She Was Only A Freshman

Finally we have come to high school in this series of posts designed to record some memories from my youth for posterity.  My new best friend, Elizabeth, and I spent the summer hanging out at each others’ houses and the mall.  Oh, and I got to spend a week with her up in the Poconos at a house on a small lake.  One day we discovered that the banks of the lake were clay, so we did what any budding divas would do…we made clay masks! Our pores never looked so good.

I was extremely moody in ninth grade.  I would have brief manic episodes of fun and craziness and then crash and mope around.  I was well aware of the fact that everything I did counted towards my “permanent record” and I was working at having a stellar HS resume, but classwork and tests came easy for me.

The most significant class I had in ninth grade was Astronomy and Geology with Dr. Frank Roberts.  We called him Doc Rock, because he was one of the foremost experts in the entire region on geology.  The man was old, even then, and a total genius.  He was quirky and often looked like he had woken up from a 30 year coma or something.  But he knew stuff…lots of stuff.

I love to learn big things.  Not basic things like reading and writing, but sophisticated, complicated things like calculus and thermodynamics. When Doc taught us how to use red shift to calculate the distance of a star from the earth, my mind was officially blown.  I was hooked. 

The awesome thing about Doc, in my opinion, was that even at our evangelical Christian school…he taught multiple theories on the origin of the earth.  He explained very well why people think the universe is millions of years old.  He of course explained six-day Creationism, and he explained other theories that make the two fit together.  He never told us his opinion, he asked us to think through things and come to our own conclusions.  That…is what makes a great teacher.  Doc passed away last year and it saddened the whole Delco Christian community, but I know I’ll see him again at the throne of Jesus.