Dear Mr. Cameron:

As a courtesy, we are sending you a copy of this letter we recently wrote your 15-year-old daughter in response to a query we received from her.

“Dear Ms Cameron:

Thank you for your letter. Yes, we are pleased to report, your father’s old high school is still standing and our library was able to find yearbooks dating back to his graduation. In fact, a few teachers even remember your father, which I will get to in a moment.

In answer to your first question: In every picture existing of your father, he is well shod, wearing what I believe were called “earth shoes” back then. Also, the weather here is moderate, with any snow generally lasting from December to March, hardly the entire school year. Thus, his descriptions of how he “struggled to school” in the mornings, do, as you suggested, seem a bit exaggerated. In fact, our bus logs are (remarkably) still intact and show that not only was your father a registered user, but that his parents paid an extra ten dollars a month for door to door delivery.

I am sure there were days your father was “sharply dressed” as he put it. However, in every single picture I was able to uncover, he was wearing the same thing: bell bottom jeans with with white strings trailing onto the floor, horizontal rents in the knees, and no belt buckle. His T-shirt has a message on it that is easily communicated with hand gestures. His hair hangs below his shoulders and looks as if it were exposed to a lot of wind. Perhaps he rode the bus with the windows down.

As to academics and “concentrating on the basics”, one must remember the times: the “basics” back then may very well have embraced some of your father’s elective subjects, which included “Personal Citizenship,” “Ecology”, and one which apparently was called “Relevance”. We have no record of what if anything was taught in these classes. What records we do have show that your father did indeed take Geometry, just as he claims. In fact, he took it his sophomore year, repeated it his junior year, and repeated the course again his senior year - Geometry was required for graduation.

Now, as to Mr. Muggins, who had your father in a class called “Problems of Modern Relationships”, Mr. Muggins does not wish to dispute the claim that your father always had his homework done early, he merely wants to point out that no matter when it was done, it was always handed in late. In fact, he remembers your father as having the most outrageous excuses for not being prepared, including having to evacuate his house because it was infected with the China Syndrome.

Your father was not, sad to say, President of the Student Council. Perhaps he is confusing student government with a social group called “The Slackers” which was as Mr. Muggins recalls, a group of boys who sat in the hallways and made loud groaning noises when an attractive girl passed by. Your father was assistant vice president of this club and to our knowledge the only past member not currently serving time in a federal penitentiary.

One thing IS completely verifiable: Your father’s name is, indeed, carved above the door to the school. Please be advised now that we have noticed it, it will be sanded out and refinished at a cost of $300. We would appreciate it if your father would pay for the damages without our having to engage a lawyer.

The honor roll to which he referred to is not hanging over the door, but on a wall outside my office. I will leave unanswered the question of whether his name is on it.

Thank you very much for your letter, which we found most amusing. Mr. Muggins sends his regards to your father.

Teacher Gail Desler and her students have produced A Time of Remembrance, an ongoing oral history of Japanese-Americans who endured the internment camps during World War II. Desler describes the project as recording the “living voices” of these people and views it as a legacy.

This is a good resource for anyone who is teaching Journey to Topaz, Farewell to Manzanar, oral history, or World War II. Desler adds, “All of those interviewed have given permission for teachers to incorporate the interview clips and photo images into lessons.”

Describe your life in six words!

That’s the premise Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser work with in a recent article in the LA Times. They recount the famous Ernest Hemingway tale, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Hemingway’s piece, of course, was fiction. Smith and Fershleiser invite readers to submit autobiography. You can read some of the models at their site. (My favorite is by Jancee Dunn: “ABCs MTV SATs THC IRA NPR.”)

I could see a creative writing class working on this, and it would certainly encourage students to be concise. I could also see it as a book report (write Jay Gatsby’s life story in six words) or as a prewriting task before a character analysis. It might ask too much of very young writers, but should work well with high school and older.

If you try this, let me know how it works!

