Taking Notes

The bank that owns the property next door to me is preparing to sell it. So yesterday, the entire contents of the former occupants’ lives were dumped on the sidewalk for everyone to pick through and take away. I walked over to see what the hullabaloo was all about and found a first edition cloth bound copy of William Manchester’s Goodbye, Darkness. I stood there for a moment in the gathering twilight thinking what were the chances that I would find that book—one I reviewed a while back, and written by my current obsession, the historian Manchester—in the midst of all the rubble.

As I continued looking through the junk, I found a box of notebooks. “Northwestern” was embossed on the covers. Someone had written “Microbiology” underneath the college logo in black marker. There were maybe ten notebooks in all. I took one up and began paging through it. There, in the neatest handwriting I had ever seen, were someone’s notes for her study. Things were labeled, diagrammed, cross-referenced. Chapters were delineated, outlined, organized. I could write a book with those notes, maybe several books.

And so I was thinking of note-taking.

I have become a compulsive note-taker. I took notes in school, like any student, but the notebooks I kept were messy, revealing someone who had yet to decide what his handwriting would look like, or if he would eschew handwriting altogether and be a printer, like his father. There were notes in cursive following the best my Catholic school teachers could do. Other pages were mere scrawls—disorganized, unclear, containing huge gaps when I probably tuned out in class.

After I became a teacher, my handwriting and my note-taking skills improved. My biggest problem was my left-hand writing: I suffered tremendous writer’s cramp if I had to write more than a page continuously. Years ago, I taught myself to type, and I have always found myself a quicker typist than a handwritten note-taker. I have settled on a procedure that works well for me. I write notes in handwriting in either a reporter’s notebook, or a Moleskin notebook. The notes tend to be bullet points, short, brief ideas or lines, sometimes quotes. Later I transcribe them to the computer when time allows. Typed or rewritten on legal pads, I gather the pages in file folders and place them in a cabinet near my desk. This is how I build my teaching and writing.

Notes to me are everything. Which was why I was so sad to find those notebooks. A whole study, it would seem, regarded as trash.

My students take notes as I teach, and I often ask them what they are noting. I am interested in how they process the information, how they determine what to note and what to leave out. For the younger classes, I am responsible to teach them how to note. I tell them not to try to write down everything the teacher says, especially if the material is covered in a textbook or set of readings. Teachers come in two flavors, many times: the one that lectures strictly by the book, and the other that uses the book as a jumping off point for additional learning. If the teacher sticks to material in the book, the student has two opportunities to note. If something is missed in the lecture or discussion, then by reading the chapter or section, the missing pieces can be filled in. If the teacher uses the text as a beginning, then taking notes during the class is a necessity, and to miss the readings and the lectures is to miss two different things.

In high school today, I think the move is away from lecture and more toward cooperative learning, group projects, presentations, seminar approaches. I see my students glaze over when the lecture goes on too long, however, the Socratic method is my best tool. It takes patience and resilience to keep hammering at them with questions to lead them to the answers, but if I do it right the entire class is involved. On my less perfect days, I wind up cutting corners and giving away the answers, not the best way to teach. Student involvement is key.

For me, one guide when teaching is to remember how I learned. Even now, how do I learn new material? The most important difference between me as a student and me as a teacher is that the teacher wants to learn, has questions he wants answered, and loves to research. Not so the student of yester-year. My students are being put through the paces, as I was at their age. Therefore, the questions are the teacher’s not the students’. The trick is to get the students to want to know, to ask the questions. The questions are far more important than the answers.

So notes, highlighting and annotating texts, how do we sort it all out? Some is intuitive. You can feel when something is important. Maybe the teacher repeats it several times, or it comes up repeatedly in the material. When I read, the sentence seems to jump out at me, especially when reading history or science. Literature is a bit trickier. There, repeated readings are a must. I cannot figure out where a poem or chapter or short story is going until I have read it through once. Then I can work through it again and find what is important. Literature calls for repeated readings.

All in all, note-taking is a personal skill; students must find a system that works best for them. That is another reason why I found those notebooks, left in the cold and darkness at the curb, so sad, indeed. They are the product of someone’s thinking, considering, living with a subject. They are a record of what that person found interesting, and placed enough value in that time was spent gathering the information. Sure, it could have been just a class, but it was learning, nonetheless, and an indication of a mind-life. Now, in the midst of widespread foreclosures and a difficult economy, the notebooks are rubbish.

