clair057

Well, the Royal Wedding is almost upon us. Many of us wish we could be on the guest list to have one of the treasured seats in the congregation, but unfortunately, we don’t have the right kind of name – one containing a royal title. Since it is the time for all the wedding hoopla to take place I decided to have some fun with my Facebook status by posting the following – “What is the name of your Royal Wedding Guest name? Start with Lord or Lady…Your first name is the first name of your grandparents….Surname is the name of your first pet….The name of the street you grew up on with “of”.” Who knew I had such important friends? They came up with names like Lord Everett Pretzel of Viceroy, Lady Lilby Piper of Preakness, Lord Wilbur Smokey of Welcome Hill, Lady Elizabeth Pepe of Pullen, Lady Annie Bucky of Chapel Hill, Lady Sarah Tinkerbell of Valencia and last but not least Lord Charlie Hotdog of Windridge. The made up names are rather comical, aren’t they? However, real royal titles can b...

Occasionally a former student or a young friend will contact me and want to interview me about my writing. Recently a young friend had an assignment to complete and during the process of answering his questions I decided I would share the answers here. 1. What stirred your ambition to be a writer, specifically non-fiction? I always enjoyed writing essays, research reports, and term papers in school. I know that is very unusual, but the truth is the truth. I don’t write non-fiction the way most folks do. I have to infuse something of myself – my thoughts, my feelings, my emotions – into the piece. Many of my postings and articles contain bits and pieces from my personal life or real situations that have happened in the classroom. Relating a bunch of facts to people can be boring. Using facts and making a parallel to something personal seems to draw others in because the process enables them to open their own doors and make connections to the content. I was fortunate to have a wonderful ...

You reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now in your office--six clerks are within call. Summon any one and make this request: "Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Correggio." Will the clerk say, "Yes, sir," and go do the task? On your life he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye and ask one or more of the following questions: Who was he? Which encyclopedia? Where is the encyclopedia? I was hired for that? Don't you mean Bismarck? What's the matter with Charlie doing it? Is he dead? Is there any hurry? Sha'n't I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself? What do you want to know for? And I will lay you ten to one that after you have answered the questions and explained how to find the information, and why you want it, the clerk will go off and get one of the other clerks to help him to try to find [Correggio]--and then come back and tell you there is no such man....

I walk over to my laptop and make a quick “click”. The sounds of Aretha Franklin fill the classroom…. Chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chian Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools Five long years I thought you were my man But I found out I'm just a link in your chain....  found out I’m just a link in your chain…. Go ahead – click on the video and listen. I’ll wait. I’m certain you are thinking I’ve lost it. Why is ElementaryHistoryTeacher playing this particular song for nine and ten year olds as the opening salvo to a lesson regarding an aspect of the American Revolution? Don’t click off just yet. I have a connection. Teaching history isn’t all about reading a lesson in a book or having a teacher tell a fascinating story for kids to take notes from. Teaching history is all about making connections and visualizing the links – links in a chain of events that ebb and flow through history to the present day. In this particular exercise where I play the Queen of Soul’s famous song for m...

I visited my father a couple of weekends ago and walked over some of his property. Today, most of it is heavily wooded, but in the early days when my great grandfather and grandfather farmed for a living most of the land was covered in cultivated fields of some sort. My father left the land in the 50s to join the Army and later settled in Atlanta to raise my sister and me. He said he was done with farming, but…….. The land lured him back, and I’ve never known him to not have a tractor of some sort even when we lived in the suburbs. Eventually, he began to return to the farm on the weekends and helped his father with a huge garden. My father is a huge proponent of child labor, so my sister and I were schooled in the ways of plowing a field, scattering seeds, and my favorite farming activity…..picking up rocks. My grandmother and mother taught my sister and me the other side of farming – food preservation. You know…….canning and freezing. During the work week Daddy would visit the local ...

I can remember how the painted wooden planks of our front porch felt on my bare feet during the hot and lazy days of July. I can remember the smell of the dirt in Pa Land’s garden after it had been churned up during a night of pelting rain. I can remember the delight of looking out my bedroom window and discovering a blanket of snow had fallen making even the ugliest parts of my yard beautiful. I can remember heading off to school on cool crisp mornings that gradually morphed into bitterly cold trips as October and November became December and January begging for coats, ear muffs and mittens. I can remember the beginning of Atlanta’s Great Ice Storm of 1973 – the clink, clink, clink of sleet as it began to coat every surface signaling we would be homebound for the next fifteen days or so. Weather has an important role to play in our historical memory. It changes our picnic plans. Derails a lunch we might have planned with an old friend or hits us in the pocketbook. It does not matt...

I’ve been in a fog since Christmas. I know the New Year has come and gone. I know that I should have hit the ground running with resolutions, new schedules, and new habits, but the only thing I seem to have formed a habit with is meandering to and from one project to another. Last week, while I was still trying to recover from being confined to quarters for an entire week while my beloved Atlanta dug out from the snow and ice I felt a little reprieve from the things I knew I must see to – the items I need to get to Goodwill, tax documents, receipts to enter, writing projects to work on and complete – but last week was different. Things were back to normal, and I was still wandering about bumping into thing after thing all needing more than a modicum of attention. Then it hit me. January is always a foggy time for me. The let-down after the holidays, the starkness of the house after decorations have been put away, the damned cold cutting through me like a knife…..all of that and mo...