Q: What kind of activities did you do when you were 17? A: Ice skating. In the only competition I was ever in, I got third. I could land an axle… 35 years ago. So, halfway through high school, we moved to a place that didn’t have any ice rinks. That was the end of my skating career. [In] my second high school, which was a big public high school (bigger than [FHS], I think we had like 200-300 per graduating class) [there was] only one high school for the entire county. We had a lot of land, but a lot of farmers. We were the biggest county in the state of Maryland, and we had the smallest population. I went there for my junior and senior years, which is when I was seventeen. I sailed with my friends on weekends, we water-skied, we ice-skated on the frozen pond, I was a wrestlerette, I was in the math club, I was in the science club, and that’s about it. Q: How was the move? A: It was hard because I just got there as a junior, and everyone else in the high school had been together all through elementary and middle school, so everybody knew everybody until I showed up. People were born in Kent County, lived in Kent County, and died in Kent County and never left. So, it was really weird that I moved into Kent County from the Suburbs of D.C. They were like “Oh my God! You’ve been to the city?” and I’m like “I’ve been to D.C, if that’s what you’re talking about.” I think of the city as New York, London, Chicago, you know, LA. They were, like, amazed that I had been over the big bridge and like, to Baltimore and Washington. It’s like some of the kids [at Freedom] who never leave Beaver County. Like, “Wow, You’ve been to Pittsburgh?” Yeah. And I drove a 1968 emerald green Cougar. Fabulous car! Fabulous car. It had the blinkers that were sequential. It was beautiful. Q: What crowd did you hang out with? Were there cliques? A: There were a lot of cliques. Because I was new to the school, I didn’t just jump into any of the cliques. My best friend Nancy Jo and my other friend Doug were like, a year behind me. I hung out with some people in the smart kid clique, because I was in all the smart classes. It’s like if somebody transferred [to Freedom] from Sewickley Academy, you would put them in all the smart classes. I was in a private school. I was not brilliant, but I was by their standards. When I got to college, I realized I really wasn’t that brilliant. I hung out with the smart kids and with the wrestlers. I was a wrestlerette there. I had been a cheerleader at my old school, but the cheerleaders [at the new school] had been voted on in the spring. So, it was too late for me to join the cheerleading squad, so I joined the wrestlerette squad, because they didn’t get picked until the fall. I’m sort of a natural born cheerleader. Q: Where did you hang out? A: We would breeze The Freeze. It was a hamburger joint, and we would drive our cars and… breeze The Freeze. We hung out in the parking lot. It’s very sad; I just heard on Facebook that it’s closing. Q: How are things different now from when you were 17? A: It was very different back then. I think a lot of things were the same as far as peer pressure with the clothing and stuff, with who wore the cool clothes and who didn’t to school. And who parked their cool pick-up trucks in the cool pick-up truck part of the school parking lot. In my computer class in high school, we had a machine that would punch cards. We had to put the cards in order, and the teacher would take our stack of cards to the main frame at Washington College and run our programs. Then when [the punch cards] didn’t work, it would be about a week until we got to try again. Some of us had calculators, but not graphing, just scientific. In most of our classes, we used a slide-rule. Stop by room 108 and Mrs. Hastings will show you what that is if you have no idea. Q: Why did you want to be a math teacher? A: I knew I wanted to be a math teacher from like, 12. Well, my teachers were boring, and I thought I could make it fun and I love doing puzzles. I think of math problems as puzzles. I didn’t always do them the way that was expected of me, but I’d figure out a way to do them! It worked for me. I don’t think of it as, “Oh my God, I don’t know how to do this puzzle.” I just think of it as “ Okay, what can I do?” In history or something, I’m stuck. What are the causes of the Civil War? I have no idea, and I can’t play with it and figure it out. I just simply don’t know, and I don’t like that. If you give me a puzzle, I can figure it out. Like the problems [on my board], I can figure out what those are even if I don’t know the formulas. I can just write them down and count, guess and check, and do all kinds of things… That’s not going to work with the Civil War.