The Doppler Effect

 I am listening to Jane Lynch's autobiography in the car and am really enjoying it.  She pulls no punches and lays it all out there, the good, the bad, an the ugly.  In fact, in the early chapters the depricating may be over the top.

But one thing she talks about is what a bad student she was and how that was just accepted by her family, which seems to have been long on personal satisfaction, and short on personal achievement.  (The drinking may have played a part in that).

I have to admit that reading her less that stellar achievements in college (I have just gotten to her early years, so things may change as I read...) got me to thinking about my own not only "less than stellar" but downright failure in college.

In the late 1950s, the competition was less stiff and it was fairly easy to get into UC Berkeley.  I was a good student, always in the top 3 in my class, and had good SAT scores so when my father decreed that I was not to take a year off to work, which I wanted to do, but that I was going to go to Berkeley and become a teacher, I was a UC Berkeley student, set on a career that I knew from the get go I did not want, but there to fulfill my father's aspirations, as he had failed his college career and I was to do what he could not.

The first problem was that with that whole little "entering the convent" detour I took, I didn't enter Berkeley with most of the other incoming freshmen, but entered in January instead.  This meant there was no freshman orientation.  I was the very first person on either side of the family to attend college and I guess we all assumed that it was just like a bigger high school.   I had no guidance with choosing classes, didn't know what an "advisor" was, didn't know about pass or fail classes, didn't know anything, and being too shy to admit that, I just stumbled along and did what I thought I should do.

I didn't know I needed to have a permit to attend classes.   Someone asked me if I had one and I had to learn about that.  I also did the very stupid thing of taking my roommate's advice and taking a speech class instead of a writing class because she assured me it would be an easy A.  Well, for someone terrified of public speaking (which she certainly was not), and fairly good at writing this was a really dumb decision.

I also needed a science class and I was told that Physics 10, taught by Nobel Laureat Owen Chamberalin (for whom I would actually work later) was another easy A.

I can truly say that the only thing I learned about Physics was what the Doppler Effect was ("the change in frequency of a wave for an observer moving relative to its source")  I don't know what that means either, but every time I hear a train pass and listen to the sound get louder and softer, I know I'm listening to the Doppler effect.

The only reason I know this is that I was dating a guy whose name I can't remember.  All I remember about him is that he was very tall and somewhat blonde.  I didn't date him long.  But he decided he was going to tutor me in Physics and he drummed all the technical aspects of the Doppler effect into my head so thoroughly that I think of him  every time I become aware that I am listening to the Doppler effect.

I would go on to flunk out of UC Berkeley gloriously (once I got the first F of my life, I knew I could never make it up so never even asked about how to go about it).   But I got my revenge by getting what was my very favorite job over my life time, personal secretary to 3 professors in the Physics Departent.  Chamberlain was not one of my regular bosses, but I did do a project for him and also for another Nobel Laureate, Emilio Segre.

As I recall, neither project mentioned the Doppler effect.

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I am starting a new photo project, this one is the 100 Happy Days project.   It's been going on the internet for awhile now, but The Today Show started their own version of it and invited viewers to post their own "happy pictures" to Instagram and tag the Today Show, so I started today.  The "Photo of the Day" for the next 100 days will be my contribution to the Happy Days project.   Today's is a little blurry, but it's someting that does make me happy.

 These are the individual binders for most of my Compassion kids.  They hold their letters and communications about them.

Why I Have No Degree

I watched Up the Down Staircase this afternoon. Sandy Dennis as an idealistic young teacher on her first assignment, in a slum school in New York (probably would be good on a double bill with To Sir, With Love).

As I watched the frustrations of someone imbued with the love of transferring knowledge to students, coming up against a group of hardened slum teenagers who want nothing to do with the study of Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson, I shuddered and thought about why it is that I have no college degree.

When I graduated from grammar school, most of the girls in my school went to Presentation High School. I had struggled for years to be first in my class, but I could never get higher than third. I figured if I went to a different school from the top two girls in my grammar school class, I might be able to do better.

Presentation was a college prep school. St. Vincent's was the best school in the city for teaching secretarial skills, but had recently added a college prep course to its curriculum.

