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A Step Up

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Here’s a note that came in early this morning from 10th grader Bubby Spamden.

Hey Mr. C.,

Your friend Bubby here, just wondering if you or any of your blog people could think of a way for me to get beyond this terrible routine I’m in of always being held back.

I know you already know that I’m Wendell Wilkie High School’s “perennial sophomore” and that I’ve been in 10th grade for about 25 years now. I think it’s turned into kind of a tradition here to not let me become a junior. Every day I’m used as a scary example for the younger kids (work hard or you’ll wind up like Bubby) and as a point of pride by the older kids (sure I got a D, but I’m better off than Spamden). I don’t think the teachers even look at my homework anymore.

And my parents are in on it! This is their way to keep themselves young – they prevent me from growing up! As long as I’m still a sophomore in high school, they can belong to the PTA, hang out with the parents who are still good looking, and dodge the high cost of college.

I admit that I’m not crazy about moving on myself, but what I’m wondering is this – is it possible to regress? It kills me to find out that in some elementary schools, little kids are being given iPads! I want to go back to the 4th grade! Pleeeeeease? I wanna!

Really, why can’t I start over and have a cool education like that?

Your friend,

Bubby Spamden

I told Bubby you get the education you seek, and he should not attack his school district to fight his own failings, real or imagined. And going backwards isn’t an option. Wilkie High School has already courted disaster by keeping him in the 10th grade for so long. “No Child Left Behind” is an act designed specifically to prevent Bubby Spamdens from happening everywhere! At the very least he should threaten to take his case to state education authorities. That possibility might be enough of a lever to make something good happen for him this spring. That’s what I told him.

As far as being given an iPad is concerned – there is nowhere in the wide world of education where that particular gift is going to be given to you, Bubby. Sorry, but any librarian will tell you – as soon as you learn how to turn off the family filter, handing you a computer becomes a very risky business.

What’s the coolest thing you were allowed to use while you were in school?

85 thoughts on “A Step Up”

  1. Rise and Shine Baboons:

    Before I answer the daily question, a snarky barb has to be set free: Bubby, clearly our newly Conservative Congress is proving you can can go backwards! I heard a commentator opining that the Tea Party’a interpretation of the Constitution puts us at about either 1799 or 1897.

    OK, I’m done now.

    I don’t remember anything about school that was “cool.” But this was 1958-1971. Slide Rules were still the cool tool, and I never did figure those out. My Kindergarten teacher still used a dunce cap and was allowed to spank and abuse children.

    But we did walk to school and we had sufficient recesses to blow off steam. That was cool, cheap, and effective.

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    1. Tangentially related (to the Tea Party and their ilk) – made the mistake of listening to KNOW on the drive into work. I thought I was done hearing about T-Paw…at least for a few weeks. Apparently he has a memoir that releases this week (just in time to steal Dayton’s spotlight…timing is everything) and it sounds like it’s a hardcover stump speech for why he should be our next president. Makes me queasy just thinking about it. It was so pleasant *not* hearing his name and voice in the news…about the only good thing I can think of about Sarah Palin is that if she goes head-to-head with T-Paw maybe she’d scratch his eyes out and we could be done with him.

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      2. and yet has the power to make me yell at my car radio.

        I keep forgetting my book on cd-1491- about civilization in the western hemisphere before Columbus-good stuff, and I don’t feel the need to yell at it.

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    2. I’d agree that slide rules were about the coolest thing we had in the 60’s besides some of the stinky stuff in chemistry.

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  2. Good morning,
    I got to use a bell to signal time to change classes. I am not that old but in 7th grade went to a wonderful private school that did not have a lot of gadgets. A little bell was rung to signal the end of class and a bigger bell was rung to signal the beginning of the next class. Bell ringer was a patronage position. The classes did not always end on time. Depending on the whim, memory, and exam schedule of the bell ringer classes were longer or shorter. I loved the power of the bell ringer.

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  3. Drawing a specific blank here, but it’s got to be something in either the chemistry or physics lab. If school gets to include college, I loved the glass set you were issued in organic chemistry, where everything fit together by means of ground glass joins.

