This was 1971-1972.

In 10th grade, we had a driver education class.

On assignment was to see how many signs we could place on a given set of roads. Here is the artwork that I submitted. As a later computer scientist this assignment never quite made sense to me. To goal should not be to put as many signs on as possible, but to put only the necessary and sufficient signs.

I apparently had 180 signs (not otherwise sure from where that number arises) and received 100%. The date was Thursday, March 16, 1972, although I was already using a continental/military time format.

I did complain to the teacher about his grading methodology. He rounded assignment percents to a letter grade number of 0 to 4 and then averaged those.

I showed him, by reason and example, how it was very possible for someone with a higher overall percent than another student to actually get a lower grade.

He was not impressed, or did not understand, the idea and declined/refused to make any adjustments.

Years later, working in the financial printing industry custom programming pie (and other) charts, I had, more than one, to explain the same type of rounding errors and how they could be avoided. In the case of pie charts, if one rounds the percents and displays them, one can get the case where either the percents do not add up to 100, or some percent is not rounded. The perhaps not so obvious solution is to have the client decide the number of significant places to use on the chart and then decide how to do the rounding when they input the data.

I still remember when someone from school took us for the driver test in Lancaster. We had prepared using the same course laid out on the parking lot on the High Street side.

I think BT and someone else were along. There was a popular song at the time playing on the car radio going to or from (or both ways), but cannot remember the song.

I think we all passed the driver exam.

That made it easier on mom and dad when I had early band at 7 before school and late track after school - I could drive myself to and from school. That was usually the brownish Plymouth Duster which seemed like a smaller car at the time but later, after getting a Datsun B-210 late in college, seemed like a bigger car.