There was never any question about whether I would go to college. My father insisted on it. He himself had only lasted one semester at San Francisco City College and then quit and I think he was ashamed of that his whole life. Nobody in my mother's family had gone to college and so I would be the very first person on either side of the family to go to college. My maternal grandmother was in a nursing home unable to speak but I remember the glow of pride on her face when my mother told her I was going to college.

I loved high school and I particularly loved the secretarial courses, but I took the college prep courses as well. I excelled in English and French, did miserably in math and fair-to-middlin' in sciences. (Ironically, I graduated third in my class of 60!)

Somewhere in my junior year, I decided I would become a nun. My father was furious. He saw that as a waste of my life, but my mother took my side and he reluctantly gave his permission for me to enter the Daughters of Charity.

In truth, I don't think I ever really wanted to be a nun, but I was carried away with the romanticism of it all. When push came to shove and I had to start assembling my trunk and buying things I would need in the convent, I was less and less enthused, though too embarrassed to admit that. My fears about entering had nothing to do with religion. They were fear that I would not be able to take care of my hair (my mother styled my hair until I was 18 and I was afraid I wouldn't know how to do it). There were fears of what it would be like to wear wool in the St. Louis summers. The Daughters of Charity had three areas of emphasis. Sisters were either teachers or nurses or concentrated on social work. I knew I didn't have the stomach for nursing and knew that I didn't want to be a teacher, but also knew that I would have no choice of what I would be assigned.

In the summer after I graduated, Sister Anne, my good friend and typing teacher, who had been transferred to Phoenix the year before, came back for a visit. I wonder if she came back specifically to talk with me. She did talk with me and gently suggested a 6 month postponement of my entrance into the convent. I would, instead, work at the school while I pondered my decision.

In the end, of course, I decided not to go. Instead of being relieved, my father took over my life. I wanted to take a year off from school and work, he said that he had listened to me once and refused to listen to me again. I WOULD go to UC Berkeley. He reasoned that if I took a year off, I would never go to college at all. Other than my decision to enter the convent (which my mother championed), I had no history of ever going against my father's wishes and so I applied for entrance to UC Berkeley. (It was easier to get in there, and cost much less than now.) Because of my six month delay, I entered mid-semester, so was on my own, without a group of entering freshmen with me.

My father insisted that I was going to be a teacher. You teachers will appreciate his reasoning--you only have to work 9 months a year, you get a great salary, you only work until 3 p.m. each day. He figured it was an easy way to make lots of money for very little work.

The problem was that I hated teaching. I was terrible at it. When I taught Sunday School at Newman Hall, I took the same class two years in a row so that I could have a chance to make up for all the stuff that I didn't teach them the first year so nobody would realize how little I actually taught them.

When classes got tough, there was no incentive for me to work at it because all I could see at the end of the road was a lifetime of working in a job that I knew I hated before I'd taken a single class. I was such an incredible wimp.

Because I never went through orientation I knew nothing about how to work the system at the university. I remember someone once asking me if I were taking a class "pass or fail" and I didn't have a clue what that meant. When a teacher made a pass at me and started cornering me outside the room before every class, I didn't have a clue that there were options available to me and so I stopped going to his class to avoid him. I had never failed a class in my life (or gotten so much as a D) and I thought that by failing his class, I would be kicked out of the university. So I stopped going to all classes. The only time I ever met with my counselor (I never even realized I had one until this happened), I had to go to her drunk in order to have enough nerve to tell her I was quitting school.

If I had known then what I know now about how a university works, about the kinds of majors other than teaching that were available, about the kinds of support I could find in the administration, things might have ended up quite different.

Instead I took the easy road and just quit, extracting my revenge by going to work for the university and having them pay me for a change.

But for most of my life, especially since we moved to a University town, I have felt, as my father did, embarrassed that I had no college degree, when everyone I knew did and assumed that I did. It was especially embarrassing when I started typing psychological reports on people who seemed to have significantly less potential than I feel I did, who had advanced degrees. People tell me it's never too late...but now I don't care that much any more!

I just know that there is no way, even now, that I would even think about a career in teaching--and Up the Down Staircase just makes that point even more clearly for me. You guys, especially those teaching in inner city schools (like my friend Merrell) have my utmost admiration!

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Walt got my bluetooth working. He says all I needed to do was RTFM. I actually did, but must have missed something. Anyway, it now works so let's hope my interview on Thursday is worth the money I paid to buy it.