A Better Heart: The Search For School Library Funding

The following is an essay I wrote for a contest where the prize is a "library makeover." Granted, the prizes are computers not books, but at this point, I'll take what I can get. Our school library is small, and really needs to break into two libraries: one for elementary school students and one devoted to the needs of the middle/high school. If anyone out there has some money they wish to donate in this tough economy, we can put your name on the building. It will be our library, and yours, too! We will even let you check out as many books as you want for as long as you live. As for the contest, I had 2000 characters, including spaces and punctuation, to make my case.

The library is the heart of the school. Our heart is insufficient for our student body.

We are a pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade school of 650 students located in Canoga Park, California, founded in 1976 by the Armenian General Benevolent Union, an organization providing a cultural education for Armenians who were dispersed around the world following the genocide of 1917. This was the first mass killing in the twentieth century, and a model for the horrors of the Holocaust twenty-three years later. We know this because Hitler told us in his own words, haunting us for generations: “Who remembers the Armenians?”

The teachers, the principals, the librarians, the counselors, the students, parents, even the maintenance staff, battle daily to prove Hitler wrong, to insure that one and a half million Armenians buried in the landslide of history did not die in vain.

But we need your help.

We need a stronger heart.

We have a small library that must service all students, toddlers to young adults. We want to build, to expand, to become a force in education, and we feel this process cannot move forward unless we have a better library. Having Acer technology would allow us to maximize our space and offer students more opportunities to discover their world. Research projects, internet connections, worldwide communication possibilities, graphic arts, writing, history, literature, languages, all can be accessed and enhanced using technology. Our parents have donated money, we have reached out to the community, we have begged, borrowed, and pleaded, but we need more.

Books are sacred to us. Libraries are our cathedrals. Like the phoenix in the ancient legend, we wish to soar from the ashes of destruction to create a better world. We need help to gather the tools to make a difference.

We have a good heart, and we are willing to push beyond our boundaries. With your help we can strengthen our resources and endeavor to discover our future. We can build a better, stronger heart.

Laundry Room Libraries

Great article in today’s The New York Times. Writer Susan Dominus talks about “saving the planet and expanding the mind.” How, you might ask? Her neighbors in Washington Heights piled all of their used books in the common laundry room in the basement where others might have a crack at them.

“At my former home…I read the narrative of some unidentified young couple through the titles that accumulated in our makeshift laundry room library,” she writes. “First The Fertility Diet, then several months later, What To Expect When You’re Expecting, and finally a slew of baby-naming books…A glance through the laundry room stacks provides a point of entry into lives that sometimes seem opaque, for all proximity.”

Dominus goes on to say that “Originally just a pile of books like those in so many other building basements, the library became a library about six years ago, when a superintendent put in some shelves.”

I marveled at this ad hoc common person’s library. I lived in an apartment for almost eighteen years; never saw a book in our laundry room, however, the manager did horde all the cast-off furniture, regardless of value, every time a tenant moved out.

At my school last year, a parent donated a grocery bag stuffed with thrillers, mysteries, and detective fiction. I do not spend much time in the faculty room, so it took a few months before I noticed the bag in the corner. The generous student was one of mine, and he asked me why the books were thrown in the corner of the faculty room. “Couldn’t we put them in the library?” he asked. Evidently, that is where the family thought they would be going. “Since the library does not want them,” he said, “why don’t we put them in the classroom shelves?”

Good idea! So there they are, along with other books I have collected, purchased, found over the years. Only a few students take advantage, however, and I wonder why.

It seems my students only want to borrow books when they need them for class. “Mr. Martin, do you have any extra copies of Hamlet? Sure kid. It’s on the shelf. They are reluctant to buy unless we will use the book for several weeks running. Some do check them out of the public or school library. Last year, I was asked if they could download the book on their iPhones. A larger number are lucky enough to have parents who take them regularly to the local chain book store.

I think the laundry room library is a good thing, but I like to buy fresh copies of my books. I love cracking one open, highlighting text, marking up the margins. If the book is rare or difficult to find, I refrain from marking and use post-it notes. Having grown up in the public library near my childhood home, now that I can, I buy fresh from the store whenever possible.

