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Tom Brody (1969)
FAVORITE TEACHER. This is to respond to the question from Sue Ferreira about our favorite teacher. My favorite teacher was Bob Shayler. I liked Bob Shayler because:
(1) He was a liberal hippie-type and in that day and age, that was abundantly fashionable.
(2) He taught physics, which was one of the best-taught subjects at Pacific High. For example, for one experiment we were required to operate a ticking machine that determined the acceleration of an object as it fell towards the floor, where this acceleration was measured by a series of blue-colored dots on a strip of white tape that was pulled under the ticking hammer. Twenty five years after graduating from Pacific High, I created a girl (with the assistance of somebody else) and when my girl was around seven years old, I bought the same ticking machine, and I made her measure the acceleration of an object as it fell towards the floor. After that, my girl became a physics major at U.C. Berkeley. I liked Mr. Shayler's classes about wave mechanics and nodes. Great physics ! ! !
(3) Once Mr. Shayler and his friend the journalism teacher took us to the Haight Ashbury district to visit the apartment of the journalism teacher, and then we went to GOLDEN GATE PARK and we smoked something (heh-heh-heh-heh !!!) while we sat on a big lawn in a crowd of other people, and we watched COUNTRY JOE & THE FISH perform on stage. Do high school teachers get any better than this ??? The journalism teacher was, James MacKenzie.
(4) Once Mr. Shayler took us up to Mendocino County to spend the next two days in a cabin. The cabin was owned by Mr. Gustafson (or maybe it was owned by Mr. Papas). Mr. Shayler had us perform "sensitivity session" games with each other. That was fun. One of these games was being blind-folded, and allowing ourselves to fall backwards, and trusting our fellow students to catch us as we fell backwards. Also, I liked this Mendocino trip because another of the hippie teachers was there. This hippie teacher was John Pierce (political science teacher). In addition, I liked this Mendocino trip because I hugged a girl for the first time. We did this out in some remote meadow away from everybody else. The girl was Cheryl Renner. In the weeks that followed, she wanted to be friends, but I was too stupid and too socially clumsy to respond in a positive way.
(5) Mr. Shayler created the "Nobody Club." This was a social club, where students could get together and rap with each other. Actually, I made up the name, "Nobody Club." My reason for this was that the school-wide announcement, over loudspeakers, would say this: "Nobody will meet today in the journalism room." Mr. Shayler liked the name, "Nobody Club," and so that is what it was called.
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