ABSTRACT
A particularly terrifying life experience for many Stanford graduate students was the first time that you had to present your research findings at the Friday Seminar. It was my 1st year of graduate school, and I would be discussing my research project on computer-assisted instructed conducted under the supervision of my then-adviser Dick Atkinson. For much of the academic year, I’d watched “Dr. Bower” tear into my poor predecessors, and didn’t have the confidence that I’d be able to withstand his aggressive questions. But I did quite well. In fact, my answers to Gordon’s questions were downright excellent! I confessed, some 30 years later, how this was so. It turns out that Dick Atkinson was sitting next to me, whispering the answers to Gordon’s questions in my ear. So Cyrano de Atkinson skated by the 1st year. That was the l966-1967 academic year. How odd today to think of this, but Gordon-The-Terrible was only 7 years post-PhD.
