Marisa Fusaro's Canadian Television Production

If you look at my previous blog, you will see a LONG, LONG, web address! That is the web address that Marisa Fusaro, my former student at Adams Street School (see former blogs) sent me last week to my e-mail address. I tried to copy and paste it to my blog but it will not turn blue, However, if you copy and paste it to your address bar you will see a delightful rehearsal of Marisa's childhood writing of "THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING EMERALD. What really comes through with these wonderful Canadian actors and actresses is their cameraderie and enthusiasm for their craft. They are a lot of fun to watch. Marisa tells me that the production will take place sometime in December. This is all taking place in Ottawa, Canada. Many of you who regularly read my blog know about this already, but if you are new, let me fill you in. Marisa grew up on Shrewsbury Street here in Worcester (Ma.) and went to Adams Street School through the sixth Grade. You can read about our writing and publishing the book "Togetherness" in previous blogs. When she and her group decided to produce the works of children, Marisa recalled her work as a child and looked me up on Google. That's how it all got started.
Another kid in that class was Vinny Pedone who is now a state representative from Worcester serving in the state legislature. Vinny didn't write a play but that troup up in Canada should consider his contribution for production also. Let me summarize it for you: He wrote a story about a dream he had that he was in Antarctica and he found a blueberry bush that was 7centimeters high! (How this blueberry bush was growing in Antarctica I will never know!) Anyway, Vinny and his friends dig up the bush and bring it back to town (wherever that is.) They watch it grow. They contact the President of the United States and are invited to the White House! (Leave it to a future politician to wrangle an invite to Washington!) He gets to Washington only to be rebuffed by the guard at the door because the guard does not believe that this kid could possibly get an invitation to visit the president with his foolish blueberry bush. The story unfortunately ends abruptly as dreams do naturally when Vinny wakes up with his mother asking him, "WOULD YOU LIKE SOME BLUEBERRIES WITH YOUR CORN FLAKES".....(Marisa said she is going to send me the link when the television production takes place in Canada. I can hardly wait!!!!
Postscript: Marisa, if you are reading this: You know, besides the African-American author, Corrine Bostic who has since passed away, there was another lady who was in that project. Do you remember who she was? Her name was Princess White Flower and she was a Nipmuc Indian who came from Grafton, Massachusetts. The ONLY reason I know that is Anthony Petrone wrote a story about her coming to visit the class and teaching the class about Indian celebrations called "POWWOWS". She told the class about a weaved basket that held water and also taught them how to count to five. I can remember Corrine very well, but I have no recollection of Princess White Flower at all. I think she came to the class that one time only. I also remember asking Corrine, who as I recall was an excellent author, whether I had any promise as a writer. Her reply?....."Well, maybe as a newspaper reporter." Hmmm.When I look at that poem I put in "Togetherness", I couldn't agree with her more!......Newspaper reporters are okay though.

http://www.reademtheirwrites.com/Read_Em_Their_Writes/Stories/Entries/2009/8/28_THE_MYSTERY_OF_THE_MISSING_EMERALD.html

