A couple months back I met Carrie Lou Who; a children’s book illustrator. Perfect timing.
My wife Pat is assembling a career’s worth of games, puzzles and activities for sale online. She’s got the data smashing and forms layout down cold. She’s particularly facile with combinations and permutations. What she’s been missing is the graphical elements; clip art. She wants her own stylistically similar sets of pics to go with vocabulary words; clothing, table setting, farm animals, zoo animals, body parts, etc. And she does not want to get into the copyright legal arena. It has been a creative sticking point.
I’m so excited that my dear wife might continue with the most passionate aspect of her teacher career: the creation.
So, one day a couple months ago I met Carrie. A few weeks later the two of them met. Pat said here’s a gal that gets the idea right off the bat. Contract signed, deposit down and sketches in a few days.
...
While Ken’s car is being serviced I’m driving him to Cudahy where he’s been busy cleaning out his mother’s house. There’s been a member of his family in that town since 1908 and soon, whenever his niece moves on, that will be the end of that. Sad times.
He’d taught Social Studies in Waukesha for so long that he’d had my boss in class once upon a time. That has been awhile. “He was kind of different.” he said.
I do not know my boss very well, but I’d have to agree.
Ken’s now retired from public school teaching mostly because of the political fiasco with the governor.
I’ve said this before and I will say it again. The right to bargain means - the right to bargain. It does not mean you get everything you want. For instance, and for teachers, a lunch hour is not an hour. It might be somewhere in the vicinity of 22 minutes in which time you may answer student questions, be a hall monitor or break up a fight. Now try to actually eat, get to the bathroom and make any calls you need to make. By the way, teacher might have phones in their rooms but their personal use of them is obviously restricted to break time. There is - in some years - no break time.
Ken wasn’t ready to retire but he was able to get out before they stripped everything from him. Anyway, he’s now teaching online economics to Chinese students through One World School. And I shared the TeacherPayTeachers site with him.
Where there’s a will there’s a way. And the portal might be found near your best creative self. Shine your light. Move forward.
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