Barb, your journey as a teacher is a wonderful one. Went to your www.simplyscience.com website, obviously a labor of love, but certainly quite a lot of work too.

Have several close relatives who became dedicated teachers. My aunt Katy Early transitioned from being an elementary school teacher and math specialist, to designing and teaching a program at Chico State University training current and future elementary school teachers in engaging math strategies for kids of all abilities. Similar I would imagine to your own effort to improve science education working with other teachers at Portland State University. Being passionate about this work has carried my aunt long past retirement: another labor of love. Your website tells me you have devoted much energy continuing to help students and teachers in retirement as well.

The closest tangential contribution I personally made to science education was years ago. Spent 7 years on the King-5-TV coed volleyball team with Bill Nye, who asked me to design and build the electronics used in one of his on-air TV science demonstrations, which thankfully did work as he intended on an Almost-Live KingTV segment. A good friend of mine and a senior electrical engineer in the lab instruments division of Tektronix in Beaverton helped as well. The Rose City is a beautiful community.

Several years ago, I watched a British documentary on education reform. One episode featured a test here in the United States of a collaborative learning model(?) developed in England. Instead of presenting a standard one week long chalk and talk curriculum module about electricity to HS students, using the new model two weeks were spent with the teacher posing electricity questions to students organized into cooperative teams. Each team was given electrical apparatus to run their own experiments. Teachers would give generic advice but students had to design the experiments themselves and interpret results to answer specific questions/hypothesis. Students problem solved together. The test of this new instructional paradigm involved a bit of adjustment by teachers and students, but was very positive for the students and testing showed they retained the course material covered far longer, and were able to deduce answers to new electrical questions more successfully than control classes that received the traditional chalk and talk lecture format covering the same instructional material. If you are interested I will trackdown the documentary and send you a link.

Have for the past 18 years attended several 5 day long science seminars on Cortes Island (BC) at Hollyhock, given by my scientist friend Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, the youngest head of the micro-biology dept at Cambridge University, an elected science fellow at Trinity College and remains a thoroughly brilliant, modest and likable fellow dedicated to experimental, data driven science set free of dogmas. My wife Lolly Bates and I just recently made a financial grant to Rupert's science organization to fund some new experiments testing his theory of "morphic resonance" in developmental biology. I have also been a volunteer tech person supporting some previous Sheldrake experiments and filmed his lecture series with son's Merlin and Cosmo Sheldrake, last August at Hollyhock as a volunteer. Rupert is the author of several popular science books and his son Dr. Merlin Sheldrake's book: "Entangled Life" spent some time on the NYT bestseller list. www.sheldrake.org

This is my modest contribution to advancing science knowledge in the world - I take photos and videos of scientists engaged in education and I write checks. Some of us try to be useful in a supporting role.

Glad to hear you have enjoyed volunteering with local theatre groups in Portland. Eric Dickman from our class and his wife Maggie are artistic and producing directors of a local Burien community theatre: BAT - Burien Actors Theatre. Have enjoyed helping them as a volunteer and long ago used to be a stagehand, lighting designer at a BAT precursor group along with Susan Bocek. The theatre community is multi-generational, warm and supportive in my experience.

From time to time we visit my wife Lolly Bates' brother who lives in NE Portland and also travel to the Rose City for Lolly's women's tennis team tournaments. In the future, if your schedule allows, dinner somewhere in Portland would be lovely. Want to hear more about science capturing the imagination of kids and enabling a lifelong love of learning. We could use more good news in our Country these days.

Posted on: Sep 20, 2024 at 5:15 AM

Hi Kathy,
Replied earlier to a question from Kathy Yellam Eggers asking when my photos taken at the Cove on Saturday would be online. Have an update for you - just finished uploading Cove Reunion photos to my wife Lolly Bates and my small website: www.ourseattle.org. Testing confirms, they are live and display fine using, Firefox, Google Chrome or MacOS Safari web browsers, at least under MacOS. If you could verify if our site's Wordpress webpages render OK using Windows web browsers that would helpful.

Yesterday Lolly and I drove to our property in Eastern WA to work on tasks here. Being a geek, I have my computer stuff and also brought backup copies of the 50th Reunion Saturday photos so I could work on them: fix exposure, crop, adjust color balance ..etc on a subset of photos (removed exposure bracketing photo repeats and a few others considerations). Did some very quick media editing on the photos, though more needs to be corrected in the future. Can try uploading some of these 50th-Cove photos to your JFK74.com as a photo gallery, however not being very familiar with the site specific upload workflow i am not as good at it.

Unfortunately, until I learn more about coding websites with Wordpress the www.ourseattle.org site is NOT viewable on smart-phones ... eventually, someday ... maybe, but for now a users' web browser needs to run on a wider format display device: a laptop, desktop or large-ish Apple or Android Pad.

The following explanation is written here for the benefit of other classmates. Both the 50th-Tavern and 50th-Cove photos can be found by accessing the www.ourseattle.org website's menu bar item --> Kennedy HS Reunion --> Reunions 30th -thru- 50th. On that webpage find the light blue outlined box of photo thumbnails and click on either the "50th-Cove" or "50th-Tavern" labels at the top of the box. This will resort the thumbnail photos to display only that section of 50th reunion photos. Click on any thumbnail inside the light blue outlined photo-gallery box to display the corresponding fullsize image. Click on "<" ">" arrow icons to display the next fullsize image.

Weather here in Eastern WA should be nice during the day so Lolly and I have a 2:00pm "tee-time(?)" at a golf course nearby. I will have my iPhone with me to answer any questions over the next couple days should classmates have issues viewing the photo-gallery. Returning to Seattle late Saturday evening.

-- mark (cell - 206-200-5592)

Posted on: Sep 04, 2024 at 12:32 AM

Tom, senior year at an all students assembly when you earned the award from your fellow classmates as having the quickest wit and best sense of humor, everyone stood in the bleachers and cheered enthusiastically at the announcement. You however remained seated, modestly waving for everyone to sit down and move on to hear the next award winner category. As everyone sat back down and looked toward the front of the gym to hear the next award, you then stood up. Perfect comic timing !!! I think the roar of laughter from the Kennedy gym was heard at SeaTac and continued until our sides ached. In my four years at Kennedy I never once heard you use your wit to put anyone down. You drew attention to humor in situations, which often defused tension for students and teachers alike. That was a gift you gave to all of us countless times and a risk you were willing to take-on that insightful humor requires. Thank you Tom, so very much.

Posted on: Sep 03, 2024 at 11:50 PM

Updating a small website, of wife Lolly Bates and mine, with a page about Kennedy HS. Created a few slideshows set to music and adding more archival photos of students, teachers and staff. Enjoyed being a programmer for many years, but website design is new for me, so dial down your webpage expectations. The site is: https://ourseattle.org click on the "Kennedy HS" menu tab at the top of the home page. I am trying to upgrade the page so it works with smart phones and iPads, but that is still a work in progress. For now the Kennedy webpage only displays OK on desktops with display screens wider than found on smart phones. As I add code to the page, it might be down briefly from time to time. Looking forward to our class reunion activities. Stay safe.

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