Scrapbooks - High School - Random and Miscellaneous Merriment

These last few pages are full of random pictures I probably found after I had put all the rest of the scrapbooks together. Or pictures from the annual slideshows that I finally got around to printing from the negatives. Who knows. It's a motley assortment, that's for sure.

I went to Great America (an amusement park in San Jose) around once a year. Junior year Physics Day was awesome because the park would be open just to high school physics classes. Sure, we had to do papers on the physics of roller coasters, but worth it. Because this was a simpler, pre-selfie time we'd take pictures in photo booths.

Mr. Gelpke, my Honors Physics Teacher, was awesome. It was a rough subject for me, but he just made class so much fun that I worked all the harder! In a previous life he had been a Dead Head, following the Grateful Dead around on tour, which of course made us venerate him all the more. I had him my junior year, which was the year my mom was diagnosed with cancer. I remember he was so kind to me and made sure to often check in and make sure I was doing okay. He was truly one of the good guys.

That bottom shot is of my Honors Chemistry class, which I took my senior year. It was taught by Mrs. Salerno-White, an awful, dreadful woman! Seriously, I know it's kind of cliche for high school students not to like their teachers. But I usually did. But she was HORRIBLE. Just mean and unnecessarily strict. She would call on people especially when she knew they didn't know the answer to questions and would then berate them and just make them feel awful. She'd seriously chose kids in the class who were struggling and just be mean to them and embarrass them! Awful, horrible woman. And I sometimes honestly wondered if it was just us kids who had a problem with her, but after I graduated I had conversations with more than one adult (a few of them teachers at the school!) who admitted they did not like her at all, either, and were willing to admit it to me since I was no longer in school. Seriously. I guess you have to have a few teachers like her to help you appreciate the good (or even just the mediocre) ones all the more. Oh, and that picture below? We went on a marine biology field trip. For chemistry. Yeah, I don't get it either. Oh - and she kept telling us that she made her class hard so we'd be prepared for college, and that we learned as much as a college chemistry course. Yeah right. I took Chem 101 and we blew through everything I learned in high school in the first 3 weeks. I wanted to write her a snotty note about it, but thankfully decided it wasn't worth the effort.