Whoa!!!

April 1, 2005 · Filed Under Uncategorized 

I just finished The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason (although that is not what the “whoa” is for, but it is a good book that I recommend). For some strange reason, I decided to read through their acknowledgements at the end of the book (something I RARELY do), when I came open this line:

“At Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Mary O’Brien and Bettie Stegall gave literature and creative writing a voice in the wilderness.”

After reading this, I exclaimed, “Holy shit!” (pardon my French, but that’s what I said). Then I thought, man, Bettie Stegall was a total bitch to me, I’m pretty sure she turned me in to the guidance counselors for writing disturbing things (Hey! I was into Stephen King then! What do you expect?). What’s up with that?

I went to high school with these guys!

Working the math, I realized these guys must have been in the year behind mine. Wow. So, they’ve published a good novel, an International Bestseller, and I’m sitting around on my butt thinking about writing a novel. This is worse than the feeling I had when in my graduate statistical inference class at Duke, we were handed out a paper to read that was written by the captain of my high school’s football and basketball teams.

From their website:

IAN CALDWELL attended Princeton University, where he studied history. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1998. DUSTIN THOMASON attended Harvard University, where he studied anthropology and medicine. He won the Hoopes Prize for undergraduate writing, and graduated in 1998. Thomason also received his MD and MBA from Columbia University in 2003. The two have been friends since they were eight-years-old.

My first reaction upon reading the acknowledgement was ” Whoa, this is so cool.” But now after it’s all sunk in, I feel really depressed.

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Just did a search to try to get more information about them, but everything coming up related only to the book. I did come across an informative (and a bit intimidating) article about my high school on Wikipedia. In particular:

TJHSST has fielded more National Merit Semifinalists than any other high school in America for most of the 1990s and 2000s. From 2000 to 2004, it fielded more SAMO qualifiers than any other high school in America. TJHSST was recently ranked as the top public high school in the nation by PrepReview. TJHSST also has the highest average SAT score among American high schools.

For schools with more than 1,000 students, TJHSST was cited as having the highest-performing AP Biology, AP Calculus BC, AP Chemistry, AP English Language & Comprehension, AP French Language, AP Government & Politics: U.S., AP Psychology, and AP U.S. History courses among all schools worldwide in its size range. No other school had a greater proportion of its student body succeed in these subjects.

Just so you know, I am not a student that aided in any of the above categories. I wouldn’t have had no option but to go to Virginia Commonwealth University if I had performed outstandingly there (but I did get to run my senior project on the school’s supercomputer — how cool am I!?!).

In high school, I kind of took the attitude that anything I was required to do sucked, so I would get D’s in all my required courses, then get A’s in classes like Artificial Intelligence Programming, AP Government, and Robotics. I got a D in Calculus then went on to major in Statistics! Can you believe that crap? What the heck was I thinking???

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Which starts me reminiscing about high school. I remember how the cool kids were the ones who had TI-81 graphing calculators freshman year. But then, sophomore year, the TI-82’s came out and you could swap programs with other people over a cable!

I have to say, I love my TI-85. Although, the TI-83 statistical graphing calculator would have been more useful given my later career, but it’s not like you can’t program the statistical calculations into the TI-85. ACK! I’m such a major geek!

Oh, but then there were the rebels with Hewlett Packard calculators. Ooooo! hmpf. I never got the big deal about them, I thought the user interface was not intuitive. And they were usually the guys with macs. They were the wusses; using a point-and-click interface while us cool guys went with the MS-DOS operating system.

And the days when a 2400 baud modem was breakneck speed. Cruising the bbs’s (bulletin board systems) before the internet came to be. My handle was Matilda… Come to think of it, my modem is still not much faster now than it was then! I’m living in the stone age here in north germany!

Ahhh… the memories of misspent youth.

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And one last note for Mrs. Stegall: My story about a rampaging pack of rabid killer ferrets that ended up existing only in the main characters imagination WAS good!

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