clair055

I met up with a teacher the other day that has the privilege of introducing the Civil War to her fourth graders each year.  The word “introducing” is a little misleading, however.  I live in Georgia where natives, no matter the ethnicity, are born with “The War” ingrained in our souls.   We can’t escape it, we can’t deny it – it’s always there.   Some of our earliest collective memories are filled with the statues around the town square, old family photographs; we hear the stories and see the preserved battlefields that dot our landscape. I haven’t met a fourth grade student yet who doesn’t know something about the Civil War, but the fourth school year is designated by the Georgia Social Studies curriculum to formally learn about the war in an academic setting.   My own personal experience indicates students are eager to begin the process.   A formal study helps them connect to family stories still lingering around the Sunday dinner tabl...

Haiti…it’s been a week and one day since the devastating earthquake and every day we hear more and more heartbreaking stories tempered with a triumph here and there. As I write this post one major news outlet reports 200,000 dead and 1.5 million homeless….and now a second earthquake. Heartbreaking…. Haiti has had such a sad and terrible history considering certain accolades. Haiti was the first independent nation in Latin America. The island-nation is the first black-led country in the world from post-colonial times, and Haiti has the distinction of being the only nation that gained independence as part of a successful slave rebellion. Yet…..falling victim to such a horrific natural disaster isn’t the only time Haiti has fallen prey to hard times. Times have always been hard for Haiti. The list is long, but to be brief I have to mention exploitation at the hands of the Spanish, the process of being racked with infectious diseases brought by the so-called civilized Europeans and the vir...