Perhaps it’s because I recently read and reviewed Robyn Arianrhod’s Thomas Harriot; A Life in Science, which details how the remarkable achievements of this Elizabethan polymath began with his employment by Sir Walter Ralegh as a mathematician specifically tasked with improving Ralegh’s crew’s navigational techniques.
Perhaps it’s because…
As luck would have it, the grade school I attended had just that year reduced its size from a kindergarten through sixth grade school to a kindergarten through fourth grade school as the result of a then new “middle school” being opened as part of a nineteen-seventies progressive restructuring that took in the fifth and sixth grade students from our grade school as well as two other grade schools in the area. As a result of this, my school ended up with a number of no longer needed classrooms – one of which was a biology lab.