Tinker Toys Turn Toes Up

I had done Lincoln Logs when I was 3-4 and TinkerToys a year or so later. Lincoln Logs were easier because they were physically bigger and you didn't have to fit pegs in 1/4" holes.

Dogs liked to chew on Lincoln Logs more. TinkerToys would crack and splinter faster.

 

I remember blowing up a Lincoln Log fort with the Millennium Falcon. As Voltron watched helplessly. *worlds colliding*

 

Capsela

 

Geometry and trigonometry, two words: Model Rockets.

When we moved into the first chapters of geometry and trig in 6th/7th grades, it was like I and the other half dozen kids in my class who had been playing around with model rockets had beamed down straight from Starfleet Academy. We went straight through isosceles triangles to calculating sines, cosines and tangents.

(All that stuff was routinely used at that time to calculate rocket altitudes using visual tracking. Nowadays they have Tootsie Roll sized electronic altimeters that give you results accurate within a meter.)

But the teachers weren't completely thrilled: it seemed that while on all the rocket related stuff, we were four or five years ahead of our class level, on the building-block arithmetic and algebra stuff we were still 6th/7th graders. The school systems at the time weren't really built to accommodate individualized learning.

 

And sadly, still aren't. They can move the gifted kids into fast-track, but that still doesn't accomplish anything if your kid is a math whiz but struggles with reading, or the other way around. And No Kid Left Behind and Teaching To The Test makes it impossible for teachers to do anything but spend time on the ones who need help, while the ones who should be excelling are left bored and unchallenged.

I got a lot of "doesn't apply himself" back in the day because my teachers didn't understand that I already mastered the material the first time and tuned them out when they repeated it over and over to the kids who weren't. They called it "daydreaming." I called it imaging the cool stuff I could have been doing other than sitting there. At least I was allowed to work out of the sixth grade math book as a third grader because the teacher wanted to push me.

My father also brought home the IBM tutorial books used to train new computer programmers when I was 12, so I already understood bits, bytes, hardware, software and CPUs before getting to program in Fortran in ninth grade.

A really progressive school district would separate classes by subject right from kindergarten, just like in high school. Truly gifted kids need a different learning experience than what most public elementary schools offer.

That way, for example, you might be allowed to take fourth grade math as a second grader, even though you're technically not old enough. It would also allow kids having trouble to repeat a subject or two without having to be held back a full year. Yeah, I can see where parents might be bent out of shape about Johnny or Judy being pushed forward or back, but it would give teachers a chance to have everyone in their class basically at the same instructional age.


High schools offer AP and college credits but so much more could be done earlier.

 

Chapter 11 doesn't necessarily mean the end of the line. Stinky wipes his arse with Chapter 11 briefs.

 

Estes Rockets were some of the coolest things we ever did in 6th (or 7th?) grade. Those were such a blast! I even did them with my boys but unfortunately not enough area and we kept losing them as they got blown off course after the parachutes deployed.

 

We used to build ‘cities’, like DT offices, with the Kenner girder and panel sets and then run a slot car track to wind through them. Actually we built them the other way around, put together the track and then erected the buildings. My friend Ken Collins had damn near the whole basement in his parents house have a ping pong table, old RCA cabinet stereo with repeating 45rpm arm and a set of drums. Plus all the slot car track (Eldon, I had Strombecker cars), Meccano and mini brick sets. Mid to late 60s, a kids paradise. His Mom was super nice but I wonder what she thought when we started playing the drums to the Animals etc. that we listened to. They always let the dog out before the drumming started. Fun times.

 

You had all that knowledge and ... chose to pursue a career in radio?
Sadly, I did too.

 

Yeah, I had the math smarts (99th percentile on the 11th grade California Assessment Test) to crunch numbers for a living, but I couldn't see myself sitting at a computer at IBM or Microsoft, writing code. I loved keeping sports stats, but not particularly fond of making programs that manipulate arrays and other math tricks. Most of the NASA contractors were actually contracting jobs in the late 1970s, so I didn't see much value in that.

The absolute hardest thing for me to do, and still is, is speaking in public. I have trained myself to carry on social conversations over time, but I was painfully shy growing up. I dreaded oral book reports with a passion, and actually missed the day we had to recite a poem because I made myself ill. I couldn't debate to save my life.

Now I knew I could write well, but the idea of having to interview a real live person or ad-lib to a bunch of strangers on the radio seemed like the most difficult job. Plus I really wanted to do something in sports. Even years later, just the idea of dialing up a contact or walking up to a famous person and asking a question required me to fight that shyness gene.

Looking back, I should have applied at Elias or STATS, Inc. That would have checked off all the boxes.

 

Kids will never understand the joy of having a window in your log cabin.