A letter by Stan O'Neal to DeLand High School Principal Mitch Moyer

By Stan O'Neal
SPECIAL TO THE BEACON

posted Jun 18, 2009 - 8:12:28am

Written by Stan O'Neal to DeLand High School Principal Mitch Moyer:

I just thought, I will not be here that Tuesday, as I will be in Louisville, Ky., to grade AP exams for a week.

It was a tough choice between being there with you for my last post-planning, or going for the money, power and prestige ... but I'Il miss you all.

Some people ask, what are you going to do with all of your time? Well, it looks like I have job before I even finish this one, so it will be an exciting new chapter.

I was thinking back 36 years ago, when I first came to DHS. About the time Nixon was leaving, I was coming — 1973? I think. Some things have changed a lot. There were no women on the Supreme Court, and there were no women in the entire Social Studies department! Now our chairperson is a talented woman.

There was no air conditioning! Can you imagine six periods a day with a class of 30-plus students in a room with one fan (of course, there was no bickering over who got to sit in front of the fan). It was so loud you could either be fanned with hot air or hear the teacher, but not both.

We finally did get one new wing that had air. One time it broke, and a certain very popular and elderly 70ish English teacher put in a repair request, and it was ignored for a day or two, and it was really hot! So was she. She wore her bathing suit to class, and it was fixed by 8:01.

DeLand High was the only high school in West Volusia, and was growing so fast we had a nine-period day. Some teachers came in at 7:00 and left about 2:00, while others came in at 9 and went to 4:00. Nobody was here the whole day.

There were no DVDs, or VCRs, or TVs in the rooms. We had a wonderful item called a filmstrip projector, which was basically a slide show on a roll of film that projected on the wall, and you had to read the script at the bottom.

Then they went modern and came up with a record player with a professional voice and music! It was so exciting to change the slide when the record went "ding."

Or you could order a movie from the county office. They sent it out for one day and you had to go to the media center (which was two classrooms with the wall knocked out), and check out one of the four or five movie projectors, and roll that huge machine out to your room, hook up the big reels, show the movie, rethread it, rewind it, and do it all over again each period. Then you had to roll it all back to the media center 10 minutes before the end of school.

There were no computers. You had to put a slip of paper listing absentees out on your door clip each period, and they sent student runners to pick them up. If you wanted to send a message to another teacher, you put a note in their box; they got it the next day, and got back to you about a day or two after it didn't manner anymore.

Spam was something you deleted from your grocery list, not your computer.

They still had corporal punishment in 1973. It was always done in the "boiler room," a storeroom next to the cafeteria, where a big giant fan sort of muffled sounds, but you could still hear and imagine what was going on in that dark, dreary place.

We had no copy machines; well, maybe in the office, but not for teachers. We had these ditto machines, as they were called. You wrote, bearing down, on spirit master with carbon paper on one side, then ran off copies in a royal purple ink.

Now, it did pretty well for about 120 copies, but if you had 180 students — which you did — then by the last of your run you were pressing, leaning and almost jumping up and down on that machine to squeeze out the last few good copies before they faded to a light lavender mush. Oh, and you had to recopy the whole damn sheet again the next year.

You could walk into the workroom and it looked like a bunch of monks copying the Bible, except we did have electric lights. One thing that was the same in the workroom. Teachers still had time to gossip or gripe in between dittos. Some things never change.

It wasn't all bad! Back then boy's underwear was ... well, underwear. When you called a parent, you actually got a human on the phone. Students sometimes spoke in a strange dialect, something like "yes sir," "no sir," I think.

And there were no cell phones. OK, now that the applause is over; they would send a runner to our class to tell us, "go call your wife immediately," so you would dash three-quarters of mile across campus to the nearest phone, call, and tell your wife what to do when the cat got out.

Well, I served my 36 years at DHS. Sounds like I did a bad crime doesn't it? But it was by choice. When the high schools split to create Deltona and then Pine Ridge, etc., I stayed at DeLand High, mainly because of the people here.

We always had a core of great teachers at this school, who seemed to deal with whatever came down the road of revision. From FCAT to teaching in a school where they are literally wrecking the room next to you with a giant ball (while you are teaching about peace at Walden Pond), they seemed to always find a way to make it all work, and better than the other schools that had more than we did.

I always tell my students not to just go for the money, but do what you love, what you have a passion for. I think I've done that. I loved teaching history and DeLand High School.

I know you and I impact students' lives every day. They come up years later and look older than you do, and say, you're the reason I vote, or put money in my 401K like you said, or read the newspaper or books, or went to college, or learned how to debate.

So, as I look back at DHS, I have some great memories, and hope you all keep them coming. I will miss you while I'm being wined and dined in Louisville for a week.

Thanks.

— Stan O'Neal

— info@beacononlinenews.com

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