Just passing time, not very interesting for most.

I am just looking to keep my mind off of Terry as I seem to walk from the back of the house to the garage door and then I turn around and may walk back again.  Oh there is often a stop in the kitchen where the fridge door may be opened and maybe or maybe not something taken out that I certainly do NOT need.  So I decided to put into pictures and words what a North Dakota guy did for eduction as he was growing up and then turned into an adult.
Here I go and it could be long and boring!

Grades 1-3 were spent here.  It is the place where I had the SAME spelling book for 3 years.  By the time I was in third grade I had the book finished way before the end of the year!  It was the place where ball games could go on way beyond the recess time IF the teacher did not feel like calling us back in.  It was the place where hot lunches consisted of government peaches that went well with our lunch from home that most of the time consisted of peanut butter sandwiches or hard boiled eggs!  I would say that it certainly was a place where memories were made that are still with me today.  Did it get me off to a flying start in education?  My spelling NEVER recovered from those days of just memorizing words with no clue as to how to sound things out.  Oh, my penmanship never recovered from the sloppy writing that I did just to get those 1000 sentences done.  I know I talked too much during school hours BUT what should one do when all your work is finished and there is another 20-30 minutes of class left?

This is NOT Cayuga school but is pretty similar.  For some reason I do not have a picture of Cayuga School but wish I did.  Anyway this is were I spent grades 4-8.  In 4th grade we were in the basement on the right side of the school.  In 5th and 6th grade we were on the first floor on the right side.  In 7th  and 8th grade, that was when the high school started at Sargent Central, we were in the top floor on the left side.  I perhaps have told too many stories already about Cayuga school.  I am sure that in 5th grade I was able to break the window with the soft ball--it was a homer!  It was here that I read more than 100 books in 7th grade and again in 8th grade.  It was here that as a 5th and 6th grader my stuttering was something that made me freeze if I were asked to talk in class.  It was here that during recess the boys and girls played a game where we had to catch the girls and then they went to jail.  Don't know what happened then!  As most of the time, recess was the best part of the day as we could play ball.  Well I did get good grades but that was not very difficult in those days as we did not have a class that were world scholars!

Grades 9-12 were spent at Sargent Central High School which was in Forman 25 miles from our farm.  It was here, as a freshman that I discovered girls!  It was here that Football and basketball seemed to be my major.  Oh yest there was baseball as a freshman and track as a senior but the best, for sure, was football.  For some reason I just loved to hit guys in a good way!  It was here that Terry and I were classmates for all four years yet never dated.  She did give me advice!  It was here that classmate JoEllen entered my life and made things interesting.  Of course I had a large part in that too.  It was here that I started dating Gail in the last half of my senior year only to break up as she went off to college and then get back together for 41 years.  It was here that my friend Larry and I played sports together and to this day I consider him my best friend ever.  Of course that is in the boy area!  It was here that I spent 1000's of hours on the bus to and from school and to and from sports events.  For the most part high school was a fun time but as I have gotten older it is easy to see that I could certainly have made better use of my time during those 4 years.

I started my college days in the near building, Reed Hall.  It was here that I found out that the world was full of people who loved to drink beer (not me), party a lot and not really pay attention to school. It was here that I found out what being away from home meant.  

The building on the right is where Larry and I stayed during our sophomore year at NDSU.  Here I found out what it was like to be on your own in terms of food!  Hot dogs in cream corn were often the  hit of the menu.  It was here that I started to think about my future but did not come to any conclusion about life.  It was this year that I had my motor cycle and that gave me freedom that I had never had before.  It was this year that I got my job in the barley department at school and for me it was perfect.  I could work alone and get my hours in. The following fall of my junior year Larry and I moved into a house with several others but I have NO idea where that house was so will skip it.

I continued my education by enrolling in Minot the winter of my junior year.  I have already written about that part of my life so will keep this to education.  I graduated from Minot in the spring of 1969.

I picked up my education again in the winter of 1973 by taking a class at Devils Lake Junior College. I do not remember what kind of class it was but at that point I had decided that I would like to get my masters degree and have it by the time John started school.  It turned out to not be a fun time.  I was teaching during the day and putting a lot of hours in.  We had John who was 3 and Travis who was 1 and I am afraid that I was not the most helpful father.

In the winter of 1973 I applied for and got a grant to go to summer school in Lincoln Nebraska at the University.  We borrowed Grandpa Saunders' camper and pickup and off we went for 2 months.  We camped out just outside of Lincoln and Gail cared for the two boys as I took class all day.  It was an adventure that turned out good but as I look back we were kind of crazy.  We rented ourDevils Lake house out to a lady who was a veterinary and we never met her!  What the heck!  Anyway it was several credits towards my degree.

In the spring of 1974/75/76 I took classes at the University of North Dakota.  I would leave Devils Lake early Monday morning with clean clothes and a cooler of food.  I would finish classes on Thursdays and head home.  Gail was left to care for Aaron, Travis and John during those times and
I know it was often more than a hand full.  I decided to do a graduate paper on the advantages of an educational program in dorms at a residential school.  Ann, the wife of our principal, agreed to do the educational program in the dorm twice a week.  I looked at the test scores of the kids in the program and the kids that were not in the program and did my graduate thesis on how the two groups did.  The conclusion was there was great value in a program on the dorm.  I still have my paper if anyone is interested in it!!!  With cap and gown and Gail, John, Travis, Aaron AND Mom and Dad watching I marched across the stage in August of 1976.  It was the end of a long long journey and a good ending.  A side note was after playing in maybe 120 games in sports in high school and not having Mom or Dad see me once play they watched as I walked across the stage to get my degree.  I never did figure it out but I remember I was happy they were there.  This is perhaps a bit awful on my part but I always suspected that Dad never wanted his kids to outdo him.  If one wants to criticize me for saying that go ahead but I do think it was true.  

Kind of my last steps into education were at the Universiy of Minnesota.  I had my master degree and felt that I wanted to get my specialist degree in administration so that I could get out of the classroom and into a better paying job.  In the fall of 1984 I was in the middle of my third administration class at the U.  We were scheduled to have a quiz in the next class and John's SPA soccer team was going to be playing their first game in the state soccer tournament.  What is one to do.  Well I could NOT miss my quiz so I missed the soccer game.  Lucky they won and I got to go the next time.  BUT it made me think.  Do I really want to put myself in a position of classes and then then once in administration be tied up so that I miss many family events?  I decided NO.  That was the last class I took but I was able to file them with the school records so that it put me on another pay scale.  

So ended my college days.  Many places, many hours, many $$'s and it goes on.  Did I ever regret ending it like that.  Well to be honest there were many times I wished I had gotten out of the classroom but to sacrifice it for family, NO WAY.