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Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Talented Tuesday: 52 Weeks of Personal History & Genealogy: Favorite School Subject(s)

The prompt for Week 42 of 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History is Favorite School Subject.

What was your favorite subject in school and why? Was it also your best subject?

I was one of "those" students who LOVED school, and thus just about every subject was my favorite and my best (I'll talk about the few that weren't next week).  As my favorite teacher taught English, it's not surprising that was one of my preferred courses.  I loved reading and writing, and for my senior electives in high school, I chose poetry and Shakespeare (the latter still a lifelong love).

I liked social studies, especially Texas history and any geography (I'm still fascinated by maps).  Math came easy to me, and I took every single math course my high school offered, including some interesting electives like "algebraic structures" and "conic sections, as well as beginning calculus.

I also liked science - mostly because of the school science fair!  I entered nearly every year, and in seventh grade, I was a winner!

My project was on the effect of minerals on plants, and I did an experiment, giving different plants different fertilizers and mineral supplements, and measuring the effects on their growth. Besides getting a nifty ribbon,



my name also appeared in a couple local newspaper articles, AND, as the first-place winner in a junior high division (biological sciences), I represented our school at the Greater Houston Science Fair*!

I didn't win anything at the big city fair, held downtown in what was then the Albert Thomas Convention Center**, but it was so much fun, and I learned a lot. So of course I entered the science fair the next year. I now knew how to make my presentation more attractive (remember, this was before the days of personal computers - everything was typewritten and/or hand-lettered!). I thought my topic, geotropism (now called gravitropism), and my experiment were even better than the previous year's.  However, the judges didn't agree, and I got second place - and did not go to the citywide science fair that year.



*now the Science & Engineering Fair of Houston
**now Bayou Place


© Amanda Pape - 2011 - click here to e-mail me.

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