In other news...

Be sure to catch the fun Flip Clip videos over at From Finance to Fiction with Robin Jones Gunn and Linda Evans Shepherd.

Also, I wrote a response to the Waiting for Superman documentary. Have you seen it? What did you think?

Grab Your Cape!

Waiting for Superman  has made us all realize that change needs to happen within our educational system.  However, this paradigm shift in education will take time.  So what can be done immediately while a longer term plan is put into place?  The answer: Grab your cape and become a superhero!  

Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama during the late 1960s and 1970s, I learned the importance of education.  My mother was an English teacher at a local high school, and my father was then Dean of the Music School at Samford University.  My mother always taught me that “Education levels the playing field.”  That is why she would take an hour each week to sit down at the kitchen table with Flora, our African American cleaning lady, and teach her how to read and write.  Years later when Flora died from cancer, her sisters told my mother that a highlight of Flora’s life was learning how to read and write during those hours spent at the kitchen table with my mother.  Flora no longer had to sign her name with an “x” and she could read what she was signing. Even in her seventies, my mother still volunteered at local high schools and tutored at-risk students. She also designed remedial English programs to help struggling students understand the basic concepts of grammar.

Read the rest here.

Labels: linda evans shepherd, robin jones gunn, waiting for superman

posted by Margaret McSweeney @ 11:41 AM