When I was teaching at Ravenna High School the first thing I did every morning before I started my first class was check my mailbox. One morning it contained this letter from the principal:
The previous day I had shown my computer class how to write a program using a “For-Next loop”. As an example of how this worked I wrote a small program for them that printed the following:
THIS IS A COMPUTER
NOTHING CAN GO WRONG
GO WRONG
GO WRONG
GO WRONG
GO WRONG
GO WRONG
I then gave the students an assignment of writing a program that used a “For-Next” loop. I didn’t tell them exactly how to write or what to write in the program, but encouraged them to be creative.
This happened to be “Spirit Week” at Ravenna High School. The highlight of this week was the football game in which the “Ravenna Ravens” played their arch-rival, the “Kent Roosevelt Rough Riders”.
During Spirit Week the students dressed in the school colors, had pep rallies, made posters telling what heroes our guys were and what dastardly ugly villains the Roosevelt players were…etc. On the night before the game they would dance around a bonfire and burn a stuffed dummy called “The Rider”, which represented the Roosevelt team’s mascot.
It turns out that the custodian found the following print-outs in one of the waste baskets and gave them to Mr. Ultican, our principal. These were the “enclosed materials” referred to in the above letter, that were going to be forwarded to the U.S. Dept. of Education.
There was no question as to their origin since they were obviously printed on a Teletype machine, and the only one we had in the school was the printer for the IMSAI computer.
I am still waiting for the arrival of my award from the Department of Education, but it must have gotten lost somewhere in the mail.