Coker College - Milestone Yearbook (Hartsville, SC)

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The song Civ. Test expressed your sentiments exactly, un- til you realized just what Civ. was meaning to you. Oh, I am crying, unhappy day, No mote wisecracks—no laughter gay; Ever since they said those words to me, eCiv. Test!” The Java ape man—his home a cave; He should hear those freshmen rave; Ever since they said those words to them, perv. Test!” Austrian succession—it bothers me; I don’t care if Napoleon was a he, Ever since they said those words to me, Aa3 . ” Civ. Test! Ah, Tchaiskovsky—he had a friend, But as for me? This is the end! Ever since they said those words to me, m@iva lesti HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE “History is that social science whose special province it is to trace social development, showing by concrete examples of successive societies in action what society has been, how society has worked, what the causes and consequences of social action have been, and how society as it is, grew out of society as it was.” quote, Dr. Farhner. You, as a history and social science student, were constantly trying to unravel the meaning of this statement. Whether you were studying the Civil War or dis- cussing the problem of juvenile delinquincy, you learned that you must view events and problems objectively. When you first entered Dr. Farhner’s classes, you pondered a rumor you'd heard that if you drop your pencil in lecture, you'd lose a hundred years of history! Somehow you managed to keep up with him; but your hands were thankful when he would tell a story about one of his three favorite topics: William “Extra Billy” Smith, the Navy, or Hawaii. Several people who passed by Dr. Davidson’s Sociology class observed that along with studying the relationships between man and his human environment, you were learning to balance coffee cups and take notes at the same time. After investigating rivers, mountains, and soil with Mrs. Reynolds in Geography, after having gathered much useful information about the history of our state and nation, and after objectively viewing social behavior, you left the Depart- ments of History and Social Science with a fuller understanding of Dr. Farhner’s definition. ENGLISH AND LITERATURE As you, a frosh registered at Coker you were told you would take freshman English and were registered for one of Dr. or Mrs. Sisson’s classes. It wasn’t long before you learned that the main object of the whole course was to teach you how to assimilate the King’s English into a readable composition. Some of your first attempts at composition were so bad you had to te-write them to throw them in the waste basket; but after the Sissons had filled the margin of your papers many times with comments and suggestions, you decided that you might learn to write after all. Left: Jane, Frankie and Frances look at Civ. slides. Right: Betty works on an English theme. or mlaies SS

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58 Dr. Haynes lectures on Literature in Freshmen Civilization. CIVILIZATION “And tor the next time read pages 264-351 in Gard- ner’—(or Warnock and Anderson, or Burgess, or Geise). So, off you went to the library and plodded through a merry-go-round of dates, events, pictures and stories, all the while wondering if this course caled Civilization could possibly mean anything to you. Some years ago a few Coker teachers decided from the evidence placed before them in the form of addled students (with gaps in their memory) that there should be one course that would “tie up” everything that a stu- dent was to study in four years of college. The result was Civilization. And oh, how those teachers and guinea- pig students suffered in such an experiment! They worked and discussed and planned, revised and edited, until there was proof in attitudes and examinations that this was something to be retained. And Civilization became a per- manent part of the curriculum —a cover-all— four-year course which furnished a backbone for all other subjects. But, my, how hard it was for you, the freshman, to see the real worth at first. You didn’t know what to expect when they told you you’d have a lecture and a class period on the same subject. You soon discovered that lecture meant “to write your hand off” and class meant to thrash out ideas given in lecture. Then you were introduced to Mr. Burgess and Miss Gardener, and you began to won- der if you ought not drop the course. “No, I’m sorry. Everyone MUST take Civ.” So you struggled to keep your head up. “No, not three of those chapters on a test at once! I'll never do it!” But you did, and things began to take shape. The dates and events began to spell out the causes and results of the rise and fall of nations. As you sat in the Fine Arts room and listened for hours to some of the world’s greatest music, you began to hear more than the melody. The number ot chapters on tests rose to four, to six, and still you hang on, sticking your nose further into the book and putting your shoulder closer to the grindstone. You realize you are thinking of things you’d never even dreamed of before. Endless questions, seemingly without answers, arose and its a wonder you weren't rendered permanently dizzy from thrashing around in all those philosophical circles. As you and your suite- mates frantically tried to solve all those “new” problems, you became more and more convinced that you really didn’t exist after all. You poured over Art Masterpieces and noted styles and colors. “Hey, why is this one Rem- brandt?” — “It’s not!” Uh, oh! Wrong again. But you kept at it, and if the noise at the art table subsided you could hear the click-click of the architecture slides being inserted in the slide machine, and the head, you hoped! Seven chapters on tests now and you almost threw up your hands and said, “That’s the last straw!” But you couldn’t quit because you were almost there. You'd spent hours in incessant study. You’d read, listened, observed; you'd analyzed and discussed. You had begun “in the be- ginning” and gone through mythology and factual sta- tistics, had a taste of the science, art, music, religion, and literature of many lands and learned about the lives of the men responsible for these. It has been a blur at first. A lot of work, or note-taking, of concentrating went into your puzzle. You studied your contemporaries, their lives, their conflicts, their problems, and tried to determine the effect they will have on coming generations. When the last piece was in place, you got the picture, clear and complete. Civilization was a developer of the sense, a useful, workable base for any other course you make take up, and an enrichment of your knowledge of life in all its phases.

