Monday October 3rd 2022 - 5.17pm
Hooray for ChloBo! I was so looking forward to your reply, I kept checking the Email every hour even though I knew it was silly because of various reasons such as you being busy and the service being slow.
Yes lets correspond as regularly as circumstances permit, its what I miss the most from being a teacher (albeit unconventional - according to Accomac County Schools Superintendent Bull of late and unlamented memory. Bastard.)
I liked having students who realised they could discuss almost anything with me if they wanted to, although there were exceptions of course since 'in loco parentis' means you should treat other peoples children like your own. It does NOT mean 'mad like their parents'! GRIN.
Whilst the majority preferred to use the Lego or make wooden spice racks, there were always the few that wanted to see what else I had to offer such as programming music on the Amiga, building real life sized wooden boats, designing communities for the future (one of my pet projects).
In fact your mother scored well at a Science Fair by using one of my spin offs from that latter project. I built a closed loop eco system model in which nutrients fed the hydroponics and the bacterial content was monitored via a TV camera hooked up to a pair of glass slides glued together but with input and outputs so the water flowed past the lens set at maximum magnification acting like a microscope to show the live bacteria multiplying in the water.
Teaching was stimulating because I had complete freedom to teach CDT (Craft, Design and Technology) the way I wanted to, basically because the system couldn't care less what went on in the workshops, as long as there were no discipline problems.
A tip for future teachers, if you have discipline problems its because your style of teaching is dull and uninteresting. You can make any subject - even Math - really fun to learn if you think of yourself as an entertainer who works with the audience.
People like yourself who love to learn for its own sake are few and far between and very much the result of their home background stimulating their interest and the rewards that come from learning as a fun thing. Your mother went out of her way to ensure you guys got all the encouragement you needed to stimulate your interests and your academic results so far have been the proof of that.
This is not meant to belittle your achievements in any way but I'm very proud of what Heather managed as a mother working in less than ideal cirumstances, basically more or less on her own.
I will always be grateful to Ann because it was her encouragement that persuaded me to go to college because she found out about a British Government scheme to educate the former drop outs that the system had created back in the 60's largely because of really bad teachers who had been more or less drafted into Education straight out of being demobbed from the armed services after WW2.
It must have seemed like such a simple solution at the time, they had all thse trained and disciplined men who had been navigators on bombers (the ones that survived)
as well as other discipines which covered the basics - Geography, History, etc. - and there were all these boomer babies flooding the schools, so what a wonderful solution and to be fair it wasn't such a bad idea at that but it only takes one bad teacher to screw up the attitude of hundreds of kids.
I had three bad Math teachers at Junior, Middle and High school which amounted to a course of aversion therapy for the subject although I did find work arounds, basically my own way of using calculations, for example I was brilliant at drawn solutions for geometrical problems, Dad bought me high precision Swiss and German drawing instruments and manys the blazing row that resulted from teachers not believing how I obtained the solution with such accuracy.
Enough of me, now onto your difficulties with bad teachers. Oh dear what a bummer because Chemistry is easy and I found it fun but in England they taught it as part of the basic high school curriculum and we had lecture hall demonstrations and laboratories to do our own practicals in.
Calculus I'm afraid I cannot offer any useful advice but there are several learning courses via the Net and doing a search in YouTube might prove helpful. That German physicist that I nickname 'Scruffy' - Sabine Hossenfelder (or something like that) does plug a couple of such courses on her channel. I love her shows even though the math is way past my understanding.
Okay that'll do for now! I'll write more soon.
Love Pop Pop. (sounds like someone farting in the bath!)
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