It’s hard to keep track of all the new tools being developed using Web 2.0 interactivity — a new one seems to pop up almost daily. Kevin Jarrett, an elementary teacher and certified Google Educator, does a good job on his blog, NCS-Tech. I am always amazed at his ability to find all these wonderful resources, take them for a test drive, and then blog about them.

Dawn Hogue, a teacher in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, recently developed a terrific site on why blogs and wikis are valuable in the classroom. She includes models of educational blogs and wikis as well as links to video files that are already considered “classic” among teachers who use these tools.

Part of our job as educators is to prepare the way for the successful integration of this approach as we move toward a 21st century curriculum. Parents may equate classroom blogging with the stuff that takes place on Facebook and MySpace. You and I know that’s like comparing filet mignon with hamburger, but we need to convince them. After all, some of these parents are the legislators who fund the technology programs.

So Kevin, thanks for showing us all these great resources! And Dawn, thanks for the support as we explain why we need to go this way — because the kids are already there.

Knock, knock!

Who’s there?

Direct object!

Direct object WHO?

No, no, it’s direct object WHOM.

You have been accused of witchcraft. The accusation itself is considered proof; no one put on trial for witchcraft is ever found not guilty. You have two choices: proclaim your innocence loudly and die, or confess your guilt, accuse an “accomplice,” spend some time in jail, and live.

Which choice would you make?

This tough call lies at the heart of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, a play that explores Salem, McCarthyism, and any other situation in which those in power assume they can’t be wrong and accuse others of the crime of disagreeing with them.

It is easy for our students, insulated by a distance of 400 years, to proclaim that making a witchcraft a crime is “stupid” and that certainly THEY would never give in to the hysteria. Prior to reading the play (or seeing the excellent movie that Miller himself worked on), students need to understand the complexity of the situation. A good pre-reading activity is available from National Geographic. Entitled “Salem Witchcraft Hysteria“, the site invites visitors to assume the role of someone who lived in Salem at the time. It guides them through the maze of choices and consequences.

This kind of interactive activity helps students realize that sometimes there is no good choice; sometimes we can only make the best of a bad situation and live with the aftermath. This is a difficult lesson for many adolescents — for many adults, as well — one that teaches respect for those who take the moral high ground and compassion for those who find that they can’t.

You say your grandson writes sentence fragments better than Obi-Wan swings a light saber?
You say you’d like that writing problem to boldly go where it has never gone before — AWAY?
You say you need materials for a 12-year-old?

Well, I can help with 2 out of 3.

Grammar Bytes contains wonderful interactive writing exercises for high school students. Provided free of charge by Robin Simmons, the site addresses issues that teachers often see in student writing:

• comma splices and fused sentences
• sentence fragments
• irregular verbs
• commas
• pronoun agreement
• pronoun reference
• subject-verb agreement
• word choice

The site is a nice mix of interactivity and traditional print-out resources. Students who want to practice on their own can keep track of their progress.

Parts of the site, like the “Terms” section, are still under construction, and I hope Simmons will continue her creative approach to helping students understand these concepts. So far, my favorite is in the “Abstract Nouns” section — she pairs them with concrete nouns to illustrate the difference.

(No, she doesn’t say which one.)

“But I don’t know who to write about!”

Finding a topic can be tough. When you’re doing a biography unit, deciding on a person to write about can also be a challenge. Wouldn’t it be great if a Web site made it possible to read just a little about someone, enough to know whether they would be interesting?

Enter OmniBiography. This terrific site not only categorizes people by country — good encouragement for an international perspective in American classrooms — but it also provides biographical information in multiple languages where appropriate.

• Looking for something on Pablo Picasso? Will that be English, Spanish, or German?
• Researching Marco Polo? Choose from English, Italian, or Spanish.
• Nelson Mandela? English, Spanish, or French.

The site suffers from dead links, always a risk online; but one a good manager should deal with. Fortunately, multiple links are available for most entries. If one link is dead, chances are good another will be available.

Students can browse by country or by name, accessing information quickly and moving on until they find someone they want to research further. This is a good site for starters.