Tammy Duckworth is a Senator from Illinois and fourteen years ago she was a captain with the Illinois National Guard serving in Iraq. On November 12th 2004 she was piloting a Black Hawk helicopter when a rocket-propelled grenade tore through the cockpit. Duckworth’s right leg was gone in an instant, shredded in a flash of heat and a spray…
All agreed that 1917 had been a sad offender. All observed that 1918 did not look promising at its birth. At midnight on New Year’s Eve 1918 the poet Edmund Blunden looked out over the whole Ypres battlefield: It was bitterly cold, and the deep snow all round lay frozen. We drank healths, and stared out across the snowy miles…
There’s a story behind every poem. There’s always a story. And the story behind this one is that the poet – Frank O’Hara – was on his way to Staten Island where he was to give a reading with Robert Lowell at Wagner College. It was February 1962 and the weather was nasty. O’Hara picked up a newspaper to read on…
Britain declared war on Germany just after U.A. Fanthorpe’s birthday in 1939. She was ten. Living in Kent she was familiar with the signs and sounds, fears and deprivations of wartime England. She knows the enemy – whom she calls by the popular put-down, the Hun – by “the nightly whines, searchlights, thuds, bomb-sites”. Her French teacher is distressed and distracted…
Thaw by Edward Thomas Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed The speculating rooks at their nests cawed And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass, What we below could not see, Winter pass. Thomas wrote all his poetry in a three-year burst of creativity between 1914 and 1917. He had enlisted in 1915 and embarked for France at…
The first day of my new life as an idle good-for-nothing superannuated coffin-dodger (my brother’s description of retirees) coincides with the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme – a day – and a battle that has long held my interest. Not so much because of the military aspects – fascinating as they are – but…
We celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday on Monday and that means a day off. It’s a recent habit to use a part of the weekend to read or re-read something he wrote and give it some thought. Seems the least thing to do. Last year it was Have Courage: The Letter from Birmingham Jail. This year it’s the speech he…
On Christmas Day 1915 David Lloyd George the former radical liberal,then Minister of Munitions and soon to be Prime Minister addressed a crowd of restless shop stewards and trade unionists in St. Andrew’s Hall, Glasgow. He was there to try and forestall strikes in an area where labor relations were contentious and complicated. He also needed to make the case…
We all love to rumble on about lifelong learning . But how does that happen when learning is presented as a series of predefined steps and stages that learners must master and hurdle – the endless hamster wheel of material, test, grade, material, test, grade, move on. Where is the room for the infinite variety of human capacity? Where is…
Tragic Events In times of community or world-wide crisis, it’s easy to assume that young children don’t know what’s going on. But one thing’s for sure — children are very sensitive to how their parents feel. They’re keenly aware of the expressions on their parents’ faces and the tone of their voices. Children can sense when their parents are really…
April 23rd 2010 – Shakespeare’s birthday and Poughkeepsie Day School begins live streaming Diary of a Scoundrel – Alexander Ostrovsky’s cynical play about hypocrisy and the trouble with literacy! You can see it here. Thank you David Held- for the live streaming and the videography. David assures me that it only takes half an hour or so to learn how…
I had the great pleasure of attending Life on Earth – a student written, multi-media and very original musical by the students in a central studies elective. The script was impressive – witty, pointed and poignant. The modern day Olympians – from Dr. Freud and Robin Hood to Miss America, from Wonder Woman and Bacchus to Ben Franklin and all…