This week we continue our series of episodes on my experiences growing up in a special education school. We talk about my experiences in fourth and fifth grade and how I begin to develop a passion for math and science.

Hello, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 17 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue our series of episodes on my experiences growing up in a special education school. We talk about my experiences in fourth and fifth grade and how I begin to develop a passion for math and science.

When I was in third grade, Miss Holmes was assisted by a student teacher Mr. Wright. I don’t recall his first name if I ever knew it. After doing his student teaching, he was hired at Roberts School to teach fourth grade so he was already familiar with me and all of the other students.

He was a really fun guy. For social studies class, he made up some sort of play or pageant that was supposed to illustrate Native South American culture. I don’t recall if he said it was Aztec or Incan culture. I mentioned that in Miss Holmes’ class I was sort of the teacher’s favorite and that continued under Mr. Wright so I got to play the part of the tribal king. The queen was played by a girl named Rosemary. Those of you who know me, have heard me talk about a girlfriend named Rose but this was a different one.

I vaguely recall referring to Rose as my “girlfriend” but I think it was sort of along the same lines as Cheryl from kindergarten. Being in school, your family required you to have a girlfriend so I picked her. I don’t even recall if she would refer to me as her boyfriend. It may have just been someone I picked to keep my grandmother off my back asking me about girlfriends. It wasn’t that I had any particular attraction to her except that she was probably the second smartest person in the class and thus also a teacher’s favorite. She moved away after fourth grade and I never saw her again and didn’t particularly miss her. At least I don’t have any embarrassing stories to tell about insulting her disability.

Fourth grade was the first class in which we had science class. That is where I began to really get my passion for science beyond my interest in the space program which was at its height in the 1960s. We did experiments where we passed light through a prism and showed how when you stick a pencil and a glass of water, the refraction makes it look like the pencil is broken. I think we also played around with batteries, light bulbs, motors, and switches as well as electromagnets.

It was either in fourth grade or perhaps fifth grade that I began reading science fiction. The first book I read was “Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship” closely followed by “Danny Dunn and the Antigravity Paint”. I will talk more about my passion for science fiction and these books in particular in a later episode.

Beyond the science experiments and crazy plays that we acted out in Mr. Wright’s class, I also recall he was a huge fan of James Bond. This was the 1964-65 school year which saw the release of “From Russia with Love” and “Goldfinger” starring Sean Connery. I don’t know if it was Mr. Wright’s influence or I just got caught up in Bond fever but I recall I built a model car that was a James Bond Aston Martin complete with a spring-loaded ejection seat and rockets that would shoot out the back when you press a button. I remember having some deep philosophical discussions with him (to the extent a nine-year-old could) because I had difficulty with the idea that the double-O in 007 meant “license to kill.” I didn’t think even with a government license it was okay to kill somebody.

My only other memory of Mr. Wright was that he had gone to school in Terre Haute Indiana and he had us convinced that the words “Terre Haute” were Indian for “terrible smell.” It was only when I took French in high school that I learned it meant “high ground” in French.

One more very memorable thing happened in fourth grade. There was a girl named Rita Johnson in my class. She had braces on her legs and walked using “Canadian Crutches”. These are sort of like a cane that has part of it come up into a U-shaped cuff that goes around your forearm. The crutch doesn’t come all the way up to your armpit like traditional crutches.

She was walking by my desk one day and slipped and fell. The cuff around her forearm dug into her arm and cut a V-shaped slice into it about three-quarters of an inch. A flap of skin opened up from this V-cut and you could see what I thought was muscle inside her arm. I don’t know for certain that’s what I was seeing but it was definitely a deep cut through all the skin. It wasn’t just a scrape.

Like lots of kids with crutches and braces, falling down was not that unusual. She was about to attempt to get up when she looked down at her arm and saw the wound. She started screaming hysterically. They flopped the flap of skin closed, took her to the nurse’s office, wrapped it up in a bandage, and sent her back to class. I think the thing really needed stitches but she never got any. Years later when I was in my early 20s, I ran into her at a disability event and she still had a V-shaped scar on her arm. I didn’t get the opportunity to talk to her to tell her I remembered the day she got it.

Afterward, I bragged to everyone about what I saw. “It was so cool! You could actually see inside her arm!” All of the girls thought it was gross and all the guys thought it was so cool, and they were jealous that I got to see it and they didn’t.

The incident further provoked my sense of scientific curiosity. Who knows? Had I not been disabled, it might have led me to a career in medicine.