    Tanked in that class, and the replacement costs for anything you broke were staggering, but all those glass tubes and flasks and stoppers were a thing of beauty and a joy to behold.

    Crazy stuff in the physics lab too-took the s&h down to Luther to the Haunted Physics lab for Halloween this year, he loved it. Yup, geeks we are.

    OT Dale- heard a nice piece on the BBC early this morning about how IZ is topping the charts in Germany and France 13 years after his death. You always knew, didn’t you.

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    1. i took organic lab in the summer at U of M – windows open – birds flying around – vacuum systems that put water into one’s unknown – and those glass breakage fees!!! the room was full of about 200 students – maybe in sections of 15 or so. any time we’d hear a crash and a tinkle of glass, everyone would yell “OH NOOO!!!” 🙂

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      1. One semester, my organic lab was late on Friday afternoon-really, just not what you wanted to be doing-we had windows too and it was pure hell to be in there with all that smelly, burn-a-hole-in-your-jeans stuff. We listened to a crazy radio station that played stuff like Dancing in the Bathtub, and at a certain time told everyone to turn and face their nearest lake and sing along on a song called “Minnesota” from the 70’s to start the weekend.

        What kind of Baboon would I be if I didn’t give you the YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZOJ9sOTKjI

        One of the guys in lab was having a bad day. First, something overheated and exploded the Erylmeyer flask. Maybe half an hour later, he knocked a beaker to the floor-*crash*! That was when he snapped and decided 3 was a charm, grabbed another Erylmeyer by its neck and hurled it to the floor (I imagine expletives were involved-memory is unclear on that point), then got the broom.

        I believe John has gone on to have a fine career in the sciences or medicine, can’t recall which.

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      3. AP Senior Chemistry. We were making aspirin when our ultra-cool teacher casually announced, “This is the same way you make heroin only you use morphine instead of salicyllic acid.” A spectrographic analysis showed that my aspirin came out at Bayer quality.

        Same class we learned about the fermentation process by making homemade wine. We had 20 glass apple cider jugs corked, piped to water traps, and bubbling away for about 3 months. After that, we learned about fractional distillation by boiling some of the wine and condensing the vapor…i.e. straight brandy.

        We were ‘allowed’ to taste 1ml of our wine and one drop of our brandy. My lab partner grabbed a dixie cup and was doing shooters through class. I think we were the last class that was allowed to do these activities….

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  4. Rise and polish your Hemingway impressions, fellow baboons! Nicely written, Dale, as always.

    I’ll bop back later to answer the question if I can, but I thought I’d mention a friend who was in peril of becoming a permanent law school student like Bubby Spamden is a perpetual sophomore. Kevin was very bright, and he had done well in the U of Wisconsin Law School, but toward the end of the road he became cynical and began to do drugs.

    After totally bombing in a notoriously hard class (Kevin hadn’t attended a single day of class discussion) Kevin went back to his dorm and dropped a bunch of drugs. He hadn’t showered, brushed teeth or changed clothes in over a week. That’s when he got a call from the dean of the law school, who wanted to chat in his office.

    Kevin’s memory of that conference was not very clear, but certain phrases stuck in his mind. “I don’t know if you are dealing or not,” said the dean, “but you are a terrible influence on other students, and I don’t want another year of this. If we give you your degree, do you promise to get the hell out of town and never come back?”

    I don’t recommend this program to Bubby, but it worked for Kevin. The last I heard he was a District Attorney in some northern Wisconsin county.

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  5. coolest thing – maybe a slide rule? had to turn it in again at the end of the class though.
    in 1976 i went to college (entering my 30s) and into the first chem exam with a slide rule. ish da. we had no money, but i went out and bought a calculator ($25!) the next day.
    a gracious good morning to You All

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  6. I remember being given the privilege of playing on the school teletype machine (with a big red phone to plug into the modem – back in the day where you put the handset into a big widget to “plug” in the phone to the modem…). Once you were dialed in, you could play games, sort of, with the school system’s mainframe computer. Mostly what I remember was the sense of accomplishment when I figured out the commands to get it to spit out my name and pictures printed in x’s on a big long sheet of perforated computer paper. You had to be one of the good, trustworthy students, because you were out in a cubby in the hallway by yourself…and only 6th graders got to use it.

