Samuel F. Pickering (American professor of English)

* Sam Pickering ― whose unconventional teaching style was one of the inspirations for the character of Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams in the film Dead Poets Society ― has Uranus in the first degree of Gemini quincunx Williams' first-degree Scorpio Ascendant. Pickering's Uranus is retrograde: he has eschewed publicity raised by the film.

WIKIPEDIA BIOGRAPHY

Samuel F. Pickering (born September 30, 1941) is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Pickering specializes in the familiar essay, children's literature, nature writers, and 18th and 19th century English literature. In addition to teaching, he has published many collections of non-fiction personal essays as well as over 200 articles.

One of Pickering's students at Montgomery Bell Academy, Tom Schulman, later wrote the script for the film Dead Poets Society, basing the pedagogy of Robin Williams' character very loosely on Pickering's eccentric style. Pickering has eschewed publicity raised by the film and has since regarded the unorthodoxy of his classroom behavior as more goalless than that depicted in Dead Poets Society, in which unorthodoxy is employed deliberately as a way to preach the values of non-conformity and carpe diem. Instead, Pickering has commented that "I did such things not so much to awaken students as entertain myself."

Read more from his Wikipedia biography.

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HOROSCOPE NOTES

Pickering has the Moon in unconventional Aquarius (at the apex of a T-square) ruling and quincunx his Cancerian Ascendant from the cusp of the 8th: He "has often considered his teaching style purely purposeless and impulsive, and he criticizes those who have subsequently asked him about his philosophy on education, responding that people, regarding such large social questions, have trouble with 'the realization that mostly it's all meaningless. I don't know why people want answers'" Wikipedia.

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NATAL DATA and ASTROLOGY CHART

BIRTH DATA: Samuel Francis Pickering, Jr., 30 September 1941, 23:30 (11:30 p.m.) CST (+6), Nashville, Tennessee, USA (36n09, 86w47). ASC: 20 Cancer. RR: A (from him in an autobiography). SOURCE: Sy Scholfield (c) quotes Samuel F. Pickering, A Comfortable Boy: A Memoir (Mercer University Press, 2010), p. 1: "I know a bit about my birth. I was born at 11:30 at night on September 30, 1941." Place of birth from various biographical resources.

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Leoti L. West, 1851-1933 (American educationalist)

* Leoti L. West ― eulogized as "the Inland Empire's most famous teacher" ― had Jupiter on her MC ruling the very schoolteacherish Chiron in Sagittarius on her Ascendant which, in turn, ruled her Equal 10th house, the domain of fame and career. A trailblazing educationalist, West was born under the exact conjunction of Uranus and Pluto in pioneering Aries (in the 5th house of education no less).

GOOGLE BOOKS BLURB

Leoti L. West (1851–1933) had longed for the opportunity “to be west and grow up with the country.” In 1878, at the age of twenty-seven, West left her Iowa home to teach at a new school in Washington Territory. Undertaking the two-week journey alone, the young teacher arrived in a Northwest that was still very much a pioneer territory. The school that West opened was one of the first in the area and soon attracted students from all over the Northwest. By the end of West’s first term, her original class of seventeen had grown to nearly one hundred students housed in a small schoolroom. In 1881 the school was officially named the Colfax Academy. West taught in Washington for more than fifty years and influenced thousands of graduates. West’s reminiscences first appeared in the Spokesman-Review as a series of pioneer sketches that were later collected and published as The Wide Northwest. Her memoir of her adventures details not only an impressive teaching career but also the pioneer experience of a woman in the late nineteenth century.

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NATAL DATA and ASTROLOGY CHART

BIRTH DATA: 18 March 1851, 01:30 (1:30 a.m.) LMT (+6:02:39), Dubuque, Iowa, USA (42n30, 90w39). ASC: 24 Sagittarius. RR: A/B (from her in an autobiography). SOURCE: Sy Scholfield (c) quotes Leoti L. West, The Wide Northwest: Historic Narrative of America's Wonder Land As Seen by a Pioneer Teacher. [1927]. (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), p. 9: "I was born at 1:30 o'clock Tuesday morning, March 18, 1851." Place of birth from Max Binheim, ed., Women of the West (Los Angeles: Publishers Press, 1928).

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