Eighty Memories for Eighty Years: #18 Matriculation

Crescent Heights High School

Did I like high school?

I think I did.

High school is just what we did in those days.

I took French, Latin, Physics, Chemistry, anything that would get me a matriculation so that I could go to university.

Miss Ramsey taught French.

She ran an extra class at noon-hour for anyone who wanted to come for extra help.

I was always there. In retrospect, I think the only students who went in to get the extra help were the ones who didn’t need it.

I loved Physics.  I think because it seemed to be a man’s subject, but still I was able to take it.  It is always a thrill to get in on what a person perceives is a man's world.   There was a section in the course where everyone took an element (or two) and gave a short report. I went down to the dry ice plant, took a tour of their facility and reported back to my class on CO2.

 I think the look on my teacher’s face’s has always left me wondering what was going on in his mind as he listened to me give that report. 

I was only to learn what he was thinking when I became a teacher myself and had students like that. 

For sure, I had teacher-worship for him, allowing me into that great circle of knowledge called Physics.

In high school, English was a chore. There was probably a lot of attention given to English forms: the satire, the elegy, the essay and there were a lot of red marks and some criticism on my papers when they came back. None of that really made me like English.

Learning to love the beauty and the potential of my native tongue was to come later at university.

Arta