2. EDUCATION
I started kindergarten the January after my fifth birthday. Milwaukee had mid-term students, and my birthday was late in November, so I was scheduled to start in January. By the time we moved to Paramus, I'd finished half of first grade. In Paramus there were no midterm classes, so I ended up taking a year and a half of first grade, total between the Milwaukee and Paramus school systems. It also meant that I was a up to a year older than most of my classmates in every class after that. I proceeded through the elementary schools wherever we moved to, in Greenhills, Ohio, and then on to Villa Park, Illinois. That move was probably the hardest, occurring at midyear of sixth grade for me. I went to junior high school in Villa Park as well. We then moved to La Habra, California, arriving three days before the start of school. I went to Sonora High School, graduating in 1971. I then started at California State University at Fullerton in the fall of 1971 starting as a biology major, and graduating as a chemistry major in the spring of 1975. That fall of 1975 I started my graduate chemistry studies at UCLA, finishing with a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry in September of 1980.
During all my education, my parents never said a word to me about my grades or doing better in school. Their attitude was that they expected you to do well. Therefore my brothers and I ended up putting the pressure on ourselves, to meet our parents' tacit expectations. I did quite well, better than my brothers, but they did well enough as well. The one thing that bugged me continuously, was that when I'd be studying, my brothers would continually interrupt me to ask me how to spell this word or that. When I asked them why they didn't just go use the dictionary, their response was "How can I look the word up, if I don't know how to spell it?" It finally got so that I'd just spell the word for them...it took less time. My parents' house was full of books on various and sundry topics. And I read all of them, except one. I tried, but was never able to finish "Forever Amber." I've tried to read it now as an adult and still just can't get into it. I gained a love of reading. It wasn't much of a punishment to be sent to my room as a kid, unless my parents' were willing to lug all the books out of the room. They never were. I also learned that education was what you made of it, even with a bad teacher, with a little effort, the information you needed or wanted was available, somewhere. It might be in your textbook, in articles in magazines, encyclopedias and yearbooks, or in books available in libraries. As a child I spent whole afternoons in libraries during summer vacations,doing nothing but reading what interested me (and usually very eclectic mixtures of novels, science articles and classic literature. For example, I can tell you that one summer I read the Iliad and the Odyssey (not summarized, but full translation). That summer I also included a faithful translation of the original Grimm's fairy tales). I rarely do that any more, but only because I have trouble fitting in the time necessary.
Home Page for "A Shy Man's Tale"