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The William Chambers Coker Science Building There were book reports! But we had fun too. For the i tales of the Sissons’ Commonplace Book were interesting and entertaining. In sophomore English you reviewed the lives and works of some of the greats in English and American literature. Here you met Dr. Haynes and tried to help her sing the early English and American ballads) Remember how crushed you were to find that Shakespeare wrote most of those beautiful love sonnets to a boy? You may have taken Nineteenth Century Prose and .Poetry in Dr. Haynes room in North where you could take off your shoes and sit on the floor, or Journalism of Creative Writing under Dr. Sisson. Whatever you studied in the English department you learned the basic essentials and technicalities involved in reading, writing, and understanding the real value of the English language. Across; Suzanne examines a slide. Below: Faye works out a problem for Sonoco Products. SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS Were you blinded or merely cross-eyed—you wondered as you looked into that odd instrument called a microscope. It took a while to decide. As the days passed in the General Biology Lab. and your eyes became adjusted to the microscope, you got up enough courage to look through the lab manual. If it looked menacing from the outside in its drab gray coat, that was nothing compared to the way it looked on the inside dressed in pages and pages of phyla—animal phyla, plant phyla. You discovered what phyla meant in no uncertain terms. After hours of looking at the list of unpronouncable names, you were told to wear your dungarees to class next session because the class was to go on a field trip to the college club. “How nice,’ you thought, “We're going to have some fun.” And fun it was—in spite of all the unexpected meetings with unfriendly spiders and the half-hidden sticks that looked like snakes. Yes, you managed to get a jar full of odds and ends in the forms of bugs, worms, mold, mush- room, and wild flowers. As you crawled over the fence to leave, you were thinking that it wasn’t so bad after all. ee r 4 . But the party was over next class session when you found out you had to classify each and every dangerous creature you had captured. . Soon enough you were to meet some other new friends who were to help you along the road to scientific knowledge: a grasshopper, a crawfish, an earthworm, and (horrors!) a frog. “Are we really going to—to cut it open?” You were! The formaldehyde burned your eyes and nose. Your lab partner got woozy after the first slash of that awful skin and had to leave; but, soon she came back and together you faced the bitter truth: a frog is one of the things every young college girl should know. But wait, this can’t be all, you thought. So you decided to try your hand at Bacteriology, and cultured some growths fearful and wonderful to behold. You stood beside the questionable poet as he ad libbed: “Still I stared and still the wonder grew That one small germ could carry all that flu.” You once carried six tiny bottles around all day because the darlings inside couldn’t live without fresh water every hour on the hour. In Genetics you set about to discover what had caused the strange combination called ‘you’. One look at the greenhouse and you knew you must take Botony too; so you planted and transplanted, crossed and uncrossed, and even grew something uncommon—to say the least—in this territory, a marvelous pineapple.