St Louis Park High School - Echowan Yearbook (St Louis Park, MN)

Page 8 text:

SUPERINTENDENT ASS'T S DIR. OF ELEMENTARY EDUC. INFORMATION OVERLOAD = “In general our lives consist of trying to make sense out of nonsense and order out of chaos ...” From womb to tomb we seldom view things as they really are. From the beginning there is too much coming at us too fast. We feel attacked, we feel threatened, we feel alone. The poet, the artist, the mathematician, each and every one of us fights this information overload with the fool proof defense mechanism of pattern recognition. We have to be able to call everyone and everything by a name. We channel all of our emotions into oceans of charts, graphs, poems and songs. We join political parties so that we can say we believe in something. We have titles so that we can say we’ve become something. We join teams and clubs so that we can say we belong to something. As Will Rogers tells it, “Two nuts can't go out to lunch together three times without one of them saying, ‘Let's form a club.' Three men can’t meet nowadays without one of them getting a gavel and the other two drawing up a constitu- tion and by-laws. I am going to be the founder of one club that is one with a purpose. Our purpose will be to take a dying oath to murder every club member we meet. Then when we have thoroughly killed every member and there are no other members left, to commit suicide ourselves and give the world a new start. It’s being ‘clubbed’ to death.” A Ph.D. degree tells us that a person really knows something and no degree tells us, of course, that a person 4 5 • Them©

Page 7 text:

 . . . to b continued rowers and tricyclers made their debuts, and we all searched for new weekend hangouts — finding Rudolph's, Dudley Riggs and Pan cho Shapiro's Mexican Eatery. Then there were those traditions that never died. The football team continued for the fifth decade, practicing at 2:45 with the predictability of the rising and setting of the sun. The idea of abolishing homecoming was overridden by strong homecoming spirit. Unadventurous students settled for the old stand bys — Ridgedale and Poppin' Fresh, while others got involved in keeping Interim alive and planning “the Rip off” dance. This year, as always, faculty members tried to do away with the annual illegal “stinking” by new members for initiation into sorori ties and fraternities. We were pressured with the decisions of which traditions were to be rejected and which ones were to be continued. . .

Page 9 text:

PATTERN RECOGNITION - O l SO mi: really knows nothing at all. Our chemists tell us that everything, that even our hearts, are made up of atoms which look exactly like the models we build of them. In general, our lives consist of trying to make sense out of nonsense and order out of chaos. But something tells us that this in itself is. too much. The way we deal with our information overload is in itself an overload. We realize we've over categorized and oversimplified. Too many undefina- bles have been defined. Suddenly it’s apparent that, although convenient, pattern recognition takes the magic out of our lives. When we can transcend pattern recognition we have our moments of greatness. These are the times we understand that there are things we’ll never understand and that there is beauty in those things. When we have no boundaries we can truly master our information overload. “A man,” says Oliver Cromwell, “never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going. But, we’re told to always know where we are going, and we honestly feel safer when do. The world can be digested far more easily when we package it in doses that we can swallow. Things move so quickly that pattern recognition is the only way for us to cope. . . . to be continued .