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    1. In the 80’s many high schools had a red phone in them. No dial or numbers on them, just a red handset in a red standard old style phone cradle. It was a part of civil defense when civil defense meant more than fearing the Russians (by the way, Happy Russian Christmas, yesterday) bombing us. If you merely picked up the phone it called the fire department and the police at a very high priority. You did not talk into it, it just sent an electronic signal to which they had to respond immediately. One school day the principal of an elementary school that was going to be added to our district was in the HS office. He looked at the phone and said “Hey, what’s this” and picked it up. That impetuosity made him a fun guy, a great colleague and good friend but an exceptional elementary principal.
      This same building added an alarm system at great expense to stop some break-ins. It worked through the PA system. The system would be set off by anyone rapping off their pipes (seldom hear that any more except for motorcycle riders). But twice the janitor forgot to shut off the system when he came in. The result was the school had 1000 people in it but the alarm did not go off.

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      1. At my elementary school, with the teletype, for my first three years there (maybe four) all three of the janitors for the school were named Bob. They were jovial fellows who were very amused by their shared name.

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  7. Cool school tools…hm…
    Now, if we’re talking elementary school here, one of the things that made a big impression on me was the mimeograph machine. Talk about the power of publishing! Yeah, yeah, I answered the phones for the school secretary when she was at lunch…but that was just a phone. (Although I must admit that the PA system was very intriguing but I wasn’t allowed to mess with it.) If you got selected to run off worksheets on the mimeo, you knew you were ‘in’ with the teach.

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    1. I can’t remember any cool gadgets from any of my classrooms… we didn’t do as much hands-on stuff as the kids seem to do these days. Never took chemistry (although I might have enjoyed it). However, I DO remember the smell of the mimeograph; I was once asked to help my teacher make some copies so got to turn the drum as the mimeograph churned out it’s purple copies. I used to love that smell!

      These days I have lots and lots (& lots) of kitchen toys/gadgets that I adore as well as a studio full of crafty toys/gadgets!

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      2. There was still a mimeograph machine in the theater dept. when I went to college (in the 80s). Got to use it some for different purposes – brought me back to being six and getting still-damp worksheets in elementary school. Did my best, though, not to let the department admin see me when I sniffed the fresh sheets of the machine…(my tech theater professor would have understood the impulse, I have no doubt).

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      3. The purpose of all hobbies is to collect gadgets. Using them is a different issue. I know because I am selling mine off. What did not sell in my garage sale is advertised in today’s paper. Lots of call this morning.

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  8. I really doubt any of us in our 60’s will really have an answer to this. Just slide rules and chem labs. I suppose there was the AV gang who got to use movie projectors, but I was not one of those.

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    2. I just thought of two things that were cool! My mom, a teacher at my school, let me run the mimeograph (and then I got to smell the fluid all I wanted). And my band director used to let me direct the band.

      Ha. I was cool!

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  9. Steve, have you read Bill Bryson’s (the second best writer to come out of central Iowa) book on growing up in Des Moines, “The Thunderbolt Kid?” He was an av guy.

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    1. Read that book and loved it. I grew up 30 miles from his home in Des Moines and was just about his age. So, yeah, there was much to identify with! But believe me, Bryson was WAY more cool than the dweebs who ran our projectors in school.

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      1. what did they write in the DM Register? I still miss Frank Miller–he was like the Morning Show was for my son-a conversation starter that taught me sooooo much.

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      3. MIG – I have a whole notebook of Frank Miller cartoons that my dad put together back in the day… are you coming on Sunday?

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      6. Frank Miller was the best ***; Donald Kaul was a great columnist too–he got me hooked on columnists.