My scientific curiosity was piqued by other observations around that age. We used to go to the Lafayette Road Drive-in Movie at the corner of Lafayette Road and Georgetown Road. We had a 1959 Plymouth which had a large sloping rear window. After watching the first part of a double feature, my parents would put me in the back of the car on a large shelf above the rear seat with the window over me. I would lay there and look up at the stars and wonder about them. I knew that stars were suns and that there was no air in outer space. I recall asking my dad, “How is it possible for the stars and the sun to burn in outer space when there is no air?“ He didn’t know. I had to figure that out. It led me to an early interest in astronomy.

I always was a logical thinker. One time when we were on vacation at Lake Schaefer we were accompanied by a priest friend Father Paul Piatt. He was the second of three Father Pauls who influenced my life. He was attempting to engage me in a conversation about how God made everything and influenced everything. Somewhere in the conversation, he asked me, “Where does the wind come from?” Presumably, he wanted me to say that God made the wind blow. My answer was, “It’s caused by the trees.”

Looking back on my answer, I still think it was a brilliant deduction. I noticed that whenever the wind blew, the trees were moving back and forth. I naturally assumed that it was the motion of the trees acting like giant fans that caused the wind. I later learned this was an excellent example of the warning, “Correlation does not imply causation.” I had noticed the correlation between tree movement and wind blowing. I simply had the cause and effect backward. Still, I thought it was an ingenious observation for a young scientist.

My scientific pursuits were furthered in fifth grade under the guidance of a wonderful teacher Mrs. Beatrice Rogers. She was a heavyset African-American woman with a sparkling personality and a passion for teaching. We had all sorts of activities going on at once in her class. My favorite was a large diorama we built featuring several dinosaurs we made out of modeling clay.

The fifth-grade curriculum was the first to implement the so-called “New Math”. According to Wikipedia, this was a revolutionary, yet temporary paradigm shift in the way mathematics was taught in elementary school. It was prompted in part by the Soviet Union launching the first man-made satellite Sputnik in 1957. The belief was that Russian engineers were mathematical geniuses and that in order to compete with them in the space race, we had to raise a new generation of people who were proficient in math.

Rather than concentrate on rote memorization, the idea was to teach mathematical concepts. Kids need to understand why math was the way it was and not just memorize answers. It was designed to teach logical thinking. Among the concepts it included were Boolean logic, set theory, ideas such as intersection and union, as well as numbering systems other than base 10. It may have contributed to my inability to do simple arithmetic that I talked about last week. While most students had no use for such concepts, I was unknowingly destined for a career in computer programming. So not only did new math come to me easily, it served me well in later years.

Concepts such as intersection and union also served me well in working with 3D graphics and a graphics rendering engine I helped to develop. In 1990, I co-authored a book about computer graphics and it relied on such concepts. I also use it in my work when I use CAD software for 3D printing.

I wonder if new math would have worked better had they phased it in from first grade onwards rather than trying to implement it systemwide and trying to teach it to fifth or sixth-grade students who already had four or more years of old math education.

Given that children are learning coding at an early age, my guess is that many of the old “new math” concepts are being taught today without the negative connotation that became associated with the sudden and ill-conceived implementation of the new math curriculum in the 1960s.

The major event that happened in fifth grade was that I was given the use of a motorized wheelchair. The chair had been donated to the school. A small brass engraved tag on the side said, “In loving memory of my husband Mrs. Vern Hollingsworth.” And a date presumably of when Vern Hollingsworth died. I had heard that he was an elderly wealthy man who had purchased the wheelchair but only used it for about 6 months before he passed away.

The school allowed me to use the wheelchair in school and I could take it home over the summer as long as my parents agreed to keep up the maintenance. I will have more extensive comments about wheelchair technology in future episodes but briefly, this was an ordinary Everest and Jennings wheelchair with two 6-volt lead acid automobile batteries and two electric motors that powered the rear wheels through belts and pulleys. The rear wheels had wire spokes and narrow solid rubber tires.

In the summertime, riding around on concrete sidewalks and streets caused excessive wear on the tires and they had to be replaced quite often. Scraping into narrow doorways wreaked havoc on the thin wire spokes and Dad eventually replaced them with heavy-duty spokes. The batteries had to be replaced about once a year but they were standard 6-volt car batteries which were still in common use in the mid-1960s.

The electronics were quite primitive by modern standards of power wheelchairs. The joystick was a simple plastic knob that rested inside four micro switches set at 45° angles. When you pushed the stick straight forward, it would press 2 of the switches which would engage both motors forward. If you pushed forward and right, it would engage only the left motor. Push straight sideways and one motor would go forwards and the other would go backward. I called that maneuver a “bat-turn” after the way the famous Batmobile could turn instantaneously in the 1960s TV version of Batman.

