School Story:
Mr. Jensen's Earth/Space Science class in my Senior year! I sat in the last row just in front of the slide projector box. As my class was immediately after lunch (often spent outside sitting on the lawn in the sun), the daily slide shows were ideal for class naps!
Anyone who took this class will remember that most of the class time was devoted to Mr. Jensen showing picture slides that he took that illustrated things we were studying. He would stand in front of the class by the projection screen and would click the pictures forward as he lectured to the class.
In the back of the room he had his slide projector inside a tall, white, wooden box. There was a hole in the box, through which the lens of the projector would beam out the picture.
Anyway, one day I thought I would have a little fun. I came into the class early from lunch. I had gotten a cutout stencil of a chicken's foot (I think it was from one of my brother's Mad Magazines) and I taped it across the hole in the projector box. I figured we would all get a good laugh when Mr. Jensen darkened the room and began his slide show with the sillhouette of a chicken's foot on the screen.
Unfortunately, all the stencil did was dim the picture of the slides. Mr. Jensen was clicking away for a few dim slides and could see something was not right. He walked to the the back of the room and removed the chicken foot stencil from the projector box and returned to the front of the class holding it up, while the class laughed.
Then, to use modern parlance, he turned the joke into a teachable moment. "Obviously, the person who did this didn't realize that he would not get his desired result..." And proceeded to tell us why there was no chicken foot outline on the screen.
Needless to say, I never sought a return of the stencil.
Despite the sleeping in class (not everyday!) and the attempted joke, Earth/Space Science was one of my favorite classes at SLH and I DID learn a lot. In fact, I still have my class notebook with all the drawings that we did!
