard Nixon and had believed him right up until he resigned. In fact, they almost believed he was innocent after he resigned. We see the same pattern now with the current president.

Similarly, Jimmy Carter was not really considered a Christian by my family. This was before Roe v Wade was fully fused with the Democratic party and the anti-abortion movement had not really taken off yet. It had mostly become tribalism. Republicans are Christians. Democrats are evil. There was a historical basis for it, I believe, in the Civil War, but those origins were now long in the past. It had mostly become a matter of tribe rather than issue, in my opinion.

There was the movie, The Day After, which came out in late 1983, my senior year. It was a pretty scary movie that tapped into my apocalyptic fears. It produced feelings not too dissimilar from those after watching the rapture movies. To this day, apocalyptic series like The Walking Dead get in my head. I dream them while I'm awake.

I wrote a piece at some point for Mr. Packard arguing that the American form of government was the best form of government because it combined all the strengths of the other forms. It had a president, which brought the strengths of a monarchy. The people voted for their representatives, which had the strength of a democracy, but it used representatives, which was far more efficient than everyone voting on everything. Mr. Packard wrote on the paper that I should try to have it published.

In my senior year, I entered a contest with the Daughters of the American Revolution called, "The Voice of Democracy." The winner would read his or her piece on the radio and get a small scholarship. I entered and won the contest with my essay.

6. There were electives I was able to take that I loved in high school. I took two and a half years of Latin in high school with Ms. Mrozek. Little did I know that I would end up getting an MA in Classical Languages and Literature about ten years later. When I entered the University of Kentucky for that program, I had not had any Latin from high school so had to get back up to speed on my own using Wheelock's Latin.

I remember some English test, maybe in the tenth grade, where I had done fine on my exam essays but couldn't remember the title of the book. One of my "friends" who was also in Latin asked Ms. Mrozek what it would tell her if a student didn't know the title of a book over which someone was taking an exam. She said it would tell her they hadn't read the book.

Well, I did read the book. I read every last book I was required to read in high school, even if I had to stay up half the night to do it (and I often did because of procrastination). This is an indication of my mind. I often know what's in a box but I can't remember the name of the box. You might say I have trouble with random access memory. I have never forgotten my mother's name, but it could happen on a really bad day.

I also signed up for electronics with Mr. Brandt. He was a jolly old soul who was quite large. In retrospect I would say it was a vocational training class. We made progress on our own working through the Navy Basic Electricity and Electronics workbooks. They were very simple and very great. I was learning physics from a practical perspective.

I would take three years of it. The final year I built a power supply that would convert wall current to the kind of current that could be used for a circuit board. In those days Radio Shack sold transistors, diodes, capacitors, transformers. It was just as everything was beginning to be put on integrated circuits. Integrated circuits would put thousands of transistors on a small wafer. They would make possible tremendous technological advances... and take all the fun out of electronic hobbying.

The Christmas of my senior year, my parents bought me all the parts to build a hexidecimal computer, including a central processing unit. I went through a Radio Shack book on Digital Electronics. Those things were so stimulating. But as usual I would never build the computer. And what would have been the point?

As a graduation present, my dad bought me a Commodore 64 computer. I never really learned how to use it, unfortunately. All I could do was some BASIC programs like the loop.

10 Print "Eat me."
20 Go to 10

Mr. Brandt had a good sense of humor. I remember him saying, "You know you're in trouble when, your senior year of high school, your dad starts telling you what a nice den your room is going to make."