#16 - Grades 10 & 11

Sophomore & Junior years.  Sophomore year one of my classes was Bible as Literature.  What a great class!  A different perspective when reading the stories.  Mrs. Bluhm was a fantastic teacher.  Everybody had a different version but we had a great time learning.  Another class I had from Mrs. Bluhm was Shakespeare Literature.   We read various plays including acting out some of the scenes.  We actually did a play and put on a show at a couple of Elementary Schools (one of which was my “alma mater” – Oakview).

Science classes were the pits.  I took Chemistry and almost failed.  Why did I stick with it?  Well, my intentions were to go to a 4-year college and get a degree to become a Registered Dietitian.  I did go to a 4-year institution but majored in Accounting.

Math classes were another bug-a-boo.  I had the same teacher all four years (Mr. Sines).  Geometry was rough – I struggled with it.  The way the class was graded was not fair.  He had our names on 3x5 index cards.  They were shuffled every day and then drawn from.  If your name was drawn, you were assigned a problem from the previous day’s homework.  You had to write out your work on the blackboard and that was your grade for the assignment.  Invariably, my name was chosen for the one problem that I had difficulties with.  So, needless to say, the daily work grade was almost failing.  However, I redeemed myself on the tests that I ended up with a “C” grade in the class.  The 2^nd Year Algebra classes (taken my Junior year), were better because we were back to “normal” grading of assignments.  One of the things, Mr Sines did in class was to have the TV on and showed Monty Python episodes (Geometry class only).  I hated them – guess because it was not my type of humor.

I had a foreign language class as well – Spanish.  Lots of memorization.  One of the fun things we did was to do a news broadcast completely in Spanish.  We even taped it!  I think my role was weather.  We were a very small class at that time (I think there was about 6 of us).

I had fun elective classes as well – took classes in Home Economics (because of my intended career path) and Business (as a fall back).

Driver’s Education was another class I took (Sophomore year) then I went to work after-school my Junior year at a local hospital (worked in the kitchen to get hands-on skills).