Congratulations to Dianna Biancheria

Another alumnus of Adams Street School has made the news in a positive way and made all of her former teachers proud of her I am sure. She is Dianna Biancheria and she was one of my students when I taught at that school. I taught everything there from Grade 6 through Grade 8 and was also the Assistant Principal. Dianna was just elected to the Worcester,Massachusetts School Committee in her first attempt at public office. I am absolutely thrilled for her! Another distinguished graduate of Adams Street School, Vincent Pedone (who was also in one of my classes) currently serves as a STATE REPRESENTATIVE in the state legislature. (I put that in capital letters because the last time I wrote about Vinny I called him a senator.
Adams Street School has had many graduates to be proud of I am sure. I am going to brag here a little about some in my era. In 1983 and 1984 I took two groups of students from the school through the rigors of the Massachusetts History Day contest and won it both years and through the generosity of the neighborhood groups was able to take them on to the National History Day Contest which was held at the University of Maryland at College Park, Maryland. I attribute the success of those two teaching years to a philosophy of teaching and a teaching experiment that I tried. A woman came to Adams Street School one day. Her name was Carol Baldassarri and she was both a lady carpenter and classroom management expert. She was connected with Leslie College and sold me (after long discussions!!) on the idea of a new teaching philosophy. The idea was to do away with the "egg crate" classroom where the children were lined up in rows looking at the child in front of him. We changed everything and included the children in the makeover. We built a loft in the middle of the room. We built "Learning Centers" around the room. We had a math center, a social studies center, a science center, a reading center, an art center. The Loft was the central place and had a ladder to get to the place to do quiet reading. Every day we had a "20 minute reading time" at which time everybody including the teacher read a book.....However, the most important part of the whole concept was it operated on the idea of TRUST WITH RESPONSIBILITY! In other words, those kids got it thorugh their head that I as their teacher was not going to stand over them like a drill sergeant. I was going to TRUST that they would do the right thing, but they had to be RESPONSIBLE. If they had to go to the bathroom, they did not raise their hand and interrupt me while I might be working with another group, they just signed their name on the board and walked out....TRUST.. After awhile it works, but it takes time. After awhile kids respect that trust and will take responsibility.
I think it is this work I did that got me that SIRS/NERC Award at the Boston Sheraton Hotel in 1984. I am really bragging now, but what the hell, the next person to get it from Worcester was Superintendent Caradonio in 1999 and that was it. Nobody else from around here as far as I know.....Well, back to Adams Street School and enough of that....So we Have Vinny, Dianna, ...as famous now...and oh we can't forget Marisa Fusaro up in Canada...read about her in some previous blogs...I hope she gets her play she wrote in my class on television.....Now lets see...who else????....There must be some more famous people.....I can't think right now, but there must be more and I apologize to them for forgetting, but when I remember, I will write about them........Oh, one more thing: Back when I taught at Adams Street School, I wrote a History of the school. Someone told me that that history is now in the Worcester Historical Society Library. I know I don't have a copy of it here at home. I have one copy of "Togetherness", the book we published with Vinny Pedone and Marisa Fusaro's class, but the history of Adams Street School????....I will have to go find it myself..........I didn't intend for this to be so long!...I hope Dianna sees this........

Goodbye to Sikandar

I feel a little sad today because I have to say goodbye to my good friend Sikandar who is moving to Woburn, Massachusetts. Sikandar was a second year fellow in the Department of Renal Medicine of The University of Massachusetts. Sikandar is a nephrologist (kidney doctor). His hometown is Lahore, Pakistan and during the time that I have known him he returned there twice to visit his parents. Sikandar's first language is "Irdu" which my wife calls a "crossword puzzle language" because the word appears so often in various crossword puzzles. Sikandar and I would meet to work on English and he always carried this Blackberry communication device with him that does just about everything including sending and receiving e-mails, telephone calls, etc. Many times I listened to him use this "blackberry" in his native language and at times switch from one version of Irdu to another version of the same language! Try that sometime. Sikandar gave me a blue satchel with the name NEPHROLOGY printed on the side of it. I carry a bunch of myy ESL materials in this with me wherever I go and it will be a reminder of one of the busiest and hard-working people I have ever met. Good luck, Sikandar and I hope our paths will cross again. You were great to work with.

A Busy Week

I thought it would be a busy week and it certainly was. My online Moodle English as a Second Language student from New York City came back to Worcester for a brief weekend visit. She kindly invited me to go apple picking with her church group out to Tougas Farms in Northboro and that was lots of fun. They were a very fun-loving yet serious minded group of people as well. I met one lady from Lebanon and her teenaged daughter who live in Boston. She was very proud of the fact that her daughter goes to Boston Latin School. I would be too. It is probably the best high school in America! This particular lady gave me a small cup of what I call 'Turkish coffee". Have you ever drunk that? You have to acquire a taste for it.... I don't know how much "my lady scientist" will appreciate my blabbing about her on my blog, but, I will tell you something: My experiences over the past year and a half have convinced me that there are certain people in this world who desrve the label DEDICATED TO THEIR JOB. Here they are: Research Scientists, Doctors, Priests, Teachers. I am sure there are others, but those are the ones that I can give examples for. Research scientists? They work all kinds of hours. The same is true for the medical doctor.(try tutoring one when they have a million lectures to attend!) A priest? They have weddings and funerals and still I know one who has a parish out of town who STILL finds time to say Mass at a local nursing home for about 25 elderly patients every Thursday morning. Teachers? I have been a teacher all my life and I have seen very few of my colleagues that I would not be proud of. There is one thing for sure for all four professions. You cannot fool people. If you believe in what you do and you are dedicated to it, it will show through to everybody after awhile. The same is also true if you are a "phony baloney" so to speak.
Well, enough of the lectures. I also had fun last week helping Quinsigamond Community College enroll ESL students in their day and evening programs. They will have a huge waiting list, but the state finds itself in difficult financial circumstances and not much can be done about it.