Unlike modern power chairs, there was no proportional control. Each motor was either on or off. The physical therapist who taught me how to drive it had little or no experience with the device. She told me, “If you get into trouble, just let go of the joystick and you will stop.” She unknowingly left out the word, “eventually”. When you let go, the chair would coast a tiny bit and that was on level ground. I didn’t realize that on a ramp, it would roll on its own without power.

My misadventures in the wheelchair began on day one when I ran over Mrs. Rogers’ foot. After that, she learned to stay out of my way.

My second thrilling moment in the power wheelchair came when I tried to drive it down a large ramp that connected the first and second-floor classrooms. This episode is already way too long so I’m going to save that story for a later episode. Let’s just say my scientific mind learned a lot about physics driving a wheelchair down the ramp out of control.

I didn’t have the only power wheelchair in the school. There were two others. Nancy and Leslie Gilson were about three years and five years ahead of me respectively. The Gilson sisters were quite frail petite young ladies with a soft voice that you had to strain to hear sometimes. They both had a type of muscular dystrophy although not the common Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy because only boys get that type.

The family had purchased 4 power wheelchairs – two to use at school and another pair for use at home. They didn’t ride the school bus like the rest of us. Their chauffeur would lift them out of their home wheelchairs and put them in the limousine and drive them to school. Then he would lift them into the other power wheelchairs which were kept at the school. We always said it was a “chauffeur” and a “limousine” but none of us really knew that as a fact. It might have been their dad or older brother or friend of the family driving what was obviously a fancy car probably a Lincoln or a Cadillac but not necessarily a limousine.

Power wheelchairs in those days cost about $1000 which in today’s money would be about $30,000. The fact that the family could afford four of them made it obvious they were well-off.

The presumed wealth of the Gilson family was an illustration of the diversity of the student body at Roberts School. On one end of the spectrum, we had the Gilsons who could afford four power wheelchairs. On the other end of the spectrum was one of my classmates who didn’t come to school for a week because he had no shoes to wear. He needed expensive orthopedic shoes. When the social worker inquired why he wasn’t in school and discovered the reason, the PTA paid for a new pair of shoes. The only reason I knew about it was that my mom was president of the PTA and couldn’t keep a secret.

Roberts School had students who were black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. Rich and poor. Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and atheist. Disability knows nothing of race, creed, or socioeconomic status. While we were highly segregated from the rest of the school population because of our disabilities, we were at the time the most integrated school by all other measures.

The prevailing belief that the Gilson family was well-off was confirmed when sadly Leslie passed away shortly before graduating high school. The family donated a large sum of money to buy hundreds of library books for the school. Each of them contained a foil sticker on the inside flyleaf saying “Donated in memory of Leslie Gilson.” Among the donated books were some sci-fi classics by Asimov and Clarke which I enjoyed. Her family accepted her high school diploma posthumously.

After the incident on the big ramp, even though I didn’t know either of the sisters because they were older than me, I stopped Nancy in the hall one day and asked her advice on navigating the ramp.

Everest and Jennings dominated the wheelchair market in those days and they were the only company to make power chairs. They only had one model. Even though my wheelchair was theoretically identical to those driven by the Gilson girls, for some reason they both were faster than me. We never officially “raced” but I would find an opportunity to go down the hall alongside them and lose miserably. It really made me angry I could get outrun by a couple of girls.

I never got to know Leslie at all. Nancy was only a couple of years ahead of me so we were in high school at the same time. She was quite shy yet very intelligent with a good sense of humor. She won a poetry contest for a poem that moved me greatly. I’ve got a copy of it stashed around here somewhere and I will reprint it if I ever find it.

In an award-winning magazine article I wrote in 1987 about my school experiences, I told a story about the Gilson girls that was related to me by one of the teachers at a school reunion. I got a nice note from their older brother thanking me for remembering them. He said he didn’t recall the incident I described how Nancy handled the death of her older sister yet he said he couldn’t deny it happened.

For me, it doesn’t matter if the story was true or not. It doesn’t matter if they came to school in a chauffeur-driven limousine or if it was just their dad or older brother in a fancy car. It’s an example of the famous line from the film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” which says “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The Gilson girls were the stuff of legends.

In our next episode, we will continue the saga of my school days at Roberts School. I will tell one more story from fifth grade and then move upstairs to junior high.

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