Tuesday, September 8, 2009

My Father


My father came to this country in 1950. He was fifteen. He was the first German boy brought to America on a scholarship after World War II. An American vet had raised the funds. The vet had been touched by the suffering of the German civilian population, the children in particular.

In Boston, my father got off the airplane in a suit painstakingly re-stitched from one that had belonged to his father who had died during the war.

It was immediately decided by the school representatives that the suit and all my father's other clothes would not do--too shabby. Somebody went out and bought him two suits, five shirts, underwear, socks, two pajamas. They were all, to his amazement, new.

In his letters home to his widowed epileptic mother who lived in a one-bedroom with a narrow storage room that held my father's bed--an apartment poorly heated by coal, an apartment in Berlin that still stood among an endless sea of rubble and broken glass--my father wrote about the clothes, the food, the private homes with circular driveways and Ionic columns, his little trips along the East Coast, the skyline of New York, intact and splendid.
Posted by Literacy Is Not Enough at 6:14 PM

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Reading List

100 True Tales From American History by Jennifer Armstrong.

Getting to Know the U.S. Presidents by Mike Venezia. This is a series. Also check out all of Mike Venezia's other incredible books at his web-site.

Simon loves The Story of the World, Vol. I- IV, by Susan Wise Bauer. He listens to the audiobooks for many hours every day. They play in the background while he fiddles with Legos or does math.


www.theexaminedlife.org

Together with Toni Deveson, Claudia was one of the founding members of www.theexaminedlife.org , a net-based home-education support group for families teaching a secular curriculum in the Miami area. Claudia remains a very active participant. The group is inclusive, welcoming families of all faiths—or lack thereof, and all life-styles. The Examined Life runs a small enrichment co-op for children in grades 4-6. This year, the co-op is covering biology, art appreciation (nine painters), music appreciation (seven composers), history—the Renaissance and beyond, and Latin. All the portfolio-ready materials that Claudia and Toni have developed themselves are available for free at www.theexaminedlife.org , including a comprehensive 36-week enrichment curriculum for the above named topics, as well as the American history project covered in this blog. The website also has a bookstore that carries all the books necessary to teach the curriculum.