I also wonder about the culture of a laundry room library. It seems people in other cities value books more. Every time it comes up here in Los Angeles, someone always reminds me that we do have a book culture, as evidenced by the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA every April. Yeah, I guess that counts for something. Still, in other cities, people read on the subway to and from work. They read in the parks at break, on lunch hour, or on Sunday afternoons. New York has news stands on corners throughout Manhattan. In L.A. books are important for movie sales. It is more important to be seen reading, I think, then it is to read. And the last time I was in a Border’s several weeks ago, I was appalled at the collection of freaks and weirdoes inhabiting the aisles. Some were speaking aloud to themselves, others were singing, rehearsing scripts, acting out. One guy was dressed in a shabby tuxedo with a top hat and cane, I kid you not. Most of them were reading books and magazines only to throw them on the floor or back onto any random shelf. Then some serious buyer can come along and pay full price for a used book.

No, Los Angeles has a way to go before we start setting up lending libraries down in the laundry room. It’s too bad. I think we’re missing something.

The Painting of You*

The Painting of You
By William Michaelian
Author’s Press Series Volume 1; $10.00, paper
ISBN 978-0-557-12874-7
Ordering Information

Long before we knew the term “Alzheimer’s Disease” we knew the signs. We called it senility, dementia, forgetfulness. I remember going to see my great-grandmother, then in her eighties, and finding half-eaten hamburgers in her cupboards with the clean plates. I remember another great-grandparent who spent all of her time in a single twin bed, staring at the ceiling, her lips gently moving as if speaking to someone up there. Her eyes were twin vacant holes, the pupils large and black, nearly blotting out the colored iris. Sometimes she would turn her head and stare directly into my six year old face, and it scared me, the emptiness, the lack of anything there, the body still animated, but the mind vanished, or vanquished by an invisible disease.

Alois Alzheimer gave us the technical name for how we lose our loved ones, piece by piece, to a disintegrating mind. He was a German neurologist who lived 1864-1915, and it is for him the disease was named in 1907. But names and pathologies do not help us when faced with loss. They do not mitigate the grief of the family, and the stress and crushing weight of caring for one whose mind has fragmented and floated away.

William Michaelian, in his new book, The Painting of You, takes us on a journey as he cares for his mother who suffers from the disease. His mixture of poetry and prose is rich and evocative, the kind of writing that does not lose itself in sentimentality but nevertheless inspires a deeply emotional response in the reader.

The book is organized chronologically, like a journal, and begins as Michaelian must spend more and more time each day at his mother’s home, amongst family heirlooms, photographs, and artifacts of his history. It is a poignant irony that even as she remembers less, Michaelian must remember more, realizing that memory can be handed down from one generation to another, and that part of his responsibility is not only to care for his parent, but become the guardian of her memories.

“Now she is eighty-three,” he writes in the opening entry, “and the sunlight on her face remembers me. / It remembers the boy I have been and will never be again, caresses the lines / and fences with eyes blind to my disgrace, inscribes a message on the wind, / seeks, blesses, grieves, attends, ceaseless in its toil, eager to begin…” The light is fading on her, and the son finds he must bear witness to the decline and watch over her gradual dissolution.

Mixed in with his poetic ruminations, Michaelian includes memories and reflections on his own half century on earth. He describes his origins as a writer, his days in the fertile soil of central California, the powerful symbolism of the vineyard, the farmlands, the heat and dust. We see “pumpkins and a field of corn, / Melons, apples, gourds, an ancient wooden trailer / With buckets of bright chrysanthemums.”

Entries include poetry, journal writing, dream reflection, and much of it has appeared in the writer’s other books, Winter Poems and Another Song I Know, and on his websites williammichaelian.com and Recently Banned Literature. (I have written previously about his work on this blog.)

Michaelian brings us to new realizations and revelations, often about the commonplace and ordinary, but he makes us see the world differently. This is a writer who always makes even the mundane poetic. His writing is haunting and sensory, addressing simple things in a profound way.

One such entry in this book is “From Common Objects, Hidden Dreams: A Daily Journal,” where he writes of his mother’s dish towels that were a gift from Michaelian’s grandmother to her daughter just after his parents’ marriage in 1943. “In other words,” he writes, “my mother is using sixty-two-year-old towels.” He goes on to catalogue the other things she has from that time: measuring cups, bread pans, clocks, canning implements, tea sets, tables, and pictures. He calls her house a museum, and his mother, in more lucid moments, asks him if she has too many pictures on the walls. When he suggests she remove some and asks which he should take down, she smiles. “None of them, of course,” he writes. “None of them, forever and ever, as long as the two of us shall live.” This launches Michaelian into the poetry of reflection: “Generations watch and listen from their places on the wall. Armenians, Swedes, lunatics. Farmers, poets, revolutionaries. Angry, happy, surprised, proud. In the dark of night, their remembered spirits leave the frames and drift about the rooms.”

