My sworn enemy for the last nine years has been Parkinson's disease. Fearful that this affliction was going to take me away from my classroom, I visualized the malady as an opponent that had to be defeated. As fate would have it, this personification of my illness negatively impacted upon my health.

Unwilling to yield even an inch, I pushed myself to the point of exhaustion and last November ('96) I succumbed to the increasing disabilities. At first, I went into a deep depression and was convinced that one long cold winter at home would render me useless. Most of all, I missed my students and the classroom.

Next to my family and religion, teaching was the most important part of my life. (Thank goodness my dog cannot read.) The following Christmas, my son gave me the gift of renewal and rebirth. As a computer science / engineering major, he invested time, money and love to piece together a PC that had some resemblance to 386 computer with a modem.

Much to my son's dismay, my initial reaction was simply expressed that: "I am a dinosaur and I am not sure that computers and my brain can obtain a condition of congruency." I begrudgingly agreed to take AOL's offer of 50 free hours and a miraculous metamorphosis began.

As a Social Studies teacher, I am compelled to make use of an historical example to illustrate the transformation that took place.

When my son was six years old (1981) we bought him the Commodore 64 computer. When he was seated at the computer, I had visions of the next Einstein and my name appearing several times in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. All he did was play games with the computer!

Thank goodness that both my son and my wife ignored my huffing and puffing bout wasting time. What I failed to appreciate was that Pac Man was an entry ort into his future profession.

After the first ten hours on AOL, I began to appreciate the many educational avenues open for me to pursue. By the end of my 50 hours, I was no longer the "ugly little neophyte" afraid to "ASCII for help," but instead, I had blossomed into a research maven able to delete and bookmark.

When I stumbled across www.beaucoup.com, (more than 800 search engines) my future educational venue appeared before me like a "yellow brick road." The exponential growth rate of human knowledge was dooming the static, printed textbook, and the need for virtual annotated bibliographic web support seemed to be a natural continuation of my teaching career. I could search for relevant and current URLs and keep student textbooks reflective of almost real time events.

I started with the textbooks and publishers that I had known and employed during my 28-year career. After my sixth query letter, I received a initial positive response, and within one month my first research and development contract was signed. My contract called for me to find, identify and abstract web sites that would support a controversial issues text that I had used for more than 15 years in the classroom.

The very day that my first WWW pay check arrived, I ran out and made 30 copies. Since that euphoric instant, I have sent out five additional proposals and one is under serious consideration.

As we say in the "HTML racket" one link leads to another. One book company, while politely rejecting my url research proposal, indicated that they liked my writing skills and may have some history writing projects for me to consider.

From teacher to unwilling retiree to net nerd to teacher. Yahoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!