First Class

I've found a gem, a book that I can't wait to read.

Hey, I'm an author. I find gems and jewels and treasures in books. I was going to order it on Kindle, but no, I want to hold it in my hands, to devour it slowly as I flip from one section to the other. So I ordered it and must wait until next week to read beyond the few "look inside" online selections.

It's about a school and according to the author, "My protagonist is a building." Just like Lessons Learned.

It has a black and white, sepia maybe, cover that fits the appropriate era, not the flashy "read me now" cover that is so popular today. Just like Lessons Learned.

It is full of interviews with living characters that tell story after story about real life at school. Just like Lessons Learned.

This book should live up to its name, First Class, if I go by the reviews I've read and the Book TV show I just watched. It has a subtitle that elaborates on the claim: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School. Little wonder why I'm fascinated. I'd like to say it's akin to mine. It's a collective memoir, a collage as the forward states. It follows the history of a school from its beginnings in the 1870's to the present day state-of-the-art facility. And, like Lessons Learned, it follows the history of the community that runs parallel to the history of the school and parallel to the history of the United States.

Its author, Alison Stewart, spent countless hours interviewing former students, teachers, children of students, anyone who had the slightest connection to the school or its graduates. Sounds familiar. Listening to her today as she explained her project, I felt a kinship that only a fellow researcher/interviewer/author could know. The hours in front of a microfische. The long distant telephone calls to people with sharp memories or aged recollections. The tears at stories that tug at the heart. The white rabbit diversions. The, as she explained, "Oh honey, I don't have anything to tell you" comments that were followed by the most unbelievably fantastic stories.

Been there, done that.

Her book followed black high school students in urban Washington, DC. Mine followed white elementary school students in very rural, mountainous western North Carolina. How could they compare? Oh, my, in so many ways I don't know where to begin.

Teacher expectation, aspirations, inspirations. Disproving that children from "another" kind of background can't learn. Parental involvement. "If we messed up, the story got home before we did" kind of community, as one gentleman today stated. Dedication to learning despite what the world has against you. Spirit. Soul.

One question that Ms. Stewart said she asked every former student was one I never considered: "When was a time when you knew Dunbar made a difference in your life?"

Drats. I should have asked that. But wait. Looking back, the majority of those I interviewed answered that in their own ways. After all, these were elementary children, not high school. But they knew. This school made a difference in their lives.

Inner city. Rural mountain. The real lessons learned from school are never, never forgotten.

I'm so looking forward to next week's mail.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Senator Sam Ervin and the Schools

This past Saturday I had a chance to meet and greet several people on the old courthouse square, downtown Morganton. I sat behind (key word, behind, since that was a six hour rear view) the life size statue of Burke County's favorite son, Senator Sam Ervin of the Watergate hearings fame. I watched as the crowds milled around him, rubbed his hand, patted him on the back as if they were reconnecting with an old friend.

Appreciating Senator Sam with my friend Martha

I understand their emotions. I ran across his name and his picture countless times during my research process, so often in fact, even though I never met him in person, I could have recognized this man's image without the inscriptions surrounding it. To the world, he was the "country lawyer" that maintained a semblance of order during a trying time in our country's history. To the Burke County people, he was the "city lawyer" they called upon when they needed legal assistance. Now there's a lesson to be learned in perception.

In January of 1947, the teachers in the area, including those at Pilot Mountain School, asked this former congressman and yet to be senator to represent their interests in what became known as the South Piedmont Proposal. These underpaid, underappreciated, underfunded classroom teachers needed an advocate, one familiar with state government, one who believed in fairness and education and working through the system. They found exactly what they were looking for, although the forty percent raise in the proposal didn't materialize. But this school bell could not be unrung, Sam Ervin's words could not be unsaid and the groundwork was laid for further talks.

Now in 2013 the teachers of the great state of North Carolina once again are needing an advocate, one who is familiar with state government, who believes in fairness and education. They've tried working through the system. That failing, they've resorted to a summer of moral Monday demonstrations, calling upon the state legislature to step up, wake up, and be aware of what the recent drastic funding cuts will mean to the children in public schools.

These current legislators need to spend a few hours watching the crowds appreciate their country lawyer. Lessons Learned.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Book Signing Time





This past Monday I launched my When Christmas Feels Like Home off to make its way in the world. I did my part in getting it ready for that moment and I'm not just talking about the launch party. I'm talking work, work, work and plenty of team effort. My critique group, brutal though they be, believed in this simple story about a boy, Eduardo, moving to a new life. They were with me for those first versions years ago, as were several online "beta" readers.

Then Kelly Barrales-Saylor, the Albert Whitman & Company editor, did her part, wonderfully so, I might add. The illustrator, Carolina Farias, did her part, also wonderfully so, way beyond my imaginings.

Now it's out of our hands and into the hands of the children. That was my goal through all the submissions and revisions and rewrites...get it to the readers. I've met with the reality that first it will go through the gatekeepers, the parents and media specialists who are the first line of defense. I appreciate their very serious task, applaud them, and encourage them to give Eduardo's story a reading.

And then I celebrated. Unairconditioned, park picnic shelter, water bottles instead of champagne. But I partied.

The guests participated in centers filled with activities related to the story. They played futbol and they played football. They wrote words floating on puffy clouds to inspire me. They created bony fingered tree skeletons and pumpkins that smile. They colored the Christmas page, the climax where Eduardo finally gets to open the Christmas box with the Nativity. They sat in chairs and read the book and rubbed their hands over the pictures, gently, softly, with reverence, tracing the outline of the characters' faces.

