Jim Flory:  

Dear AA Alumni and Friends, Since my retirement I have really enjoyed getting in contact with friends and alumni from the AA. I tried to put up a shorted illustrated biography from my website but this system apparently doesn't permit external links so here is more than will ever want to know that I could quickly cut an paste in here. Timeline Since Alliance Academy “ Jim Flory 1960 - 1963 - Manchester College - Small Church of the Brethren liberal arts college. Wonderfully stimulating intellectual and cultural atmosphere for me but also difficult time of adjustment. Good friends with 8 roommates who shared a house. 1963 - 1966 - Purdue University - MS Physical Education, Spanish, Psych Pursued physical education by default and the strong belief that it provided a wonderful developmental tool in the education of children. The world of sports is a wonderderful simple social system which is also a time out from the real world. One where making mistakes while not pain free, is less so than in the real world because we can always say, "it was only a game". Not only physical but also social, since in reality it is a simple social system which can serve as a lab for social learning. Most physical educators didn't see it that way, but I found great pleasure in the joy of students in my classes as they learned new skills both physical, social, and insights into social structure. In a carefully controlled environment you can set things up in a way that insights come from the experience. For example, on the playground only the best athletes are captains. I could put less skilled kids in the position of choosing teams. The first time they would choose teams based on friendships. This usually led to losing the game. Next time they would chose based on a combination friendship and sports competence. I delighted in creating "natural experiments" where encouraging kids to reflect on what we had just been through together. I also found analyzing sports skills (kinesiology) fun especially given the variety of skills involved in gymnastics. The danger of injury makes the figuring out safe lead up progressions and also it is interesting in that you need to get to know each athlete well enough to make judgments not only about physical readiness but also psychological readiness for trying potentially dangerous moves. 1966 - 1968 - Taught physical education, Spanish, and coached track and field at Taft Junior High School, Crown Point, Indiana. This was part of my plan to gain experience teaching young students and building a winning coaching record. My next planned step was to move to high school coaching and do the same. Actually I had a high school offer when I left. Then I was going to return get a PHD in Physical Education or Sociology and write the definitive work on the cultural, sociological, and social psychology of sports. My ultimate goal was going to be college teaching and international sports clinics. 1968 Influenced by the death of Martin Luther King Jr. (and other events in the late 1960's) and my experience of the of the American school system; I enrolled in a graduate program in sociology at Indiana University. It seemed to me that in many respects the school system by its very nature was teaching things I didn't want to teach and turning me into somebody I didn't want to be. I wanted to understand social structures with the ultimate goal of changing them. Summers - Camp Counselor at a great camp in Wisconsin, and two work camps in Mexico which were really fun and interesting. 1968 - 70 After feeling like a prison guard at the junior high school, the freedom of graduate school was a period of mild euphoria. I had burned no bridges behind me, so that I could return to physical education if grad school didn't work out (gymnastics coaches were in high demand in Indiana at that time), this took a lot of pressure off of me that others in grad school felt. I had a wonderful time playing club volleyball for Indiana University (clubs were not a varsity sport with full funding and scholarships) but supported to the extent of a coach and travel/meal funds for tournaments. We practiced 2 hrs a day 5 days a week and traveled to tournaments around the Midwest what fun! This started me on a career of USVBA volleyball which I continued until 1994. I had no background in sociology beyond an introduction to sociology class and a social problems class taken in 1962. These classes had convinced me that the social sciences were a waste of time. So I had to work hard to catch up. I didn't understand how the academic game was played at Indiana University until it was too late, so I ended up with an MA and a fair amount of the course work for a PHD done as well. At IU I met Eileen who was also a graduate student who had spent time in Mexico doing ethnomusicology and anthropology in village Mexico. She and I also were active in the local silent meeting type Quaker student group there. 1970 - 1986 Taught sociology at Inver Hills Community College, Inver Grove Hts. Minnesota. Eileen's PHD program fell apart in 1971 when her professor died. She had the music from an all night curing ceremony from Otomi Indians in Mexico. Previous work with these Indians suggested that musical themes carried semantic content for the Otomi. She was in the process of learning a computer program (main frame days) which searched for patterns. She planned to transcribe the music, code it for the computer, search for patterns, take the patterns back to the field to play segments and ask what they meant. You can see how it would be hard to find a graduate advisor to take over this project. So she decided to abandon that plan and came up to Minnesota and we got married. In many ways teaching sociology to a largely working class, multi aged, student body was a good fit for me. It let me pursue almost any topic and then work to translate it into terms and concepts my students could understand. I taught four courses - Intro to Sociology, Analysis of American Society, Social Problems, and Marriage and Family. Pay and benefits were good: three months off in the summer, plus long winter break, a brand new campus, and with many young friendly and competent faculty. I arranged my teaching schedule so I could play good quality volley ball three times a week and continued to play with USVBA teams. I had time and the opportunity for outdoors activities, many of which I shared with my wife. Such things as cross country skiing, winter camping, snow shoeing, backpacking, mountaineering, and canoeing. 1979 - Sabbatical year - I took courses at the U. of Minnesota. I also traveled with my wife to Cuba on a two week study tour and later in 1982 enrolled in a longer study opportunity in a Cuban educational institution. I also went out to Wyoming on a month long National Outdoor Leadership school course on mountaineering in the Wind River range. The first of three courses I took with them over the years. 1985“ I took a year's leave of absence in which I took courses at the University of Minnesota to try to figure out how to make teaching interesting again. I also took some computer courses from the education department there. I worked hard at the community college job but eventually burned out and lost my belief that the work was very useful. Teaching under the constraints of class size (sometimes very large and the nature of the student population, etc.) made teaching more of a performance art than I had expected and e...Expand for more