Happenings

Welcome to your source for information for the Edgewater High School Band alumni!

Please check the website often as we plan to have regular updates by some of your fellow band alumni.

Also you can check out the different categories listed in the menu to the right of the page.

I hope to see you all at the big reunion next year!

Regards
Richard Hiley

John is an Edgewater High School Class of 1978 Alumnus. He also was a trumpet player at Robert E. Lee Jr. High School. Leaving the Band after Lee Jr. High John never left the friendships that were formed there. John along with several other EHS band members also belonged to the now legendary College Park Methodist Church’s Boy Scout Troupe 28.
After Edgewater John graduated from UCF and became a commercial pilot logging some 4600 hours in both cargo and passenger flights.
In 1994 following his life long interest in Exercise Physiology John earned a degree from UCF in Molecular biology, and then attended Medical School at USF in Tampa, graduating in 2002.
After a couple years of doing Orthopedic Surgery in Louisiana, John married the love of his life: Carmen, and returned to Orlando to complete training in Family Medicine with a sub-specialty in Sports Medicine.
He graduated from Family Practice Residency in June, 2007, and his Sports Medicine Fellowship in June, 2008.
John is Board Certified in both Sports Medicine and Family Practice

Hello Fellow Eagle Alums:

In my capacity as a sports doc, the most common questions I am asked by people “our age” involve losing weight. I’m almost never asked about gaining weight. That’s way too easy at this time in our lives. Whatever happened to the days when we could eat whatever we wanted, sleep till noon, then party all night and never gain an ounce? Well, as we all know by now, things change.

In my last blog entry I discussed the amount of exercise needed to maintain health. Bear in mind those were minimum numbers, and that all we were discussing was maintaining health, not improving fitness or losing weight. Unless you’re pretty sedentary now, doing those things will probably require an upward adjustment in the times.

Losing weight is primarily mathematics: you have to burn up more calories than you consume. I recognize that it is often much tougher than I’ve made it sound, but those are the basics. If the math doesn’t work out, then you probably won’t be very successful.

A recent study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, tried to shed a little light on how some of the more common weight loss diets worked. The study, performed in Israel, had their participants on one of three different diets: a low fat, calorie restricted diet similar to that recommended by the American Heart Association, a moderate fat, calorie restricted “Mediterranean” diet, and a low carbohydrate, non-calorie restricted diet similar to the Atkins diet. The study continued for two years, with the subjects eating their study diet only at lunch at their workplace cafeteria. The subjects, both men and women, were all moderately obese with a body mass index of 31. This works out to a 5’10” man weighing 215 lbs. or a 5’5” woman weighing 187 lbs. The study did not look at how much exercise the subjects did, if any.

The results showed that in two years, average weight loss was greatest in the “Atkins style” group with 10.3 pounds, and the Mediterranean group with 9.6 pounds. The low-fat group averaged 6.3 pounds lost. Cholesterol numbers varied too, with the “Atkins style” and Mediterranean doing better than the low fat group. Diabetic blood sugar control was best among the Mediterranean group.

Although this seems to be a fairly good endorsement for the low-carb Atkins style diet, there were problems. More of these participants dropped out of the study (22% after two years, compared with 15% for Mediterranean and 10% for low-fat). This suggests it may be harder to stay with this diet than the others, even though it was only for five meals per week. As I mentioned earlier, the study did not address the subjects exercise habits at all. Presumably, some did exercise, and I would expect these exercising individuals to show greater average weight loss than the averages for their groups.

So, although all the groups lost weight, it appears choice of diet regimen does matter. As always, talk to your personal physician before starting any exercise or diet program, and try to pick a program which you can stick to, and make it a lifestyle change.

Dr. John Felix, MD

Submitted by
Wanda Plyler Bullock

I look at them. They look at me. Thirty years have and have not passed. Their faces are so familiar.

Today, I am the substitute teacher for the same band class that I once sat in as a teenager thirty years ago. For each student, I remember my classmates who in someway looked or acted as they do now.