Next Week

I am going to be busier than usual next week. On Monday I have to pick up my lawn mower which has been in the repair shop for the past month. (I have been borrowing my nice neighbor's.) On Wednesday the 7th I will be traveling down to Woburn, Massachusetts for my once a month meeting of my veterans' organization (Military Intelligence Association of New England). This meeting is our annual "lobster meeting".(I am the Vice President this year.) On Thursday, I will travel to Hopkinton, Massachusetts to attend the second Moodle Conference which will be held from 4:00 P.M.until 7:00P.M. at Hopkinton High School. You can read more about this at http://imoodle.imgsoftware.com/img. I am also hoping for a special visitor from New York next weekend. This fabulous lady scientist has done some work in English on my distance learning Moodle site and I am anxious to talk with her about it. Moodle has been very sucessful in the k-12 program across the country. I think it has potential for ESL as well, but it is going to take work and some modifications. I love the challenge. In the meantime, I await my audience with the new superintendent of schools, but that has been over two years now and I am a patient man. (Guest access to my Moodle site ccan be obtained by using the web address above and the password----"scallops".

The Hole in the Letter

Both of my parents were immigrants to the United States. They both came to this country prior to World War I. My father worked in a wire mill and my mother was a domestic housekeeper for a doctor on Harvard Street in Worcester. My father was drafted into the United States Army BEFORE he was a citizen of this country and very nearly gave his life for this country in the Argonne Forest of northern France where he fought in some of the bloodiest fighting. He was a soldier with the 77th Division.
There were five boys in my family. My father kept his war memorabilia in an old steamer trunk and sometimes when we had a snow day in the winter, we would explore that trunk. We would look at and try on the old gas mask. (It had an awful musty odor!) There was a picture with an angel with a sword and a soldier on one knee. The angel appears to be knighting the soldier. Other papers were yellowed and crumbling with age. The one prize that stands out in all our minds was a small envelope addressed to my father containing a letter. Both envelope and letter had a hole through the middle of it. It was a BULLET hole. We all know the story by heart...
The 77th Division was fighting in the Argonne Forest of Northern France. It was 1918. My mother wrote my father and told him about the terrible deaths happening in the United States (The Flu Epidemic of 1918) My father wondered what in the world she was complaining about when he was seeing such terrible death all around him every day in the Argoone Forest.(He did not realize just how bad the epidenic was at home.) The American division was advancing against the Kaiser's German soldiers just outside the town of Saint Juvin (France). The fighting was fierce. My father felt something go between his pack and his back. He asked a comrade to check him to see if he had been hit. He thought the bullet went between his back and his pack. After it was determined that he was okay, he continued to advance with his unit. A few minutes later he was hit by a sniper's bullet and the bullet pierced the letter from his mother which was in his rear pants pocket. Two medics placed him on a stretcher and started to carry him back from the frontlines. When the firing became too intense, the two soldiers dropped the stretcher and ran! My father was left there on the battlefield and had to crawl back under fire to a church on the edge of town. Growing up we listened to this story many times and we told my father (kiddingly) that the fact that the letter was in his BACK pocket proved that he must have been running away! Of course, he would always defend himself by saying that we did not understand combat!! We had to understand that the enemy was not always just in front, but could be all around you. Of course we knew this, but we enjoyed getting my father to react the way we could predict that he would every time!
When the war ended, a group of soldiers who were immigrants were taken from Fort Devens, Massachusetts down to Boston, Massachusetts and sworn in as citizens of the United States. That is how my father became a citizen. Perhaps this is why today I look with some suspicion upon these characters who look with disdain upon the word MULTICULTURALISM. I wish they had known my father and the soldiers who stood beside him in that room in Boston and became citizens that day. They might not be so narrowminded.

Safe Bets at Every Restaurant

Although some restaurants list nutrition info on their menus or websites, most of the time it’s a guessing game. These are usually the healthiest picks.

At a Chinese restaurant Egg drop or wonton soup to start, anything steamed with sauce on the side (shrimps, vegetables or chicken with broccoli and garlic) and brown rice.

At a diner Egg-white omelet with spinach, tomatoes and feta (or turkey bacon) with whole-wheat toast, or open-face (leave half the bun) veggie or turkey burger with Cheddar: fruit salad or side salad with vinaigrette.

At an Indian restaurant Tandoori chicken or shrimp with raita yogurt sauce; whole-wheat roti bread.

At an Italian restaurant Tricolore salad, insalata mista or minestone soup to start: baked, broiled or grilled fish or chicken entrée (like Chicken Scarpariello or Marsala).

At a Mexican restaurant Fajitas ( steak, chicken, shrimp, veggie) with 1-2 tortillas and a dab of sour cream, or grilled fish soft tacos with salsa.

At a pizzeria 1-2 pieces of thin crust pizza piled with veggie toppings: salad on the side.