Alpha_Alternative_School_1972–2012-Yumpu

Crawford (Crocky) Teasdale
“The most important lesson of ALPHA
was love… We need to learn to love
ourselves first, in all our glory and our
imperfections.”
Halfway through grade two I was bored at school, and I changed to ALPHA.
I’d fin ished all my math books and spelling books and Eng lish books early,
and I had noth ing to do. ALPHA was great because there was some cre ativity,
which was really lack ing in the pub lic school sys tem. I remem ber playing
the piano there a lot. There was a piano in the hall way, and I loved it.
I wanted to play gui tar but my hands weren’t big enough, so I just mostly
taught myself to play piano, and I guess I played the dul cimer. I remember
our teacher Mike, he used to play the I love peanut but ter song, and he
taught me how to play that on the piano. In a cou ple years my hands were
big ger and I got a gui tar and taught myself how to play. I can also remember
col lab o rat ing on ani mated films at ALPHA, paint ing cels and putting
them under a cam era and mov ing them around.
CRAWFORD TEASDALE
ALPHA 1973 to 1978, ages
7–8 & 10–11. Stud ied at the
Royal Con ser va tory of Music.
Works as a graphic designer
at Maple Leaf Sports and
Enter tain ment. Makes music.
*The Ontario Insti tute for
Stud ies in Edu ca tion, now part
of the Uni ver sity of Toronto
When I was nine, ALPHA teacher Mike McCarthy helped me get into a
cat a lyst pro gram [a pro gram for high school stu dents who wanted to audit
uni ver sity courses] at OISE* …I’d go there after school one day a week and
learn BASIC pro gram ming. I remem ber I had to sign out two big floppy
discs that were the size of records: one of them made the com puter start
up, and the other one was for my data. I went on the Inter net in 1977. I got
to dis cuss BASIC pro gram ming, through what we would now call chat, with
some one from Cal i for nia who was much older than me, at a uni ver sity.
There would be a ter mi nal win dow and you’d type some thing and the other
per son would see it and they’d type back. I just thought this was amaz ing—
I couldn’t believe it—and when I told peo ple they didn’t believe me. I was
nine, and most of the peo ple who were doing the course were much older
than me, they were in high school. I just went and did it. It wasn’t that
hard, and I learned to do BASIC pro gram ming and that helped me down
the road a lot.
They always told me at ALPHA that the future’s in com put ers, and that you
should learn your math and your com puter skills. So I did. We saved up, my
broth ers and I, and bought a Com modore PET, and I used it for pro gramming,
and they used it for play ing games. I mostly would just get games
and then look at the code, and try and change the graph ics or the order of
things. I learned that you could resave the file and make the graph ics differ
ent. So I took some games and I made them into my own games. I didn’t
really pro gram them, I just stole some one else’s game and changed the way
it looked and played. I was get ting on to eleven by then.
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