        ***Not an official World Series without the Yankees

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  10. Good morning to all,

    There wasn’t much that was cool, as far as I was concerned, when I went to high school in the fifties. A few good teachers, and some class mates that were a little cool is all I can remember. What saved me was my interest in rock and roll music which was not part of my high school education, but got me started on appreciating good music. Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and many, others were my favorites. Those early rock musican were amazing. Some thought rock and roll was bad music for teen agers at the time, but now we know that the best of those rockers were musical geniuses.

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  11. The smart elementary teachers I had would have me clean the erasers outside and run errands. I was the classic restless-cannot-sit-still-boy. So my three older, wiser teachers would create excuses for me to move around. One of the others punished me and the other two just ignored it. My restlessness was greater than most boys for sure, which was probably an early sign of my FM.

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  12. My grade school and high school classes were run with military spartan efficiency, and I don’t recall being allowed to “use” anything. When fat old Rose Daniels, our Latin teacher, sized me up as the worst student in the class, she gave me the privilege of running around town paying her utility bills during class time. I guess she didn’t want to pay for stamps. What I “used” was an excuse to escape the boredom of her class.

    My undergraduate school, Grinnell, was a pleasant prison. It was a great place to be, and it had to be since we weren’t allowed to have cars and they forced us to live in dorms. The school was determined to keep men and women in separate beds at all times, so they kept us confined in our dorms.

    Since I was friends with the Vice President, I once got permission to drive the college station wagon on a hush-hush trip off campus to the bright lights and fleshpots of Des Moines. Three couples ended up in the apartment of somebody who knew somebody who knew one of us. The apartment had a record player and a tall stack of Johnny Mathis albums. The only light was from a candle, and I have to describe this for the benefit of Baboons of a certain age. The candle was jammed in the mouth of an empty Jeroboam wine bottle that had been used for years this way, always with a new color of candle so that the drippings were as colorful as waxy rainbows.

    I made some discoveries that day, starting with the fact that stolen pleasures are ever so much sweeter than ordinary pleasures.

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    1. My third grade teacher would send me to the bank, a round-trip of 7 blocks into the one-block business district. I always think of that as an example of how e have lost innocence re our children,n needfully so, but still sad.

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      1. Yes, Clyde. This was an oversized version of the same thing, so big it was set on the floor. And do you remember when restaurants with a tiny amount of pretension would light a candle on your table, with a globe-shaped candle glass covered with a plastic mesh? Very popular in “Eye-Tallion” restaurants. (Arbors with plastic grapes. Crude murals of Italy on the wall.)

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      2. There are for sure some date markers for that period. But the transition from the U of Chi neighborhood and culture to the U of M was fairly large.

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      3. Great, so now I am “a Baboon of a certain age” I’ve got a pair of those multi-colored drip candles in my dining room drawer and well remember those mesh covered glass candles in restaurants-usually red or green glass-rarely and amber one would appear.

        I prefer to think I just had a precocious memory and paid attention.

        But tell me, oh sage Baboons, why is it called a Jereboam, my Biblical recollections do not list him among the Great Kings of Israel-did he drink a lot?

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      4. MIG — nah, old Jeroboam wasn’t much of a boozer. His name accidentally got picked for the 3 Liter bottle size at a time when the French were naming many wine bottles after old Biblical kings. If you get hold of a Melchidezek wine bottle, I hope you have friends to help you imbibe it; that’s 30 liters.

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      5. Clearly my compatriots at Mac had lower standards – we used plain old Gallo bottles (though the Eye-Tallion restaurant nearby did have those red globe-shaped candles with the plastic mesh on the outside as I recall).

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  13. Just a technical comment-a link for today’s post didn’t show up on the right side of the screen under “recent posts: and today’s post wasn’t easily accessed. Happy Friday, Baboons! For a variety of weird reasons I am making 4 trips to and from Bismarck this week, and it has been tiring. Hope you all have a good weekend. We have All State Orchestra auditions and a bell choir concert to keep us busy, as well as a winter storm watch to hike up the anxiety level.

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    1. Yowza… guess I won’t complain about my little trip up to Big Lake and back tomorrow. Gymnastics meet – what else?!

