FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL: NO CRY, THEN CRY

When I was very small, my mother coached me on going to my first day at kindergarten.  she would let me off and pick me up so I wasn't lost but in good care in the meantime.  So when she let me off for school, I just marched in with no crying or hysterics.  After school, my mother did pick me up and took me to a candy store to get a piece of candy for being such a good boy.  While I was trying to decide what piece of candy I wanted, the store keeper asked my mother what the event was that was being honored.  She said for being a good boy at my first day of school to which the store keeper replied, "Before you know it he will be in college."  I cried and cried because I knew I couldn't do college work.

But wait, there is a sequel to this funny story.  As it turned out, I was to spend 11 years in college accumulating  Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Geological Engineering degrees, a Master of Science, and, from the Marines of educational institutions, a Ph.D.

If truth be known, I am of rather average intellect so how did all this happen?  For one thing you have to want it or be highly motivated or as one professor commented, "You've got a bit of a bull dog in you."

I recognized that in the Earth sciences, there was a lot of terminology (Medicine would be another field requiring lots of memorization.).  I've been told you cannot improve your memory, but that is not true.  After school while I waited for my mother's piano teaching to be over, I would practice memorizing poems, any poem of my choice.  I got so at one time I could recite the entire Gunga Din by Rudyard Kipling and The Ballad Of The Northern Lights by Robert Service.  I could look down a list of 20 items twice and remember it for 48 hrs, which proved invaluable for tests.

The last of the principal things was to learn not to panic.  If I couldn't answer the first question, I should go on until I found one that I could answer, then look for another and work my way to the hardest question.  Sometimes by that point my mind had cleared, and I could even answer the hard question.  Later in my brief teaching career, I found I could control the average grade on a test to a large extent as to whether I put the hardest question first or last on the examination  In fact I got so I would work myself up before an examination.  I'd jump up and down and repeat strings of things I knew on the examination topic (Repeat the 30 uranium minerals was one I recall or how to derive the radioactive decay equation was another.).  Get the blood circulating and the mind sharpened.  I call it intellectual athletics.