The book builds to a breaking point: Michaelian finds himself exhausted with the demands of caring for her. His sleep-deprived body aches, his family suffers, the stress begins to threaten his health. His mother is aware of the progression of her disease, and one morning at breakfast tells him: “You know, I just realized something. It dawned on me that I’m never going to get better, and that I’m really just dying—and too slowly.” It is a heart-rending moment between mother and son. “Such sudden logic,” he writes, “from someone who almost always has difficulty telling the time.”

So the ending is inevitable, and Michaelian must seek care for his mother in a facility that can deal with her degenerative state. “I’ll never forget my mother’s face / at the window as I drove away / from the nursing home.” After all the days, we reach the end, and nothing can soothe the departure. From his final entries in The Painting of You, we see that this decision and his eventual taking-over of his mother’s home as his own were difficult days for the writer. He is the keeper of the museum now until the day comes when he must pass the torch to his children and grandchildren.

In The Painting of You, he speaks of what is lost, the joy of living, the pain of regret, the desperation of fading memories. Michaelian describes how memory is a fluid thing, passed from parent to child. It is in this transmission, this thread that runs through the ages, that we discover who we are, what led to this moment, and life is reduced to its most important elements: family, love, the joy and heartbreak of being alive. This is the moment we hear the whispers of history, when the ghosts sit down with us and tell us stories. In the immense darkness of a winter’s night, he evokes the disappearing world of his mother, memories of life and family, the delicate smoke of dreams. His words are profound, rich, elemental, the poetry of history, the sepia-toned mystery of who we are, what we have lost, and what we must never forget.




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Addendum: Thanks to sanjeev for adding on as a follower to The Teacher's View.



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*Update: William Michaelian's second book in the Author's Press Series has now been released. You can order the book here. The specifics are as follows:

No Time To Cut My Hair
By: William Michaelian
Author's Press Series Volume 2; $12.00, paper
ISBN: 978-0-557-20222-5
Also available as an e-book

Goodbye, Darkness

Photo courtesy of Wesleyan University


Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War
By William Manchester
Little, Brown/Back Bay Books; $16.95, paper
ISBN 978-0-316-50111-5

Late in William Manchester’s superb memoir of soldiering in the Pacific during World War II, he clarifies why no other generation since could do what they did. “To fight World War II,” he writes, “you had to have been tempered and strengthened in the 1930s Depression by a struggle for survival…And you had to know that your whole generation, unlike the Vietnam generation, was in this together…You needed nationalism, the absolute conviction that the United States was the envy of all other nations, a country which had never done anything infamous, in which nothing was insuperable, whose ingenuity could solve anything by inventing something. You felt sure that all lands, given our democracy and our know-how, could shine as radiantly as we did.”

Do we long for those days of absolute evil on our doorstep? No, we long for that fortitude, lost forever to the ages.

When I was in high school, we were required to read Manchester’s excellent narrative history of the United States, The Glory and the Dream, a history book like none I had ever read in school. Years later, while combing through someone’s junk at a garage sale, I found a perfectly good cloth first edition of that book. I purchased it, and thus began a mania for Manchester. I have since found almost every thing the man wrote, most of it, unfortunately out of print. He died in 2004.

Goodbye, Darkness is simply the most poetic memoir I have ever read. Part history, part recollection of a Marine’s life in the Pacific, the book reads like a novel. I finished it on Veterans’ Day, and I do not think I fully understood that holiday until I read this book.

