Storytelling
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Who Was X in Your Family?
On the day I received my bachelor’s degree in music, my father told me that I was the first person in his family to graduate from college. It was a fact I’d never known. Years later, while digging into genealogy, I learned that my paternal grandparents–the generation that emigrated to Boston–received only a few years of schooling. Continue reading
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Family Storytelling at Thanksgiving
After the pumpkin pie is put away, take your phone and sit with a loved one in a corner. Ask some thoughtful questions. Listen and record (video or audio) their responses. Why? You’re participating in StoryCorps’ Great Thanksgiving Listen, by asking meaningful questions of someone close to you. Storytelling is an art form that links us humans Continue reading
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Military Family Stories
Veterans of World War II rarely speak of their service. In the case of my father, humility is part of the reason. “Everybody did it,” he shrugged, referring to his peers in the 1940s. He is one of a handful of remaining WWII veterans in his town. Read his story, published this week in the Continue reading
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Do Pets School at Work, or Work at School?
To mark Take Your Dog to Work Day (June 26), I offer this piece from 2010, published at Lesley University as “The Magic of Mario and G Force.” Learn what a difference pets make in the classroom. It’s a steamy spring afternoon in a city school. Twenty-six hot first graders in navy polo shirts plop onto the rug to hear their Continue reading
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Buried Treasure: X Marks the Spot
Before students write a story, ask them to draw an illustrated map. Visualizing, creating, drawing, painting, coloring, and discussing a map stimulates the imagination in ways that words sometimes cannot. It worked for Robert Louis Stevenson (1854-1894), who spent a rainy day with his son drawing this map, which inspired his masterpiece Treasure Island: This marvelous text in Continue reading
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