There is a perfect irony in this moment. So perfect, that ether it offers a rigorous proof of a grand, divine entity executing its master plan or it is an example solution to the ultimate question of quantum mechanics – the existence of parallel universes.

Do they really know how very important these years are, will be and someday have been? Here and now they are making decisions that will infinitely affect the course of their lives.

These students, like my former classmates, are mostly college bound, have a kind demeanor, and appear to be concerned for each other’s welfare. Edgewater High School and the band students in particular remains a relative oasis in what has become a largely brutal school system.

As a substitute teacher, I’ve been to just about every middle and high school in Orange County. While I’m certain that there are likely many opinions that disagree with mine, I have an abided perception of the school system that is my reality.

In my travels I heard several teachers during the relative privacy of lunch together call students “stupid”, “dumb” and “liars.”
More often I heard teachers say that they were just doing their time to earn a healthy pension and health insurance. There was a sense among them that they felt trapped, even hopeless.

For a long time, I marveled at these attitudes. How could so many people with bad attitudes succeed? How could they do well in the face of seemingly so much personal misery?

One experienced, even dedicated educator once told me that in the teaching profession - “You’re public enemy number one.”

The lesson for me in this experience was not about the widespread existence of seemingly bad attitudes, but the fact that they so often occurred at schools that held good ratings under the No Child Left Behind Act. There was NO CORRELATION between the behind the scenes negativity and FCAT performance.

And that was the telling truth - the teachers who expressed these things got up, pulled what is easily a 10-hour day for many, and never for a moment let their inner feelings show. A major feat because teachers get slammed from every direction and in Florida their jobs are often not secure. Florida state law provides that for the first three years of employment a teacher can be fired within the first 97-days of the school year without cause, due process, and reason. While the law reads as if such an action will not affect either party, and is a kind of no fault policy; in this county, with rare exceptions, when a principal evokes the 97-day rule that individual is blacklisted from ever being employed as a teacher in this county again.

Students have seen so many quick, unannounced changes in their classroom instructors that they’ve gotten a picture that the job security for teachers is about the same as hamburger flipping.

Young people are very observant and highly perceptive, a talent that many folks loose as they age. In an instinctive way, they see the lack of security some teachers have about their jobs and are pretty aware of their abilities and the power they can reap from these.

Once I plainly overhead students bragging about how they were able to get rid of not just one English teacher they didn’t like, but were able to effect this outcome over several occasions. When I heard this I checked. Sure enough, the district’s web site showed an opening for a Language Arts teacher at that very school.

I would later learn the common scenario that gets carried out with impunity.

Students get together and talk about a teacher they don’t like and complain to their parents, often taking something the teacher said out of context and twisting it just enough to make it sound both heinous and believable. Parents get angry and call the principal. The principal in turn doesn’t have the time or support to really sort out the situation and knows that their own job is more secure if they tend to side with the parents and so the 97-day rule comes into play.

Not long ago I walked into a classroom where several teachers were having lunch. I looked at them. They looked at me.

“Let me guess,” I said, “Mean kids, complaining parents, an unsupportive administration, and a teacher’s union that is worthless.”

Preaching to the choir, I was told, and not only did they nod Amen like tired Pentecostals during the third hour of Sunday service, but mentioned too that teacher’s could not strike in Florida and would risk arrest if they did.

From this experience, I feel inspired to re-read Lord of the Flies. Is it possible to draw a parallel to the themes of that classic book and the state of education today? Or is the question merely redundant and rhetorical?

Christophe Massey, P.T. is a member of the EHS Class of 1978 and was a Band member during the tenure of William Thomas. Over the last eight years or so because of health problems he was advised by his doctors to take more control of what he ate. Most of these recipes are a result of incorporating those suggestions into his daily diet and cooking habits. Currently he attends Cooking-Technique classes at Williams-Sonoma and does extensive research to find new and healthy recipes.