Manchester begins with the first man he killed in war, a Japanese sniper, who was shooting down Marines and G.I.s alike. A man diametrically opposed to violence all his life who suffered greatly at the hands of bullies, Manchester finds himself pinned down by this enemy. If he remains in his foxhole, the sniper will eventually kill him, of that he is certain. He has one opportunity to rush the fisherman’s shack where the sniper is hidden. He takes his .45 and rushes up the hill, boots in the door, and finds an empty room. Another door awaits within, and he realizes that the sniper now knows he is coming. He smashes through the second door expecting to be killed in his tracks, except the sniper is tangled in his gun harness. Manchester squeezes off a round, missing the soldier. His second shot finds its target, shredding the enemy’s thigh and mutilating the femoral artery. “A wave of blood gushed from the wound,” he writes. “Then another boiled out, sheeting across his legs, pooling on the earthen floor.” The soldier sinks down, bleeding to death in minutes. Manchester vomits his C-ration beans and urinates on himself. He has killed a man and wonders: “Is this what they mean by ‘conspicuous gallantry?’”

From here, Manchester takes us through his life and history, but also the history of America and the great wars of the twentieth century. We see his father in the Great War, badly wounded by an exploding shell that kills a comrade instantly. On All Souls’ Day, the elder Manchester is carried on a litter into a tent “reserved for the doomed” and left there to die, a hopeless case. Gangrene infects his shoulder, and “He lay there in his blood and corrupt flesh for five days, unattended, his death certificate already signed.” He survives. His right arm becomes useless, “a rigid length of bone scarcely covered by flesh, with a claw of clenched fingers at the end.” He cannot sign his name to his discharge papers because of this injury, so he makes an X, “like an illiterate.”

We see the younger Manchester growing up in New England, a somewhat sickly child who takes early to books, and writes his own stories “derivative of Poe, on the Underwood” typewriter his father uses in his job as a social worker. “I cannot remember a time in my life,” he writes, “when I was not deep in a book.” His calling is clear, even though he is not a stellar student. His is an intellectual life, one that leads on naturally to his oeuvre of a few novels and a great number of history books, all written in a fluid and engrossing style that defies conventional history textbook writing.

Goodbye, Darkness becomes a journey. Manchester retraces the battles and skirmishes in which he participated during the war in the Pacific. The book jumps back and forth between his late 1970s return to the fields and atolls of the Pacific theater and the days of the war. He details the fighting and dying that went on, and then shows us the decaying monuments and rusting junk on the field upon his return. Many of the memorials are damaged by time, or worse, by vandals. We learn about the costs of war, the impact on one man’s life, and the heartbreaking moment when he realizes that all of it will one day be forgotten. There is bitterness and thanksgiving, the grace of a good death and the turning point of a young man’ life exposed.

The book ends as it begins, with Manchester killing a man, again a sniper, this time behind a boulder. The writer takes an action that is now second nature: he prepares to die to save lives. For one who has been bullied all his life, the Marine Manchester is a crack shot, and he puts his skill to the test by diving into the open, sighting in on the enemy, and preparing to fire. A mortar explodes in front of him, and he is showered with debris, but as the dust clears, he sees his target and fires, striking the man in the face. He pumps several more rounds into the body, and the soldier is down. He returns to his partner nearby to find his comrade’s face blown away. Another soldier dies. Manchester continues on, and as he passes the dead Japanese sniper, he gives the head a swift kick.

The war officially ends for Manchester when he is badly injured by a mortar round that vaporizes two fellow soldiers and leaves pieces of their bones inside Manchester’s body as shrapnel. He suffers a brain injury. He is sent to a series of hospitals, and in San Francisco, the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima reaches him. The days of war are done. Japan surrenders shortly thereafter, and Manchester returns to civilian life. He lists the men he knew before the war who accompanied him into battle. Many are dead, and Manchester gives a litany of names and their fates. It is a literal lost generation.

I found a picture of William Manchester from the archives of Wesleyan University where he was a writer-in-residence, teacher, and scholar for most of his career. It is the desktop background on my home and classroom computers. I greet him each morning. He stares at me, pipe in mouth, as if wondering why I have disturbed him at his work. I gaze back at him, thinking about that long ago senior history class at my high school. I kept my paperback copy of The Glory and the Dream all these years, bound in duct tape, the pages torn, highlighted, annotated.

Could we today ever accomplish what the men and women of Manchester’s generation did? I think not. The world has changed, the concept of war has changed, and America is no longer the country of right and good. Guantanamo, water-boarding, Dick Cheney, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have changed all that.

Manchester wrote his book to say goodbye to the darkness, the nightmarish days of war where smoke obliterated the sun, and blood ran into the sea. It is a different world today. Manchester has gone, but the darkness remains.

Addendum: I would like to thank Gabriel for joining The Teacher's View as a follower.