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  14. If you were reliable, trustworthy and getting top scores, you got to take home the cassette recorder and make the tape for next week’s spelling words. There was a way you could plug a bunch of those big foamy headsets into one player, so a group could sit at a round table and all use it at once.

    Checked with the resident 6th grader-the computer is no big deal, of course, but he remembers how cool all the Montessori School manipulatives were. One of Maria Montessori’s tenants was that the learning tools be well-made and of quality materials-ah, craftsmandship…..

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  15. I remember a high school art class where I had a lot of interesting silk screening supplies at my disposal. I don’t remember much about how it was done – I think I had to build my own screen frame and then apply the stencil. I recall drawing paint or ink over the design with a tool kind of like a pastry scraper, and I thought that part was really cool.

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    1. I taught myself to silk screen when I was a teenager – used it to make political signs for various causes and did a few t-shirts as well. I did like smooshing the paint around on the screen and pulling the screen up to reveal the pattern underneath. I don’t remember what happened to my screen and accoutrements. Probably went out in a garage sale at some point!

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  16. Oh crap, I can remember everything that’s been mentioned. At ISU, one Elem. Ed class was how to run projectors and other AV equipment around in 1970. The mimeograph machine was my FRIEND the first few years when I taught… (yes, that smell was intoxicating, and I too remember carring stacks of damp papers). Someone in my house had and electric typewriter that everyone would be in line to borrow.

    I wish I’d been around when girls got to take auto mechanics, etc. Or that I’d taken mechanical drawing – that room had these adjustable slanted tables with a grid imprinted on them, and other cool tools like t-squares and right triangles… My dad taught m.d. in high school before becoming a counselor, so he’d take us to the school sometimes on Saturdays (to give Mom a break, I guess). I still have my dad’s slide rule.

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  17. Schools around Redwood Falls are all closed. So the favorite thing over that way is probably the bus, except they will have man days to make up.

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  18. Morning–

    I don’t remember anything special from elementary or middle school… but HS, lots of fun stuff.
    Started doing the tech theater thing in 10th grade and the administrator for the theater was also the school district technical repair guy and his office / shop was in my school. So we would hang out with him in the mornings and we played with film and slide projectors. He would also give us the key for the elevator and we could deliver TV’s or projectors to the classes that had requested them for the day.
    He would be working on some electronic item and would say to me “Stick your finger in here.” Then just as you were about too he’d slap my hand and say “Don’t do that! What are you thinking!”
    He also had the machine that made the plastic sort of name tags so we made a lot of those. Made one for myself; Name and school and “Acoustical and Illumination Technical Engineer”
    Had to make up an astronomy quiz after school at the Planetarium. Since I knew the teacher outside of school as well he left me and my friend to ‘play’ with the stars and planets. Way Cool!

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  19. Bubby needs to remember that they have really neat gadgets in college, and if he graduates, he could really have a grand time being a professional stuent at some large (or small) university. Just think about college dorms, Bubby, and all the fun you can have there.

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  20. Coolest thing I used in school? When I was a junior, I had an email account, which I used to correspond with my new girlfriend who lived about 40 miles away.

    This was 1979.

    You might think a geek having a girlfriend was perhaps more significant, but our small rural high school was connected via phone modem to the Control Data computer mainframes via the phone system. This was timeshare computing. We had a terminal and modem but no actual computer; rather than using a screen, the display was a teletype which printed everything to along roll of paper. Everything was printed. The modem had a foam cradle into which you placed the regular phone handset, to modulate and demodulate the signals. And though it was 300 baud at best, it was surprisingly snappy, given that it only transferred text.

    We could play Oregon Trail and Hangman and other games via text. I wrote a couple papers for classes using an early word processor. I learned BASIC programming, and could “print” out my programs onto 8 bit yellow paper tape storage.

    And I was able to email my lovely girlfriend who lived too far away, but whose school also connected to the same system. I was 17 years old and that experience shaped my career for ever.

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    1. I too remember the phone cradle modem things…played some sort of missile command game…. and something about gravity of Jupiter and opening your parachute in time… ‘Educational’ yes? Librarian was in charge of it and you had to be nice and sign up with her…

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      1. Does anybody remember that old movie “War Games” starring Matthew Broderick when he was a kid. I remember at the time that the technology that he had access to was incredible. But I watched it on TV last month and it is SO outdated now. Amazing!

