As an April 1965 elementary education graduate of Park I had been asked, earlier in my senior year, by Dr. Young Pai to help organize, supervise and teach in a summer remedial reading program. Doing so augmented my preparation for the third grade classroom at Oakwood Manor Elementary School in the North Kansas City school district to which I had been assigned for the 1965-66 school year. My preparation from practice teaching at Southeast Elementary School in the Park Hill school school school district guided my lesson planning for myself and the other Park students who assisted me as teachers in our program. The Park Hill district allowed us to publicize our program among their parents, provided the students and loaned us testing materials and books to use in the program.
I count that summer of 1965 experience as a key factor leading to my discovery of the guy, in June 1971, who would become my husband in June 1972. In the late spring of 1966 I read in the Kansas City Star a small item about applying to be included in a summer of 1966 National Defense Education Act (NDEA) Institute in Remedial Reading at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. There were two prerequisites: to have had prior experience with a remedial reading program and to have completed a three-hour education course in the supervision of reading. I had completed my involvement with our month of June 1965 reading program for children of the Parkville community. In the fall of 1965 I saw on a school district bulletin board a notice about a 3-credit-hour course on reading supervision to be taught by Dorothy Hunt, supervisor of elementary education for the North Kansas City School District. I signed up for it and was admitted by Miss Hunt.
Near the end of my participation in the NDEA Institute I was asked by the director, Dr. John Sherk if I would like to have a graduate assistantship in the reading center at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. I told him I'd like to have one more year of third grade teaching experience to which he agreed. In September 1967 I began my graduate assistantship under the supervision of Dr. Sherk, Dr. Robert Leibert and Dr. Warren Wheelock. I tutored elementary grade students who had been assigned to our remedial reading program. I supervised graduate level students who were also tutoring while working toward their own graduate degrees in remedial reading education at UMKC. In June 1968 I graduated with a degree in education with specialization in reading. The next day I began working for the Allyn & Bacon, Inc. textbook publishing company as a consultant in elementary education. I worked with salesmen and school district, college and university personnel, and state department of education officials in nine states: Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri.
So where does my guy enter into all of this? Scroll back through this blog by clicking on Older Posts (at the bottom right corner of this and previous pages) until you reach August 21, 2015: Waiting for Mr. Right - and no, this blog is not about Republican politics.)
If you are computer savvy I invite you to do searches via the search bar in A 1961-65 Park College Diary - http://parkcollege1961-1965.blogspot.com/ for:
June 1, 1965
June 2, 1965
June 8, 1965
June 29, 1965
June 30, 1965
Those are dates for which I composed a reading program related blog post heading when I was transcribing 1965 diary entries in June 2015.
Thank you for continuing to read A 1961-65 Park College Diary in 2017.
About the diary writer
- Barbara McDowell Whitt
- Kansas City, Missouri, Alexandria, Virginia, United States
- ~ About: A 1961-65 Park College Diary ~ As a high school girl and then a college coed in the first half of the 1960s, I wrote nightly entries on the pages of one-year diaries. In January 2010 I began transcribing the entries into a blog and gave each one a title. I grew up on three farms within 30 miles of Iowa City and the University of Iowa with its Iowa Writers' Workshop. As the oldest of four daughters, in my diaries I sometimes referred to my sisters as "the kids" or "the girls." We helped our parents, but we also had good, wholesome fun - a characteristic I took with me to Park. Park is 300 miles southwest of West Chester, Iowa, in Parkville, Missouri, on the Missouri River 10 miles northwest of Kansas City, Missouri, and across the river from Kansas City, Kansas. In 2000 Park College became Park University. Today Park's flagship campus is in Parkville and there are an additional 41 campus centers across the nation. Park was one of the first educational institutions in the United States to offer online learning. My last post was on May 22, 2018. I may be followed on Twitter @BarbaraMcDWhitt.
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