7/4 #4
Glad to see you had that competitive spirit..I think my success in school was due to the same kind of competition.
And, oddly enough, it stayed with me all my life (so far anyway). When I went in the USAF and did tech school after basic, I went to the head of the class and stayed there. Not that my classmates were stupid; it's just that they had not learned to delve deeper, to seek harder... so I ended up being a student teacher there too. 3.5 years later, I came back to that same tech school for further education (weather observer into weather forecaster) and did the same thing. Top of the class (Can you hear Will Smith from MIB? "With honors. Sir!")
So the teachers there set up a special ed class on Saturdays and the students having the hardest time (and me) all met for a bike ride, then back to my place where I taught them what they couldn't understand in regular class (atmospheric physics is hard for someone who doesn't understand math). During all this, I was taking night classes in electronics (weather is not a very marketable career and my wife at the time really wanted me out of there, even though I loved my job). When I got out, I got a job as a control systems wireman, then field electrician, then moved to a large electronics company and climbed the ladder there, all the time teaching others on the side. I even went back to school (Portland State University) to get a teaching certificate and started teaching night classes for community college and in the day was teaching computers (CAD/CAM) and writing instruction manuals in language anyone could understand. Even after I became an engineering manager, I taught community college (Advanced Engineering Mathematics). I loved teaching and you don't even have to pay me to do it. Everything I have learned I gladly give away free
IF the student asks for it (I will not force my opinion/beliefs on anyone - you gotta want it or I cannot be your teacher).
You can see the above attitude in most of the pictures I attach to these files. I took them because I was there. Got a mountain in it? I probably climbed it. Gotta a canyon? No doubt I went down in there. Got a river? Chances are I either waded across it or did white water rafting in it. WHY?
Because it is there. I did not go to the top of the mountain just to stand above the rest of you. I went because I needed to see the view, to push myself one more step, to find out if the rocks on the other side were as pretty as this side. I even explored caves... not to do something others didn't, but to learn what the world beneath was made of. I know... go read a geology book! That is not good enough. Some books lie. I had to see it in person, to touch, to feel, to learn truth for myself.
And I cry because young Americans believe the crap they get off Facebook and never challenge themselves to get off their lazy butts and go explore their world. "Oh, I can see it on my cell phone, so I don't need to go there." Get off the freakin' interstate! Take the back roads and learn what America is really about. See and touch the history.... or ignore oldt pharts like me and become an automaton.
