An appreciation of Holly Hickler, master teacher, poet, her love affair with words, dead at 88.

Posted on September 20, 2011

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An appreciation of Holly Hickler, master teacher, poet, her love affair with words, dead at 88.

September 20, 2011 | Author: Jeffrey Lant | Posted in Dr. Jeffrey Lant’s Article Archive

Holly Hickler

By Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Author’s program note. This is a story about words and a woman who understood the power of words properly used to motivate adolescents, some of the toughest customers on earth. It is the story of Holly Hickler, proud to be a teacher, exhilarated by the challenges of her profession, a model to the less committed, who are legion.
Words, words, and ocean of words.
If you are a word person (as I confess I am) you will be sad upon reading this article that you never knew Holly Hickler. The minute I read her obituary in The Boston Globe (July 31, 2011), I was so saddened… I wanted to know her… and I wanted the world to know her, too. Words, you see, even words in an obituary, can make you feel so; words can do anything, convey anything, rouse anything, exult anything, change anything, remove anything, love anything, revolt anything…
… but you must know the words, have them not just in your head, but in your fingertips; words must be your constant companions. They must intrigue you, mystify you, bring you to your knees with grief, carry your prayers to God, and then, doubling back, conjure love from indifference… then ask your too late mate when she will be home for dinner.
Holly Hickler loved words, every word; she loved the sound of them, the textures, the complicated words and the simple words which proved upon reflection to be the most complicated of all: heaven, love, death, God, forever.
Mischievous, this mother could with laughter and purpose confound her children by reciting at any time or place a sprig of Frost on an autumn day:
“”Summer was past and the day was past. Sombre clouds in the west were massed. Out on the porch’s sagging floor Leaves got up in a coil and hissed….”
( from “Bereft” by Robert Frost, 1874-1963)
Or this written by Gerard Manly Hopkins (1844-1889) in 1877, but not published until 1918.
“GLORY be to God for dappled things — For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow: For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings:…”
( from the poem “Pied Beauty”).
Poems like these, even simple seeming Frost, are hard to read… harder to understand… and that would have suited Mrs. Hickler just fine. Such words, in such order, forced the surly, withdrawn, moody, often aggravating adolescents (either school delivered or borne by her) to stop, read the words clearly, sharply, for words must be heard; then look up the definitions… recite them again with greater clarity both of recitation and of meaning… then again and again, transforming brain cells into repositories of words, to be yours forever, shared only when you wish to touch a human heart or uplift, if only for a minute, some weary passerby in need of the comfort of the right word right delivered.
Her life.
Born Helen, in Philadelphia, her mother, Jean Miller Schloss, was fashion coordinator for Gimbels Department Store, and her father Edwin Schloss, a cellist who played chamber music with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra. It was a home of culture, the arts, and of sensitivities to music… literature… and, always, to words.
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1945 with a major in English, she worked on women’s magazines and publishing for a time and interviewed authors on television in New York City. Unfortunately (and tellingly) her greatest achievement in these years was not the stunning prose she wrote and published (for she did neither), but rather the fact she survived the crash of a B-25 aircraft which plunged into the Empire State Building in July, 1945 while she was working. But she survived…
In 1946, she married Courtland Yardley White III, her former writing professor. They had twins, Peter and Kate. Mr. White died of tuberculosis in January, 1950. That September she married Frederick Dunlap Hickler, an architect. They had three children. When their oldest child left for college, Mrs. Hickler started teaching at the progressive Cambridge School of Weston, Massachusetts. Here her vocation for teaching became evident to all.
Sympathetic, loving, strict standards.
Unwary students often misread Mrs. Hickler’s educational approach, to their peril. She was kind, empathetic, even loving towards her students, but this did not mean any diminution of the high standards she expected students to meet. As Bonny Musinsky, a fellow teacher at the school for 17 years, said, “when it comes to grading, she was no push-over. If they didn’t measure up — with all her love and caring — she would give them a C.”
The writer’s eye.
Writers are a probing, observant, perceptive, invasive kind of people. They never merely glance and are the masters of minute detail and of actually seeing a thing. No one can write effective prose without these skills. Mrs. Hickler made it a point to foster this ability which she used to good effect in her 1981 book co-authored with Cambridge psychiatrist John Mack. It was titled “Vivienne: The Life and Suicide of an Adolescent Girl”, and focused on the impersonal attitude of teachers in meeting the needs of teen-agers. No one ever accused Mrs. Hickler of such misunderstanding and dereliction and that is why she was such an effective, impacting, and always memorable instructor.
Writer’s block.
I can guess, but cannot confirm, that one of the great sadnesses of this productive life was her own difficulties with writing words and slender published oeuvre. It must have been maddening, discouraging, irritating at the very least. So much so, that at age 75 she took a class to overcome writer’s block. In due course, she wrote again. It was prose remembers Deborah Carr of Wellesley, a member of the group, about her “youth in an artsy, intellectual family in Philadelphia which she told in a voice that sounded as young as Holly was at heart.” Unfortunately, it was not published… but this article, which will be read by thousands, will help keep green the memory of Holly Hickler, and her message that words matter, good writing matters, and that both are essential in the complicated business of human communication.
Infuriatingly, this is something far too many school districts have not grasped, which is one reason SAT reading scores have sunk to a record low with the class of 2011. In this connection, Wayne Camara, College Board vice president of research, mused, “We’re looking and wondering if more efforts in English and reading and writing would benefit students.”
Having read this article, just what do you think Holly Hickler’s resounding response would have been? Or what yours should be, now that she has gone?
Then go to any search engine to find the recording by the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia of Tshaikovsky’s Variations on a Roccoco Theme. Holly would have loved it…. and so will you.
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About The Author
Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc., providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses. Republished with author’s permission by Howard Martell http://HomeProfitCoach.com . Check out Massive Traffic Ultimatum ->  http://www.HomeProfitCoach.com/?rd=sk9BRJWy

An appreciation for the life of Paul Baran, dead at 84; helped create Internet’s precursor Arpanet.

