This Web site is no longer being updated. To go to the
updated site for the new Scholar page click on the link below.
http://williesigler.com/dads-scholar.htm
Scholar
The year was 1954. My mother took me to a building that had one hallway with two
classrooms on each side and a small office at the end of the hallway. There
were two buildings out back. One building had a sign on it that said
"Boys" and the other one had a sign that said "Girls". At recess
and lunch, the older students pumped water from the well in the yard so that the other
students could bend over and drink water from their cupped hands. During my first
grade year, seven grades were taught upstairs and another grade was taught in a small room
next to the furnace in the basement. This was elementary education on the floodplain
of Camp Creek in rural southern Ohio. During my first grade year, there was no
permanent teacher available for the first grade students. Instructors came and went
and the eighth grade girls "baby sat" with the first grade during the periods
between the tours of the three regular teachers that came that year. The principal
assigned grades at the end of the year and passed the class on to the second grade.
My mother taught me to read the following summer. The next year there were only six
grades at the school and there were no classes in the basement. The second and third
grades were in the same room and a person was found to teach the group for the entire
year. During my third, fourth, and fifth grades, I was taught by college trained
certified teachers. They had a lot of work to do and did a very commendable
job. A cafeteria, indoor plumbing, and a playground were added to the school and
were in use during my fourth and fifth grades.
The year was 1959. My family moved to Paducah, Kentucky. The sixth grade
was culture shock. Our house was a block from the school. There were almost as
many sixth grade students at that school as there were students in the entire school at
Camp Creek. I became an urban student and began a seven year education in vocal
music. Three years in a junior high school were followed by three years in a senior
high school. My major scholastic emphasis was in mathematics and vocal music.
I completed mathematics with a basic understanding of calculus. Our only computers
were our minds and our slide rules (slip sticks). I completed my vocal music
training as a member of a twelve member a capella group. We sang without
accompaniment and sat around a table in such a manner that no two people singing the same
part sat next to each other.
The year was 1966. I was seventeen years old when I graduated from high school
and found myself at Paducah Junior College in the fall of 1966. A new campus had
recently been built on the outskirts of town and both the faculty and curriculum were as
good as that found in many of the better known four year schools in the country. I
compared my education at Paducah Junior College with the experiences of my classmates at
the Defense Language Institute the following year and found that it was above average.
The year was 1968. After a school year spent mostly in an army uniform, I
returned home and spent the next five years at Murray State University. My majors
started out as mathematics and history. History was changed to Russian and
mathematics was changed to geography. I was the only Russian major, so Russian was
later changed to political science. The final product was the degrees of Bachelor of
Arts, Master of Arts in College Teaching, and Specialist in College Teaching in the areas
of geography and political science. My areas of specialization were physiography,
climatology, Eurasia, Anglo-America, American government, comparative government, and
international relations. During graduate school, I was offered the opportunity to
substitute something new for the language or statistics requirement. I sat through a
freshman level IBM Program Language 1 (very similar to Basic) course long
enough to get the gist of the language and then I started writing computer programs for
research in geography and political science. My major work, in collaboration with
another graduate student, was a program for the Koppen Climate Classification System.
I found that the computer could do in minutes what had previously taken
hours and my love affair with cyberspace began. Twenty-five years later, I bought my
first home computer. I was also a member of the first 200 level two semester
astronomy class to be taught at Murray State University. The course was taught
during the 1970-1971 academic year. Unfortunately, I afterwards found that
community colleges do not hire people to teach only geography and political science.
Doctors of history frequently teach them on an "as needed" basis.
