Douglas Patterson

I spent a total of thirty-seven years in the classroom - the first three in New Plymouth High School in New Plymouth, Idaho, and the next thirty-four years at Dwight D. Eisenhower Senior High School in Yakima, Washington. During this time I taught English and German courses. Though I taught the normal variety of language arts courses, my main interest was English composition.

My interest in teaching composition arose primarily from the fact that it involves a lot of doing on the part of the students. In my judgment, one learns by doing. When students are idle, they are probably not learning very efficiently. A writing course provides a context within which one can focus meaningfully on grammar and usage and spelling and vocabulary and rhetoric and research and reasoning and critical thinking. The quotation from Francis Bacon that I listed above is, in my judgment, the best available guide to what education ought to be.

President of the Yakima Education Association

BA - University of Oregon M Ed in Curriculum Studies - Central Washington State University

I was born in the small town of Carey, Idaho, during the depression. My parents were grade school teachers who taught in several villages in Eastern and South Central Idaho; however,I spent most of my school years in the Woodriver Valley which is best known for its Sun Valley ski resort. I attended Bellevue Grade School and Hailey (now Woodriver) Senior High School. Even though we were quite poor by today's standards, growing up in our high mountain valley was actually an idyllic existence. The population was small and benign, so we were free to roam the hills and the river bottom. In the evening our mother would read to us or we would listen to Jack Benney and Edgar Bergen and all the other great stars of radio on our scratchy wireless. The air was clean and the stars shown like diamonds in the cold night sky. How could one be so lucky as to grow up in that place during in those halcyon times? I grew up in the very small town of Bellevue, Idaho. I attended Hailey (now Woodriver) High School.