Saturday, February 18, 2017

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Where Did You Go to School?

This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge is one of those rare few when I have more information than Randy:

For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I want you to:

(1)  Michael John Neill started an interesting Facebook meme:  When and where did you go to school?  


(2)  Tell us in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a status line on Facebook or a stream post on Google Plus.  Be sure to leave a link to your post in Comments on this post.


• September 1967 (I believe) to 1969 or possibly 1970:  I attended Rorimer Elementary School in La Puente, California.  I don't really remember anything about the school other than the name.

• 1969 or 1970–March 1971:  From La Puente my family moved to Pomona, California, so I'm sure I changed schools.  I have no idea what the name of the school was or what grade I was in.  I think we took a bus to school there.  I know I was in the 3rd grade when we left and moved to Australia, in March 1971.

• April to late November or early December 1971:  4th grade at Daceyville Public School in Daceyville, New South Wales, near Sydney.  I remember I learned to play the recorder while at Daceyville, and I think I did some stage plays. I learned to tie a Windsor knot, because a tie was part of the school uniform.  My mother might have driven me, my brother, and my sister to school.  This is also the school I was attending when my mother had to come in person to sign a document stating that it was ok for me to take a school period to study during the religion time slot.  My mother told me I refused to go to church classes.

• About February to late November or early December, 1972:  For the 1972 academic year, I was in 5th grade at Woollahra Demonstration School in Woollahra, also near Sydney. This was a school for advanced students, all taking advanced classes. I remember my embroidery/needlwork class, which I really enjoyed. I remember the school uniforms, particularly my sports uniform, which was very different from my everyday one; we had sports once a week.  I still have a stencil for drawing a map of Australia that I got from class.  My mother drove me to school and picked me up.

• March–June 1973:  My family returned to the United States in March 1973, and I went into the 6th grade from April to June 1973 at James E. Plew Elementary School, in lovely Niceville, Florida.  My teacher's name was Mr. Rich, and I ended up explaining one of the class textbooks to him.  He took it upon himself to register me for 7th grade, signing me up for all the advanced classes.  He did let me pick my own elective.  I took a schoolbus to and from school.

• September 1973–(probably) June 1979:  I actually attended junior high school, C. W. Ruckel Junior High School, and senior high school, Niceville Senior High School, both in Niceville, with no moving out of the area, and finishing all three years at each.  While I was in junior high school, I announced to my mother that it was ok if she wanted to move again, but I was going to finish a school for once in my life.  Lucky for me, my mother did not move.  If she had, I might have ended up living at my grandfather's house, or maybe my aunt's.  I think I took a bus to get to Ruckel, and most of the time I took the bus to go to high school.  If the (unpaved) streets in Villa Tasso had flooded or it was a below-zero morning (yes, we had those on the Panhandle), my mother would drive me to school.

• September 1979–about November 1988:  After graduating high school, I moved back to California to go to the University of Southern California.  My degree was a Bachelor of Arts with a French major, Russian and Spanish minors.  After graduation, I continued to take classes on a a part-time basis through 1988.  I lived near campus.  I usually rode my bicycle to and from campus.

• 1987 or 1988:  While I was going to USC part-time, I also took two semesters of tailoring classes at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College.  I don't remember exactly when, but it was probably in 1987 or 1988.

• September 1989 to about 1992:  I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and started taking American Sign Lauguage, music, computer, and creative writing classes at Vista College (now reincarnated as Berkeley City College) in Berkeley.  I used to drive to and from my ASL classes, and parking was always terrible, even at night, because Vista was in the middle of downtown Berkeley.  The creative writing classes I took were held on the UC Berkeley campus, also a horrible place to have to look for parking.  (Vista was in a small building without a lot of rooms or capacity).

• About 1992 to 1993:  I took orchestral performance and class voice at Laney Community College.  More horrible parking at a downtown location.

• About 1993 to 2000:  I discovered someone was teaching millinery at College of Alameda and took her class for seven years.

I think that covers everything.  All of that and only one degree!

2 comments:

  1. Hats! How very cool. I wonder if moving around from place to place like we both did as kids contributed to our interest in finding some sort of roots in family history. Very interesting back ground. I enjoyed reading your post.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I hadn't thought about a correlation between the moving and family history. One thing I know I got out of moving so much (by the time I turned 21 I had lived in 21 places) is that I'm extremely adaptable. How about you?

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