by William Cobbs

Created on: April 28, 2009   Last Updated: April 30, 2009

This article must be completely related to my own experience and the experiences of my pupils.

My personal background was fortunately a family of physicians and teachers, all of whom had come out of traditional and historic curricula. Their beliefs and those they imposed on me and my siblings were adequate mathematics, adequate science, concentrated history, and concentrated English and creative use of language, with emphasis on pre-school learning.

The elementary and high schools of the time (nineteen-twenties) reflected the same thinking. Ordinarily, this background would have ended up in the three then acceptable to upper middle class career choices of MEDICINE, LAW, or CHURCH.

Vaguely, I suppose because of my affection for my father, an excellent physician, I chose medicine, and after (a) home learning and reading at age four (b) excellent elementary school teachers and (c) a miserable non-challenging high school I went to a fine liberal arts college and majored in pre-med and English.

A war intervened and after two years of not paying much attention to my classes, I was in the military for several years in World War II. That three plus years gave me discipline, a regard for direction from others, and an understanding of the necessity for thinking about others as well as oneself. After returning from overseas the Navy sent me first to Princeton to study advanced mathematics and then to Pennsylvania State for advanced physics. Those were important subjects with excellent teachers and I prospered, But the war over, I was a a civilian.

I returned to college and graduated amid the agitation and turmoil of CHANGE among young returned veterans. At the same college where I had atarted five years before, I completed my work but barely, having lost the vital interest in a PLANNED life.

I took the Graduate Record Examination and much to my surprise, my best friend and I made the highest levels in the United States! What was it that made a mediocre student achieve such results? Perhaps this article will answer that question.

I went immediately to graduate school at Columbia University and enrolled in all courses in English and Journalism. I was almost instantly appalled to find I already KNEW or had LEARNED all things taught by the elder lecturing professors. I had used their textbooks in undergraduate school. What to do?

I taught for a year, and found that matured me a great deal, as my teaching was in a remote rural high school and to extremely untutored but healthy and

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