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    3. welcome bc where the heck did you come from? been around long? we welcome new guys in and harass them mercilessly so with a memory like you have cmon in and let us pick your brain for a while. great post thanks

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  21. That’s amazing, bc — so what is your line of work now?
    I got to monitor a teletype machine during a temp job in Manhattan back in ’74…

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  22. I remember many like you, bc, in those years, many steps ahead of the teacher assigned to teach computers. Some of my favorite students, many of whom went on to careers in the developing computer world. It was a fun time.

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    1. Yeah, most of the teachers really didn’t understand what was happening. It was both liberating and frustrating, because I wish I had had a teacher who could have helped at the beginning, but I appreciate that it forced me to learn on my own.

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  23. bc, I taught English across the hall from the room with the connection; many of the kids in there were my students, too. They entered state competitions of various kinds; won a couple. I did yearbook at night and many of the kids then came in that night and I “supervised” them so they could do what you are talking about one evening a week. Form them I learned how to do Basic and wrote three programs I used in my writing classes–very very basic.
    J

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  24. bc, I taught English across the hall from the room with the connection; many of the kids in there were my students, too. They entered state competitions of various kinds; won a couple. I did yearbook at night and many of the kids then came in that night and I “supervised” them so they could do what you are talking about one evening a week. Form them I learned how to do Basic and wrote three programs I used in my writing classes–very very basic.

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  25. But just to show techo/mechanically dumb I cam be, here is the “Dope Slap of the Day” award: I have owned a Chevy S10 extended cab pickup for 9 years. I put it up for sale yesterday. Today a man came to look it it. After about three minute he opened the driver’s side door, and then he opened a door behind that door that opened into the space behind the seat. I had no idea there was a door there. Oh, how I wish I had known when we used it for camping and moving.

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  26. In college I had a radio show on KSTO (the famous student radio station at St. Olaf). Back then it was vinyl all the way. I played Layla when I had to go to the bathroom to give me time to get back. This led to a weekly children’s radio show on WCAL that lasted several years after graduation. I started out being paid $3 a show and worked my way up to $15. Then I was laid off. Many years later WCAL was bought by MPR and became The Current. You know the rest of the story.

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  27. Greetings! The absolute coolest thing in high school was dissection! Sounds terrible, but I found it fascinating. We had fetal pigs that we worked on over several weeks, going from one body system to another. The grand finale was removing the brain. Two students shared each pig, but I was the odd person out (in more ways than one), so I got to do it all myself — thank god. Some of those girls were such prissies and the boys would goof around, but I really enjoyed it. I was a loner anyway.

    Math gadgets wouldn’t interest me.

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    1. creeped me out. we did frogs and the first instruction was to take the stick with a needle on it and stick it in the frogs brain and swirl it around so hes not able to feel the pain as you pin his legs down and slice him open to watch his heart beat. two years later gave up killing stuff and went veggie.

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  28. the coolest tool i got to use in school was in kindergarden when mr bob would get the milk cartons ready for the classrooms (3). i was chosen as the student who got to help. we all brought our own lunch and the school furnished the milk. the milk cartons were square and stacked very neatly in the milk boxes. my job was to see how many students showed up for class that day and then take out that number of milk cartons and use the straw hole making tool ( board with a big nail through it) and insert the straw for the students, i suppose there were 20 kids in a class and it was a 10 minute job that i would watch the clock to attend to. in the middle of the year they switched me form one class to another one ( i guess they thought i was well adjusted and they would mess with my head and have me learn to function in a different enviornment, well they forgot to tell my teacher i was the milk kid and when i got up to go do my job she was all upset and told me to get back into my chair and stay there. i told her she would have to talk to the old teacher to understand that it was my job to get the milk ready and off i went. she was flabergasted and came to discuss it with mr bob and he told her it was indeed my job and i have never before or since seen that straw hole punching tool but it was my favorite school tool. hemmingway ho yall

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