1972

Early holiday greetings! News from Mark Arnott reporting from the Southland: “I’ve been teaching Kenpo Karate for about 25 years now and in 2011 decided to open my own studio in Pasadena, Cali- fornia. We’ve since been voted Best Martial Arts Studio in the greater Pasadena area in our every year—a very comforting accolade, as the presenta- tion ceremony is catered by all the restaurants that win. My ongoing goal is to continue getting one free meal a year. Just to keep things interesting, our first studio was recently transformed into a giant hole in the ground, making way for a new Shriners children’s hospital, and we have moved to another L.A. suburb next door in Eagle Rock (still up for the best-of dinner, by golly). We’ve taken over a very cool 1937 Art Deco building that had been home to the area’s first newspaper, and I plan to never move again. My long-range plan is to continue teaching Kenpo until I drop dead, I hope a fair ways down the line. It’s a different world, running a karate studio, and it leaves me grateful and plumb tuckered every day. Who could ask for more?”

Can any ’72 beat this tenure? Andy Harrison shared photos with Sandy Kryle “reuning in Grand Central’s Oyster Bar in Manhattan. I can report that Sandy has spent 36 (or maybe 37) years with the legal department of CBS, which may place him among our class leaders in terms of longest tenure with a single employer!”

Dan Cooperman on the passing of our classmate Bill White:“ ‘Bwat,’ as we called him, was a friend and an Alpha Chi brother of mine, John “Burkie” Burke and Shel Prentice. We should take special care to extend our sympathies to his twin brother and our classmate, Jim White.”

Kip Ault’s first of two books is out! “David Go- erhring read my original, unwieldy manuscript of a year ago. His feedback helped me focus and split the project into the two books.” Kip goes on: “Early retirement gave me the chance to write intensely, and Rowman & Littlefield has just published my Challenging Science Standards: A Skeptical Cri- tique of the Quest for Unity. The book finds fault with the unifying dimensions (not the core dis- ciplinary ideas) of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and traces their historical derivation to the promotion of teaching ‘science as process’ in the 1960s and the myth of the scien- tific method before that. In greater measure than most educators realize, the NGSS are old wine in new bottles.

“I argue for deeper respect for diversity among the sciences and careful attention to how different fields match their methods of inquiry to the chal- lenges they face. The generic portrait found in the unifying dimensions of the K-12 science standards obscures this truth, fosters belief in stereotypical experimentation and encourages the tyranny of a supposedly universal and misperceived singular scientific way of thinking. From my perspective, such belief makes sharing how climate science, medical science and geoscience study complex systems difficult for the public to accept as reli- able science.”

Keep the news coming!

12 Lummi Key, Bellevue, WA 98006; bill@drivasolutions.com