Mt. Pleasant High School Class of '68 Teachers

Mount Pleasant High School Teachers

Robert (Gumby) Greiner - Class of '68

I originally began this project as an HTML programming effort to see if I could embed anchor tags within a table. I discovered that I can, but only if I place them within a table data construct. (Do not worry if you do not understand a word of what I just said: that just means you are not a computer programming geek, and you should rejoice!) In fact, take special note of the Zolin/Emrich cell where I placed not one but two different links: one separate link for each teacher.

It then evolved into a tribute to the teachers who influenced us so much while we were growing up.

I confess that I had to resort to our 1965 (9th grade) and 1968 (12th grade) yearbooks for help with some of the details. However, a few teachers were not in either of those yearbooks, including some of the best (Mr. Noice, History 8), some of the the worst (Mr. Shalvey, Science 7), and those in between (Mrs. Smith, English 10). Amazingly enough, I was able to recall the missing teachers even through the fog of my distant memory.

I was soon struck by the realization that I could not even begin to attempt a similiar project for my college or graduate school professors even though I experienced them more recently. As I write this in June of 2010, I graduated from college 38 years ago and graduate school 26 years ago, but I seem to have more vivid remembrances of my high school teachers collectively than I have for many of my more recent college professors. Even making allowance for the fact that diseases like Alzheimer's affect short term memory, who would classify 26-year-old events as short-term memory?

Instead, I am inclined to attribute the more lasting impact of high school teachers to more repeated exposure. In college, students might have one professor for one class that meets only two or three times a week for just one semester or even one quarter. That is a far cry from from dealing with a high school teacher five days per week for an entire school year. And with most of my teachers, I found that contrary to popular idiom, familiarity did not breed contempt but a fair amount of respect, however grudging.

In the above table, I have included a phrase or sentence that attempts to capture the essence of each teacher or classroom experience to the best of my recollection. Of course, in many cases, a single sentence does not do justice to the teacher involved, but that is just a concession to the limited space available in one cell of the data table. Also striking is the absence of many of the Mount Pleasant teaching legends that I never had the privilege to have (e.g., Mr. Menser in history, Mr. Schomborg for English, etc.).

If you think that any of my comments are off the mark, or if you have additional comments of your own, or if you would like to add commentary about other teachers who influenced you, by all means drop me a line at any of the e-mail addresses shown below and let me know your thoughts. I will attempt to compile the results and post them for all to see.

Thanks in advance.

(NOTE: The e-mail addresses above are an image. As a result, you cannot copy-and-paste the addresses but must instead manually type them into your e-mail address field. I apologize for the inconvenience, but I chose to use this method as a way to preclude automated web-crawlers from capturing the addresses as fodder for someone's junk/spam distribution list.)