We ate food that I matched to the story. My antique toy car carried Moravian cookies shaped like Christmas trees so that for this day, trees rode on cars. The children sampled the candy pumpkins. I don't think too many of them attempted the pumpkin dip for the "Eduardo ate Thanksgiving turkey with his friends" page, but the adults raved about the flavor...and the book.

I came home worn out, drained emotionally and physically, but oh, so satisfied. No doubts now.

This book will soar!

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Lessons Learned from Lessons Learned



Today, Labor Day 2013, is the day I selected to celebrate the launch of my newest book, a children’s picture book…a beautiful children’s picture book, I must say so myself, When Christmas Feels Like Home.  

The illustrator took the words I had painstakenly assembled about a homesick little boy, and through her artistic interpretation, added a whole new dimension to the story, taking it to heights I never imagined. What joy! Thank you, Carolina Farias, for giving the readers an Eduardo to remember and a puppy to love.

  

This book is so far on the literature spectrum from the narrative nonfiction, adult level Lessons Learned that you'd think there was no comparison. True, the process was different, but in both cases I was blessed with editors who focused on making the book at hand the best it could possibly be. Thank you Kelly Barrales-Saylor at Albert Whitman & Company. Your patience and persistence helped me turn this manuscript into a reality far beyond my original concept.

One lesson I've learned from Lessons Learned and meeting readers, goes to the reality of putting a book out in the public. The writer has no control once the book is chiseled in stone. This is no baby I've birthed on Labor Day 2013. The birthing came months ago when the final revision was approved. This creature launching today is a teenager on the day he first gets the keys to the family car. It's driving solo now, and where it lands, in the hands of a homesick boy just like Eduardo, or under the couch, forgotten, waiting for the day someone remembers it and looks for grandma to read one more time, no matter the circumstance, I'm no longer in control.

Sounds exciting for Eduardo!

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

When Christmas Feels Like Home

Take a look at this adorable dog. I know that expression. It's happiness! I feel it, too, grinning as much as he is because I have just this very day received my first shipment of my children's picture book, When Christmas Feels Like Home.

I had seen the pdf. I had browsed through a friend's copy that arrived earlier than expected. But holding my own copy in my hands - priceless. Wait, maybe that's satisfaction I see in that picture.

This happy pooch is a featured part of almost every page in the book. Its personality is a story line in itself from the front cover to the final page with all the simplicity of the manger on Christmas morning. That image, I'll tease you with. The entire book leads up to it, to that moment when the main character, Eduardo, feels like he is finally at this wonderful place called "home."

Thank you, Carolina Farias, for the magnificant illustrations. They are beyond my expectations.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Off to Kindergarten

My younger granddaughter is off and running (literally) to a new part of her life, kindergarten. She's happy and I'm happy for her. When my daughter-in-law gets over the meloncholy of her baby going to school, she'll be happy, too. That might take five minutes because she has plans to meet other mommies at Starbucks!

There was no kindergarten at Pilot Mountain School during most of its existence, or even for the most part in the whole state of public education in North Carolina. Local units, especially city systems, funded kindergarten starting in the late fifties, but the state didn't catch on to the value of early childhood education until the seventies, 1972 in Burke County.

However.

Beginning in 1969 there was a federally funded kindergarten there on the campus. It began the last year the school served first through eighth grades. It continued for two years after that when the school system realigned and it became a junior high with seventh and eighth grades only. Imagine being in a kindergarten class on the first day of school, walking in the halls with wanna-be teenagers and nothing between.

But it worked. The principal made sure it did. The teachers made sure it did. And the older students became mentors, dropping by the room to sit and read with the younger children, to buddy with them, all before the technique became a "modern" concept.

These children in 1971 didn't know how the world would change by the first day of kindergarten for their own future children. All they cared about was love. Security. Feeling wanted and needed. And getting home.

Maybe kindergarten hasn't changed all that much after all.

Reagan Griffith, have a wonderful first day of school!

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Teacher Flight

Fifty states in the union and North Carolina ranks fifty-first in teacher salaries. (District of Columbia in case you wondered.) That’s not a statistic to brag about or to attract twenty-first century thinkers who create jobs who bring up the economic level who…you get the picture.

Let’s look back a few years to 1957, in an article by Lynn Nisbet of the Raleigh Bureau of the News-Herald when Governor Luther Hodges stated that in the previous decade the average teacher salaries went from 28th place to 39th. He insisted the budget was as high as the state should go in paying teachers and that the local counties should assume any additional pay. School improvement would have to come from them, not the state.

He did “deplore the loss of competent teachers to other states.”

He did “fear the scale would slip further down the comparative ladder unless the communities assumed a larger share of the school costs.”
He did “know this idea is not popular and might not get votes.”
He did “distribute a memorandum comparing North Carolina’s per capita income, average teacher salaries, and the part paid by the state with data from five other states.”
He did “point out that their state teacher salaries were lower, but local units supplemented funds.”
He did “claim that in North Carolina, the local contribution averaged a mere $148.”
His goal to make the local units more accountable was across the board unpopular, to say the least. The more wealthy city systems cried foul because it increased their budgets, although it did relieve them from shouldering the expenses of poorer areas. The rural county systems had even less resources to draw from and could never compete for teachers under this plan.

Teacher flight had begun.
That was then. This is now. From 39th to 51st? Governor Hodges would be appalled.
Catch of the day,
Gretchen