I was disappointed to not have Volume 12 number 1, the first Catamount I have from 67/68 is number two - dated October 6, 1967.
It's been a long time since I've touched the site - mostly because I've started consulting again, so trying to do a Catamount in an afternoon is no longer possible most of the time.
This has been kind of fun in terms of contact with interesting people - Gayne Barlow (daughter of my 7th grade science teacher at Wilbur Junior High, and in my graduating class) and I have exchanged some emails. My wife found a "biography" of Mr. Barlow that I wrote back in 8th grade (English assignment) that is a hoot to read, and Gayne and her family apparently enjoyed it as well. Since other of Claude Barlow's former students might find this fun, I put it up on the site as well. That particular paper was written when I was in Mrs. Wolfrom's class in 8th grade, also at Wilbur Junior High. (If Wendy Lesser should happen to read this, I believe Mrs. Wolfrom was the teacher whose name you couldn't remember that you wrote about in "The Amateur"./
8th grade English at Wilbur was (for me) an interesting class - Mrs. Wolfrom wanted to teach us using "linguistics" rather than traditional grammer, which I really enjoyed. The teacher the next year (Mrs. Forbush) was of the old school "grammer", but after those two classes, I found I could pretty much analyze and parse anything thrown at me. The exposure to linguistics made it easier later to learn more about computer languages as well. These two teachers were opposites in many ways, but I learned a lot from both of them. Mrs. Wolfrom's class *did* have a - shall we say - "hiccup", which I think was what precipitated events leading to Wendy's comments in "The Amateur" and that was because we had a reading specialist come in periodically that many of the students didn't care for. He was armed with things like SRA reading labs and tachistoscopes (darn - no Wikipedia article on that - it's a device that flashes things like words up for very short periods of time - it was supposed to help us read faster). Anyway, there was a revolt of sorts by the students in our class, and as I recall Wendy was one of the ringleaders... and he went away and didn't ever come back, which probably put Mrs. Wolfrom in an awkward position. I thought the tachistiscope was kind of fun actually.
I also exchanged emails with former Catamount columnist Doug Monica who graduated a year ahead of me. (Doug's mom and my mom were good friends - I think they both worked on the Pete McCloskey campaigns - back in the 70s. I got to drive him (Congressman McCloskey) to the airport once on a messy rainy night back in my college days. His son and I were at UCSB at the same time).
I slso got email from a teacher in Palo Alto who is doing a wonderful site on Palo Alto history. Check it out at http://www.paloaltohistory.com/.
Much of what is covered in this issue of the Catamount that I just put up is covered in former Cubberley English/Journalism teacher Sylvia Williams' book Hassling (hardcover) , or Hassling (paperback) which she wrote in the early 70s. It is out of print, but if you follow the links you might find a used copy.
I've been doing sort of "topic pages" on each edition of the Catamount because hopefully that will help searchers to find things easier - especially since the optical PDFs sometimes garble things up. (Yikes, I'm repeating myself!)
It's been a long time since I've touched the site - mostly because I've started consulting again, so trying to do a Catamount in an afternoon is no longer possible most of the time.
This has been kind of fun in terms of contact with interesting people - Gayne Barlow (daughter of my 7th grade science teacher at Wilbur Junior High, and in my graduating class) and I have exchanged some emails. My wife found a "biography" of Mr. Barlow that I wrote back in 8th grade (English assignment) that is a hoot to read, and Gayne and her family apparently enjoyed it as well. Since other of Claude Barlow's former students might find this fun, I put it up on the site as well. That particular paper was written when I was in Mrs. Wolfrom's class in 8th grade, also at Wilbur Junior High. (If Wendy Lesser should happen to read this, I believe Mrs. Wolfrom was the teacher whose name you couldn't remember that you wrote about in "The Amateur"./
8th grade English at Wilbur was (for me) an interesting class - Mrs. Wolfrom wanted to teach us using "linguistics" rather than traditional grammer, which I really enjoyed. The teacher the next year (Mrs. Forbush) was of the old school "grammer", but after those two classes, I found I could pretty much analyze and parse anything thrown at me. The exposure to linguistics made it easier later to learn more about computer languages as well. These two teachers were opposites in many ways, but I learned a lot from both of them. Mrs. Wolfrom's class *did* have a - shall we say - "hiccup", which I think was what precipitated events leading to Wendy's comments in "The Amateur" and that was because we had a reading specialist come in periodically that many of the students didn't care for. He was armed with things like SRA reading labs and tachistoscopes (darn - no Wikipedia article on that - it's a device that flashes things like words up for very short periods of time - it was supposed to help us read faster). Anyway, there was a revolt of sorts by the students in our class, and as I recall Wendy was one of the ringleaders... and he went away and didn't ever come back, which probably put Mrs. Wolfrom in an awkward position. I thought the tachistiscope was kind of fun actually.
I also exchanged emails with former Catamount columnist Doug Monica who graduated a year ahead of me. (Doug's mom and my mom were good friends - I think they both worked on the Pete McCloskey campaigns - back in the 70s. I got to drive him (Congressman McCloskey) to the airport once on a messy rainy night back in my college days. His son and I were at UCSB at the same time).
I slso got email from a teacher in Palo Alto who is doing a wonderful site on Palo Alto history. Check it out at http://www.paloaltohistory.com/.
Much of what is covered in this issue of the Catamount that I just put up is covered in former Cubberley English/Journalism teacher Sylvia Williams' book Hassling (hardcover) , or Hassling (paperback) which she wrote in the early 70s. It is out of print, but if you follow the links you might find a used copy.
I've been doing sort of "topic pages" on each edition of the Catamount because hopefully that will help searchers to find things easier - especially since the optical PDFs sometimes garble things up. (Yikes, I'm repeating myself!)
