Writer's Block: Back To School

This one is, more or less, a three way tie.  While in high school I was living with my grandparents instead of shifting from place to place with my mother and step father, so I ended up in the same school the entire time.  The teachers I had during those years certainly influenced the direction I took with the rest of my life.

Mr. Phipps (Chemistry/Physics)

  While I enjoyed Chemistry, I doubt Mr. Phipps thought much of my efforts.  I distinctly remember him referring to my lab book like a cook book, and not in the good sense.  I tended to write up results by documenting the process, without any explanation of what the process was for or what was going on in the reaction.  In Physics though, we synced up.  It turned out he was a sci-fi fan and during my junior year he got a class project going to build a scale model of Rama, as in Arthur C. Clarks "Rendezvous with Rama".  We ended up cutting a 50 gallon drum in half and then using plaster to sculpt the interior.  Along the way we got taught the physics of what we were looking at, why did it rotate, how fast did it need to rotate, why were the feature balanced, etc.  Another project concerned angular momentum, and here I ended up writing one of my first programs for an old HP programmable calculator, using punch cards, that calculated the angular moment of an object on the surface of a star, from pole to equator.  I think I burned out the printer on the HP, it took an entire roll of paper.  Mr. Phipps got another teacher to verify my program was correct, hand calculated a couple of points to verify I was close and I gave a presentation to the class, which firmly cemented their impression of my geekhood.

  Side note: Mr. Phipps passed along a book by John W. Campbell called "The Mightiest Machine", which I still have.  The space opera style of that book as well as the idea of the Momentum Wave Drive would later show up in my own writings, fifteen years later.

Mr. Kenmore (Math)

  I might have hated math, but Mr. Kenmore also had access to the HP calculator used in the angular momentum project, as well as a low speed terminal hooked to the mainframe at the local university.  When he discovered that I'd already been teaching myself "Basic" by sneaking into the basement of another local college and playing with their PDP, he let me start staying after school and gave me access to the terminal.  Besides programming, this was my first introduction to "Super Star Trek" and "Adventure", a couple of the first computer games ever written.  While I'm afraid I still hate math, the programming bug infected me permanently thanks to Mr. Kenmore.

Mr. ??? (Science/Electronics)

  I really wish I could remember his name, but it's slipped away.  He had the classroom right next to Mr. Phipps and taught the science subjects Phipps didn't cover.  This was my formal introduction to electronics, including the math formula's I still remember.  My initial introduction took place at the age of 5 or so, in Germany, when I became fascinated with the electrical test meter my father brought home one night from the flightline.  I still remember all the smoke that poured out of it when I plugged it into the wall, fortunately I survived my first attempt at electrocuting myself.  *grin*  Near the middle of my senior year, this teacher took me and one other student aside and introduced us to a recruiter from DeVry Institute of Electronics.  By that time I was already pretty set in the path I would take, electronics, computers, preferably both.  DeVry was the doorway and in the fall of 1975, at the age of 17, the other student and I both ended up in Phoenix AZ sharing an apartment.