Old photo of schoolhouse where Dolly taughjt at age 16, located in Waterloo, New Brunswick

The Golden Rod is Blooming

Old photo of the schoolhouse where Dolly taught at age 16, in Waterloo, New Brunswick

It’s a beautiful New Hampshire morning, blue sky, white fluffy clouds and a soft breeze with a little cool bite to it, which tells us fall is not far away. The golden rod is blooming everywhere, another sign of the last days of summer.

As usual I started the morning checking into the literary bloggers who have given me information and hope that I, too, can create a blog on my website: Shirley Hershey Showalter, Carol Bodensteiner, and Kathleen Pooler. They, and many others, offer an endless source of help and information for beginning writers.

Because there is an avalanche of information online to help writers write and be published or self publish, I’d like to dedicate this blog more to sharing information about the subjects in my book (Dolly: Her Story), and my magazine (Wellspring Magazine). Those subjects include family issues, immigration, education, parenting, recovering from loss, the costs and rewards of love, and much more.

This week the children here in New Hampshire go back to school. Some will be excited, some will be anxious, others will be scared. Some children will be home schooled, a percentage that is increasing in many areas. Parents homeschool their children for a variety of reasons, some to enlarge their children’s experience of the world, some to confine their experience to the social, moral and religious experience that fits the beliefs of the parents, some are traveling and find home schooling more convenient.

As owners of an art gallery we have had many home schooled children come to visit with their parents. We have been impressed with their calm demeanor, their interest in art and their thoughtful questions.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on education, home schooling, and ideas for improving our schools.

14 thoughts on “The Golden Rod is Blooming

    1. Thank you, Bob. I’m really looking forward to connecting with a wider audience. It’s so interesting to hear from other people with different experiences.

  1. Hi, Jane, Congratulations on launching your new website. It’s inviting and professional. Well done. Thanks for mentioning my blog. I’m glad you’ve found tips of use to you there.

    I attended a one-room country school for the first eight years of my schooling. It was almost like home schooling since I was the only one in my class. Much of the success of any classroom depends on the teacher. I was fortunate to have many great teachers. I’m hoping the same for my granddaughter who had her first day of kindergarten yesterday.

    1. Hi Carol, How exciting for your granddaughter, and her grandmother. I hope I will hear more about her school experience. I’m sure school is quite different than when I was in school but certain things never change, like the importance of a good teacher, a teacher who is truly connected to his or her students.

      To be the only student in a one room schoolhouse is unique. Were there other students in other grade levels?

  2. Jane, you are doing a wonderful job integrating your personal experiences while simultaneously sharing your wisdom and knowledge. Thank You!

    For those of us in older generations (40’s and 50’s), the beginning of school was an exciting time. Life was on a more human scale, which many parents are attempting to replicate via home-schooling. Staying connected as human beings, learning our personal strengths and weakness, appreciating similarities and differences with others, and gaining skills and knowledge to better serve and collaborate should be educational priorities. However, the vast amount of information and entertainment provided by digital materials seems to have distracted society from these basic goals. How to find the balance to best prepare our youngsters for meaningful futures?

    1. Ames, I think you have distilled the essence of what we all long for in education – the human connection.

      As schools become regional and bigger (the school I taught in had 1200 students), and the digital age further separates us from each other, (although it can be argued that it connects us in other ways), we need to find ways to maintain a human connection between teacher and student. Think of what some of us have learned about ourselves from special teachers.

      Thank you so much for your wise comments.

  3. Hi Jane. I’m enjoying your blog. I home schooled a couple years and long enough to teach my youngest (now 25 and a daddy), to read. He became a voracious reader and would get in trouble in school for always having a book from home and taking it out to read when he should be paying attention to something else. He never could understand why some of his friends in school didn’t like to read. He found that to be the oddest thing, even as a little boy. Teaching him to read is when I finally learned phonetics! I was only taught to sight-read.

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