It is always great to pay tribute to a contributor that one has never heard of.  In my case, Paul Baran was one of those people. The ARPANET was his baby.  Who knew?
An appreciation for the life of Paul Baran, dead at 84; helped create Internet’s precursor Arpanet.
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Paul Baran

Fellow citizens of the Internet, one of our Founding Fathers, Paul Baran, has died, at 84,  in Palo Alto, California.
Pray, take a moment from your busy day online and have a kind thought for a man, a brilliant man, so far in advance of his times that he was written off as little more than a kook, his idea science fiction, not practical technology.
This is a story about people who see visions that others cannot see. So often spurned, they must instead be cherished.
This is a story about people who should have known better, whose ignorance and  unwillingness to listen nearly cost the world one of its greatest and most important assets. Thankfully wiser heads prevailed.
This is the story of a man who persisted in the face of rejection, wondering why authorities didn’t “get it”  but determined to persist until they did. He triumphed and we all won.
This is the story of Paul Baran, and it is a fascinating look at how one man’s persistence and unwavering belief can lead to dramatic change and benefits for all.
Born in Poland, April 29,1926.
Paul Baran’s first piece of good luck happened when his Jewish parents emigrated from Grodno, Poland (now in Belarus) May 11, 1928. Had his family stayed in Poland, they would almost certainly have gone to a concentration camp and horrible death. But Paul, his two siblings and parents landed in Boston, then moved to Philadelphia where his father opened a grocery store.
Baran graduated from Drexel University in 1949 (then called Drexel Institute of Technology with a degree in electrical engineering. After graduation, he joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company where he did technical work on UNIVAC models. Baran was lucky again, for these models were the first brand of commercial computers in the USA. He had a heady glimpse of the future, a computer-based future.
In 1955, he moved to Los Angeles and worked for Hughes Aircraft on radar systems. He obtained a Master’s degree from UCLA. His thesis was on character recognition.
Baran then went to work at the RAND Corporation (1955).  There he took on the task of designing a “survivable” communications system that could maintain communications between end points in the face of damage from nuclear weapons. This was the height of the Cold War and America was vulnerable. Most American military communications used High Frequency connections which could be put out of action for many hours by nuclear attack.
Baran decided to automate RAND director Franklin B. Collbohm’s previous work with emergency communication over conventional AM radio networks and showed that a distributed relay mode architecture could be survivable. Moreover, the Rome Air Development Center soon showed that the idea was practical. Paul Baran had a foot on the path that would, in due course, become the Internet we all rely upon and cannot imagine life without.
“Message blocks”.
Still at RAND Corp. Baran next outlined the fundamentals for packaging data into discrete bundles, which he called “message blocks”. The bundles are then sent on various paths around a network and reassembled at their destination. Such a plan is known as packet switching.
Baran’s key idea was to build a distributed communications network, less vulnerable to attack or disruption than conventional networks. In a series of technical papers published in the 1960s, he suggested that networks be designed with redundant routes so that if a particular path failed or was destroyed, messages could still he delivered. He approached AT&T with  the idea to build his proposed network.
AT&/T’s response? “Baloney, your idea won’t work”, and so resoundingly refused.
Had the luck of Paul Baran, the lucky man, run out at last?
Certainly not because Baran had the necessary trait for this unpromising situation: he was dogged, persistent, indefatigable about explaining just what his futuristic invention could do. He never quit.
He needed it all in the face of AT&T’s rooted opposition to Baran’s idea. What they particularly disliked was this:
Baran’s design flew in the face of telephony design of the time, placing inexpensive and unreliable nodes at the center of the network, and more intelligent terminating “multiplexer” devices at the endpoints. In Baran’s words, unlike the telephony company’s equipment, his design didn’t require expensive “gold plated” components to be reliable.
AT&T engineers said over and over that Baran just plain didn’t understand the science and technology. But he did…  far more than the AT&T people who couldn’t see the bonanza in front of them and so threw away the chance to develop — and possibly own — the  Internet, a situation with immense consequences for all of us, not least AT&T which painfully discovered that “big” isn’t always right.
“Paul wasn’t afraid to go in directions counter to what everyone else thought was the right or only thing to do,” said Vinton Cerf, a vice president at Google who was a  colleague and long-time friend of Baran. “AT&T repeatedly said his idea wouldn’t work and wouldn’t participate  in the Arpanet project.”
Arpanet… and vindication.
In 1969, the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency built a network that used Baran’s ideas along with those of other communications pioneers, the Founding Fathers and Mothers of the ‘net.
In due course, Arpanet was replaced by the Internet we know. Paul Baran’s crucial invention packet switching still lies at the heart of the network’s internal workings, an insight so valuable that President George Bush gave him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
One of the nicest things to report is that Baran always said, forthrightly, that credit for development of Arpanet and the Internet should always be distributed as widely as possible. Founding People all needed recognition, not just a few. It was a gesture from the heart.
Now one of the great inventors of the age, a man of intelligence and insight is gone. However Paul Baran’s chief invention (amongst his many) lives on, spectacularly so. Lucky himself, we are yet the luckier… for we had him, an avatar for the new, connected world in which we all must make our way. Paul Baran, we have good reason to remember you and rejoice.
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About The Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc. providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses. Dr. Lant is also the author of 18 best-selling books and conducts daily webinars. Republished with author’s permission by Howard Martell http://HomeProfitCoach.com. Check out Commission Crusher -> http://www.HomeProfitCoach.com/?rd=fe2JEfUO