Class Note 1983
As I write this, I’m also working on the Class Notes portion of our newsletter, so I’m co-mingling information. Is that right? In the newsletter for this month, which you most likely received long before you received this magazine, we were focusing on education and, more specifically, our classmates who are teaching our kids. In looking at our class spreadsheet I can see that a large proportion of our class is in the education field. However, not too many of us are actually teaching kids. Lots of professors, deans, presidents, but not so many teachers. In my mind, teaching is the most important profession we have. How can you get to be anything else without having first learned how to read and write and do math? Unfortunately, teaching is one of the least celebrated professions. So, teachers, here’s to you! Those who responded to my questions about education included Paul Aubin, a seventh-grade science teacher and chiropractor in California who was recently laid off; Wendy Nelson Kauffman, teaching social studies in Connecticut; David Badger, teaching science in North Hollywood, California; and Bill Hammond, a math and drama teacher at Hanover High School. Ginny Lower Viteri is teaching fifth grade in a quiet corner of Connecticut. Carol Anderson Pepper has worked in independent schools for years, and is the current director of curriculum development at the Tower Hill School in Wilmington, Delaware. Her job includes planning faculty in-service, investigating how to address students’ various learning styles, overseeing the testing program and working with schoolwide initiatives. She also teaches a section of eighth-grade algebra. Ellen Malinin Carpenter is a professor in the department of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. Her research focuses on how cells migrate and has applications to both breast cancer and autism.
She teaches at both the graduate and undergraduate level and likes undergraduate teaching the best—“the students are bright, engaged, curious and interesting.”
Steven Cramer McAlpine (yes, Steve Cramer from the Lodge, but with a different last name), is an instructor of writing and critical thinking in interdisciplinary studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, campus. As for the name change, he married a Scottish lass, and to celebrate their common Scottish ancestry (McAlpine is his paternal grandmother’s clan) they each added the McAlpine surname. “Symbol of a new identity, too.”
Mary Beth Shimkus Murphy wrote that her twins are loving their time at Dartmouth. They are ’13s, sing in two of the a capella groups (Sings and Dodecaphonics) and son Luke is a Dog Day Player and a brand-new member of Sig Ep (along with Max Hunter, Andre and Kelly Hunter’s son).
In non-education related news, I received an actual handwritten note from Debra Himelman. Deborah writes that she is a paraplegic after falling from a window in 1999. She is now happily married to an exterminator whom she met at the nursing home that she lived in for nine years. They celebrated their one-year anniversary on December 22, 2009. Her husband coaches her with her folk guitar music. Debra and her husband live in Brick, New Jersey.
Eric Valley has an eighth-grade daughter and is happily practicing criminal defense law, traveling to Masters swim meets all over the country (such as San Juan, Puerto Rico, this August) and going to band camp every summer (studying jazz trombone) and playing in two different big bands. There’s more news from John Leonard about his weekend at Dartmouth, and Stuart Grider and his vacation in California. Check out our newsletter, which should be online on our website page!
Forever green!
—Maren Christensen, 166 Sausal Drive, Portola Valley, CA 94028; (650) 529-2396; marenjc@yahoo.com
