Well, tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, and many of us will have severely expanded waistlines on Friday! I want to wish all of you a happy and joyous day, hopefully spent in celebration with family and loved ones.
Your humble (cough,cough) writer has been with this company for more years than he likes to admit, but there is one performer who even has me beat! I started performing my Abraham Lincoln school assembly in January of 1989. To gauge how long ago that was, I always remind myself that while waiting to perform that morning, pacing back and forth in a school faculty lounge, I could look up at the television in the lounge and watch as George Bush took the Oath of Office .... George Bush senior, that is!
Yikes, it's been a long time doing school assembly programs!
How do you know which programs and how many presentations to do for your school? This is a question which comes up with any Elementary school or Middle School looking for ideas for school assemblies. Well, as famous detective Sherlock Holmes used to say: “Elementary, my dear Watson!, Elementary!”
I sit tonight watching the beginning of Game 3 of the American League Championship Series. The New York Yankees are tied one game apiece with the Texas Rangers, and tonight’s game is in Yankee Stadium.
The place is packed and the excitement is so thick you can cut it with a knife (well, almost!). It is so easy for all of us to be excited and motivated by the competition of sports.
It is Fall and a lot of schools are looking for things to do with the kids to break up the daily grind of classroom work and augment the educational process through a field trip. And there is nothing wrong with field trips! We all love taking trips to cool destinations. Trips to a Planetarium or the Zoo or a historical site all contribute mightily to a students education and can spark the imagination in countless ways.
A new book caught my eye this week, or rather my ears, as I first heard about this new tome while listening to a radio interview with the author, Eric Foner. You would think that with the vast plethora of books available about Lincoln that we would scarcely need another ( there are more books about Lincoln than almost any other person who ever lived!). But in this case, the author has provided something very useful by examining the course of Lincoln’s thinking about slavery and about African Americans in general, and how that thinking changed over time. I highly recommend “Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World” by Eric Foner. Here is a great review - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/books/review/Reynolds-t.html
We had a great day today, talking to school assembly coordinators from all over the greater Chicago area about our school assemblies! Today, of course, was the first of two days comprising the Center East Showcase at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, Illinois.
I was just speaking with another member of our staff here, and I was reminded of an old story from my early days performing my Abraham Lincoln assembly program, and I thought it might be amusing to some.
