This was 1965-1966.

Mrs Kenderdine was married to a lawyer, so everyone said.

In the summer I would check out books from the Rheems Library during their summer hours. The summer before starting 4th grade, someone had left a baseball card of the Phillies pitcher Ray Culp in a book. That started me collecting baseball cards, and later many other types of cards. I was especially interested in all the statistics on the back of each card. I soon learned about batting averages, ERA (Earned Run Average), etc. The statistics on the back of these cards were much like what would later be called a spreadsheet.

We had a new reading system sometime during the year called SRA. The teacher handed out booklets, told us to turn to a page, read a story, and answer the questions at the end of the story. I kind of read the story and looked at the questions, as my mind would always wander. I flipped through the booklet, saw a list of numbers and letters, recognized that the numbers matched the questions (same number in both places). I looked at the first letter or so, and checked them with the question. They appeared to match, so, as a good problem solver, I just copied the letters to the blanks for each number. Problem solved. Then, when we were done, the teacher said to exchange booklets, turn to that page, and correct the other student's work. I started to suspect that I should not have done what I had done. I did not say anything. I ended up at the top of the most difficult readings and I always wondered if the teacher noticed that I kept going down in levels whereas most students were going up. But if she had told up to not use the answers later in the booklet, I would not have used them. Through graduate school and to this day, I often solve problems in ways not anticipated and sometimes not accepted, even though what I come up with does in fact solve the problem. Over time I realized that when one hears that one is to "think outside the box", the person saying it does not really mean it. They mean that they have created a box within their own mental box and you are only supposed to think outside their created box but within their own mental box.

In about 4th grade, I found my mother's Latin and French books from when she was in school. I tried to learn some Latin and French from the books, but it was just too hard for me to make any progress by myself.

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