William Caldwell
In the early 1960s, Grahamwood Elementary School was so high tech, we had a TV room! Yes, a TV room. Cutting edge. And we used to walk there in our single file line for our science lesson on public television: “Discovering Science, with Miss Betty Mothershed.” My friends and I were entirely capable of creating trouble, chaos, and distress, as any of our parents and their neighbors would have attested. But we had never seen anything like Betty Mothershed. We would leave the TV room wide-eyed, whispering, “Did you see what she did? If we created conflagrations and explosions like that, our mothers would kill us just as a warning to our brothers and sisters.”Decades later, I was at the copying machine at the Hutchison School, chatting with my colleague, biology teacher Betty Stimbert, when it came out in the conversation that her maiden name was Mothershed. I remarked that I had only heard of one other person by that name, a notorious TV science teacher. She said, “Oh, yes, that was one of the early education TV shows!” I said, “YOU!?! You’re Miss Betty Mothershed? You’re the one who helped us discover science by blowing things up and incinerating the studio?!?” “Yep, that’s me.” My next thought was, “Betty, you haven’t changed so much.” I was blessed to have the opportunity to teach with her.Bill Caldwell