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Today's Featured Biography

 
Chris Fisher

Hello Everyone - Write your life story in a few paragraphs! OK - Here goes.

I attended Ohio Wesleyan University where I received an undergraduate degree in Physics with a minor in math and pre-engineering. In college I met my wonderful wife, Diane, in the a cappella choir. She was an organ performance major that was a year ahead of me and while we dated on and off during my first 3 years, we stayed good friends and then became engaged my senior year and were married in June. We decided to move to New England and in the fall of 1969 I began a 30 year teaching career, having had no previous experience other than teaching boolean algebra to one of Mr. Bradford's classes during senior teaching days at BCC. My first year I taught business math, remedial algebra and 9th grade general science in two departments - who rather surprisingly were at far ends of the school and the department heads didn't get along. The principal who hired me had just left and the vice-principle who took over had one primary motto he loved to repeat - "zap the little bastards". I learned a lot about teaching that first year, and took advantage of an opportunity to move to the Bloomfield, CT school system my 2nd year to become the only physics teacher. Bloomfield was much smaller than BCC - about 1000 students in grades 9-12. In New England, each town has it's own school system so everything is on a smaller scale than we experienced at BCC. Over the next 29 years I had great fun teaching a subject that had the built in advantage of relating to anything a kid was interested in.

During this time, after getting the required Master's Degrees to keep teaching, we did quite a bit of traveling during the summers. Then in 1989, we bought 23 acres in Vermont with my brother John and his wife Holly and proceeded to spend the next 10 summers designing and building a house. We did all the work ourselves - hammer and nails (well - actually a nail gun) electrical and plumbing. Only the sheetrock and foundation were contracted out. It was a wonderful learning experience and we still enjoy the house.

As the years went on, my school went through many principals and many changes. At various points I ran the entire school computer system and did all the scheduling for the school while still teaching a full load. After 30 years of teaching, I still enjoyed the kids, but had become very frustrated with the administration constantly changing and doing things that were designed to help their resumes, but had nothing to do with helping kids get a better education. So in 2000, I realized I could give up half my salary and let someone else attend the faculty meetings and grade papers. I retired and while Diane finished up 3 more years, I worked on projects around the house and helped her be Music Director at a local church. Once she retired from 32 years of teaching elementary school music, we started to travel and become more serious birders. We had decided at some point along the way not to have kids as we had enough to deal with every day at work. This also made it a little easier to retire early since we weren't putting anyone through college. I also started doing more serious photography as we traveled more. While I was teaching I had spent 15 years doing wedding photography on the side with a friend, but now I could do travel and nature photography just for fun. We're still doing that - in fact as I'm writing this shortly before the reunion, we're on a 4 week long trip with friends birding through Oregon and California. We've been on 23 Elderhostel (Road Scholar) programs and done many more trips just on our own. We also enjoy biking and skiing. Within the last month we bought a small travel trailer which we are going to use to take a long trip to Alaska in 2017. We'll spend next year learning how to use it!

One of the most enjoyable times since retirement was helping to set up a reunion of the Western Jr. High School Chorus about 11 years ago. I've stayed good friends with Olga Gazda over the years and we decided it would be fun to try and get everyone from that chorus back together again and see if we could still sing. We did it and even put on a concert for our friends, children and spouses.

At this reunion I'm looking forward to seeing friends from BCC, Western Jr. High, Westbrook Elementary School and I think even from Miss Brethauer's Nursery School at the Congregational Church on Westmorland Circle!

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