Our Place In The World

“…but what I remember most is Mango Street, sad red house, the house I belong but do not belong to.”Sandra Cisneros
The House On Mango Street

I am blessed with some great ninth grade English students. Sure, they are struggling to achieve in their first English Honors course, but we have some great discussions. They have things to say, opinions to share, and they think. There is not enough of that going on in the world anymore.

We are reading Sandra Cisneros’ The House On Mango Street, a slim volume that is more poetry than prose, and is actually below their reading level, but rich in content and insight into what it is like to be different, to be in the early teenage years, and to witness the emptiness and desolation of difficult circumstances, to be filled with regret for missed opportunities, or worse, opportunities that never materialize.

Cisneros’ characters are trapped, and her voice in the novel is Esperanza, a fiercely brave young girl who wants more from life than her circumstances offer and has a ringside seat for the disappointments and tragedies of failed dreams.

Esperanza tells us that she wants “Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.” After living her life in the crowded house on Mango Street, she dreams of a home of her own, where she can be an individual, where no one will mess with her, or take her things, and she can write and read and think. Esperanza is a different character from her friends and family. Over and over again in the novel we see the futility of empty lives.

There is Marin whose boyfriend is in Puerto Rico. She is more worldly and experienced than Esperanza and “knows lots of things.” The things Marin knows are about sex, and what a girl must do to get attention from boys. She smokes cigarettes and wears short skirts. But the real heartbreak comes in the last lines. “Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the same song somewhere. I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life.”

There is her father “who wakes up tired in the dark” for another day of work. But today, Esperanza’s grandfather has died. It is the first time she has seen her papa cry.

The last chapter always nails me in the heart. “Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes.” Esperanza talks of leaving Mango Street, of getting out and into the world, leaving the past behind. “I like to tell stories,” she says. “I tell them inside my head. I tell them after the mailman says, Here’s your mail. Here’s your mail he said.” Cisneros has the lilting rhythms of Dr. Seuss, of children’s poetry. “I like to tell stories. I am going to tell you a story about a girl who didn’t want to belong.”

We are all the people we have ever been. Wordsworth’s great line: “The child is the father of the man.” All the places we have lived, all the disappointments, the triumphs, the days of bearing witness, and the nights of fevered dreams, they are what make us. Esperanza speaks of this theme. She traces the litany of all the places she has lived. “I put it down on paper,” she tells us, “and then the ghost does not ache so much. I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free.”

My students are Armenian-American. They are searching for a way to remain Armenian while also becoming part of American society. They have, quite literally, a foot in each world, split like a compass straddling a circle. Many of their relatives and their Armenian teachers tell them to remember: culture, food, language, history and values. But the pull of America is strong, the pressure of peers, the desire to fit in, even stronger. I feel for them and empathize with their plight. To assimilate is to fail their elders; to remain isolated from American culture is self-defeating. Which way to go?

So they connect with Esperanza. They see their own future journeys in her desire to escape from Mango Street to find her home in the world. I share with them my own conundrum: I had to sever the ties with my family in order to find myself. The cost is loneliness, guilt, regret. But to not break away is to remain trapped, like so many characters in the novel.

Cisneros says it best in the closing lines of the book: “They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out.”

We are all looking for our place in the world. I watch my students struggle with this, make mistakes, suffer the pangs of anger and disappointment. They push back against the forces that try to hold them close. They must leave, if only to gain some distance, some perspective. It is only by leaving that one can have any hope of finding a way back.

We must, in the end, be fearless. We must trust the journey to bring us home.

Thank You*

Just a quick note to thank Amber Johnson from Online Schools.org for listing The Teacher's View in her blog post, "100 Blogs Every New Teacher Should Read." Ms. Johnson has sent me several links to her work and continually reads my writing, so thanks and praise to her are long overdue. In addition, her site features many blogposts, lists and resources for teachers. It is a valuable tool to bookmark.

Also, thanks to all who read and comment or send me email. I appreciate the feedback. J.D. and ALeks, thank you for adding on as followers for The Teacher's View. Your readership is appreciated.

Finally, William Michaelian has a new book out, which I will be reviewing shortly, about caring for his mother who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. The book is an artful blend of poetry and prose, and is part of his Author's Press Series. Information on the book and ordering can be found here.

*Update: I would also like to thank Jim and Gary for adding on today, October 23, as followers. Welcome aboard and thanks for reading.