Stephen Lewis
— 10th — (1981) Ronald Reagan
Lived and worked in Jerusalem, Israel, for a year. Now about to go to graduate school in architecture.
— 30th — (2001) George W. Bush
Rapid rise and fall in the dot-com wave as head of a well-funded then unfunded educational software company;
Invented a participatory animation engine, sold to Mattel;
NSF grantee: Programming with a Purpose, a development environment that uses an ice-skating metaphor to interest middle-school girls in programming;
Currently work at a high-tech laptop K-12 school in Manhattan, inventing and implementing learning activities, under the title director, lab-a-dab-a-doo. Not that far from Thoreau's Self- Appointed Inspector of Snowstorms. I do, inexplicably, get paid for this fun. Also developing a large museum exhibit for a science museum called Virtual Graffiti Wall.
— 50th — (2021) Joseph Biden
Not yet out of Harvard College, I took a job at what was then a lovely elementary school up the street called Buckingham School. My students included many faculty kids, including those of Henry Kissinger, George Wald, Zeph Stewart, Kevin Starr, and others. I taught first and fourth grade. In retrospect, it seems odd that I was only ten years older than they were. On my first day, I was on playground duty and Katy, one of my students, slid off the swings and fell on the ground, lying on her back and screaming, "I'm paralyzed, I'm paralyzed!" I ran to get the head teacher and reported this horrifying event. The head teacher replied, "Oh, that's just Katy. She does that all the time." To this day, my students' voices are ringing in my mind. I was offbeat even for those "hippie" times. I brought a spinning wheel into class and taught my students to spin, dye with lichens, and weave. I took groups of them to eat lunch in the Mustard Whale, my yellow '57 Chevy step van that I had outfitted as both living quarters and a mobile photo studio. Using my abstract photos as prompts, they wrote poems, and this led to a brief career in publishing children's books, two of them with William Morrow: Zoo City and How's It Made. Zoo City was a Junior Literary Guild selection (a big deal). Wow. Over its lifetime, the book netted me about seven thousand dollars in royalty earnings. A couple of years later, I pitched the Zoo City idea to Sesame Street and made a number of short movies. I went to Florida with a borrowed Bolex and shot the footage. I spent almost all my fee on opticals for the movies. A fellow Harvard student wrote original soundtracks for the short movies. Time for a new career. Enrolled in the MArch program at Columbia, hoping to learn to invent the city of the future and place a large emphasis on learning environments. Alas, the postmodern malaise was rampant, and my classmates were spending most of their time choosing colors for their renderings. Computer-aided design (CAD) was just being born at the time, so I became involved with that and along the way invented a measuring device that used ultrasonic sound beams to measure interior distances. I taught myself computer programming, which supported the automation of architectural design, but also found that I could create a virtual aquarium with creatures that moved around and interacted with each other. This led to a dozen years in software development for the architectural practice, but eventually circled back to children's education, with a particular emphasis on invention and creativity.
So out came AniMagic, a "participatory animation" product where you got to doodle and your objects came to life. This caught the attention of Hasbro and Mattel, and I sold them the rights "throughout the universe" (I kid you not — that was in the contract), so presumably Martians are paying royalties to Mattel to make little green people come to life. I think the Mars Rover caught a glimpse of one.
Next career: I met the head of one of the first laptop schools in the world, Trevor Day School in Manhattan. The director was obsessed with Cuisenaire Rods, and I suggested that I could design apps that would simulate the rods but make it possible to chop them into smaller rods and fuse them into larger ones. He hired me on the spot (does this kind of thing still happen?). I became the house inventor at a digitally innovative school, and it was a dream. I developed dozens of apps for reading, math, and creativity. I moved on to STEM education and creative coding, developing products and always keeping a teaching job. But the Cuisenaire Rod apps were basically left behind‚… until the other day, when I got a call from someone whom I had last spoken to in 2005. "Help!" this person said. "I've been using your apps for fifteen years and Flash [the programming language I had used at the time] is about to be removed from the internet browsers." This teacher had been heavily using my work for a decade and a half, and I had no idea. I had just left the apps active on a webpage I called "Lab A Dab A Do" and never bothered to check usage. So I dusted them off, rewrote them in JavaScript (runs perfectly on any device), and got the idea of seeing if I could make this early work available to a wider audience.
I now split my time between Manhattan and Beacon, New York, where my daughter and granddaughter live. I teach high school and continue to invent groundbreaking things, which I then bury in the ground to help break it up for next year's plantings.