2. Wow, was that scary or what? Obviously, I’m no killer, but when you have at-risk students who think they’re tough, I’ve found it a great ice-breaker. I must confess a guilty pleasure in slipping this video in.. And I did have fun making it. One thing I believe is we should make education as much fun as we can for our students. Now, on to where we are supposed to talk about “Home.” While I grew up in Edgecombe County, I now consider myself a citizen of the world. I believe a “home” is NOT the physical dwelling and the paraphernalia and “stuff” you accumulate. Rather, I believe a home is wherever you can psychologically unwind and relax, and where you can create things.
3. My Personality? I am mostly an Extraverted iNtuiter. Extraverted iNtuiting involves noticing hidden meanings and interpreting them, often entertaining a wealth of possible interpretations from just one idea or interpreting what someone’s behavior really means. It also involves seeing things “as if,” with various possible representations of reality. Using this process, we can juggle many different ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and meanings in our mind at once with the possibility that they are all true. This is like weaving themes and threads together. We don’t know the weave until a thought thread appears or is drawn out in the interaction of thoughts, often brought in from other contexts. Thus a strategy or concept often emerges from the here-and-now interactions, not appearing as a whole beforehand. Using this process we can really appreciate brainstorming and trust what emerges, enjoying imaginative play with scenarios and combining possibilities, using a kind of cross-contextual thinking. Extraverted iNtuiting also can involve catalyzing people and extemporaneously shaping situations, spreading an atmosphere of change through emergent leadership.
4. So What are my Values? I learned to read by 22 months. By the age of 5, I had read most of the classics. My grandfather was a Davidson graduate and my grandmother was a Salem graduate, and they had an enormous library in their home. I lived in the country with little access to playmates, so I spend all my time ensconced in their library readying everything I could get my hands on. I learned at a very early age there was a much bigger world beyond our tobacco farm in Edgecombe County, and I made a promise to myself to try and live an “interesting” life.
5. Everyone’s got family, right? Well as you might imagine by now, mine’s a bit different from some. My mother was a Navy Pilot back in WWII, when not many women were flying. My father was in the service as well. Henry Hugh Shelton is my second cousin, so we have a strong lineage of military service in our family. Incidentally, we called Hugh “Little Hugh as his daddy was two inches taller than “Little Hugh.” For those who don’t recognize his name, Hugh Shelton retired as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was a native of Hobgood, NC. My father-in-law was also ex military, then went to work for NASA as an engineer, and my wife grew up playing with the astronaut’s kids. She can tell you some interesting stories. And my wife and I have been married for over 35 years. And she, too, is an EC teacher.
8. Finally, I tired of the “game” I had been playing for over 4 years and decided I wanted a job that did not have quite as much stress and excitement. So I finished my MBA and then charged into corporate America. Here are the companies I worked for. Did you know that Scott was the first company to put toilet paper on a roll? Now you have a new trivia question. d
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10. Coble was actually the first company to sell fluid milk in a colored jug. This was because light in the 400 to 700 nanoweber ranged damaged a protein molecule and began an irreversible flavour change in milk. The research had been done at Penn State back in the 1950’s, but no one in the dairy industry every bothered to follow-up on it. Career fatigue set in and I missed the “techy” stuff I used to do for the government, so I returned to the tech sector in 1987. I opened the world’s first on-line Telecom store on the Internet in 1994. In 6 months it was our most profitable store.
11. My mother’s declining health necessitated a return to North Carolina in 1995, so I went to work for a small rural cooperative telephone company in West Jefferson. And I introduced Internet access to Northwestern North Carolina. And then Sprint made me an offer I could not refuse. And then the telcom sector began to head south, so I began my own consultancy. D
12. After some years of constant travel, I got tired of it all, so I retired. Or so I thought. One night my wife told me it was time for me to do something useful in my life, and TEACH! So I began teaching the Winston-Salem system and quickly learned I really liked being in a class room, and I was particularly good with oppositionally defiant at-risk kids. I began as a sub and quickly was assigned long-term jobs at the system two alternative schools. But Winston adapted a policy of not hiring lateral-entry teachers, so now I teach in Tarboro, amazing, where I began my journey some time back.
13. OK, so what do my wife and I do for fun? We don’t have kids. When my students ask me why, I tell them that our kids became behaviour problems when they were in middle school, we got tired of the constant conferences and meetings, so we sold them on eBay. I then look at them very seriously and tell them, “You know, if you’ve been giving your parents a lot of grief lately, you might want to check with them when you get home today and make certain they don’t have you listed for sale on eBay!” Now, here are some things we like to do.
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20. Dreams/Aspirations Several of my good friends are hounding me to write a book. I have blessed with the opportunity to do some amazing things in my life and I should write about them. I’ll probably begin with some of my travel stories. Like the time I was in a 4-Star Hilton and the only beverage they could serve with my breakfast Cheerios was draft beer. You know, beer and Cheerios isn’t a bad combination! What makes me unique? I was told a long time ago I was not normal. Perhaps I am really an alien-human hybrid? What do I want to become? I’m still deciding this.
