I left teaching in 1988 to give full-time to a business Sheila and I had started that year, Shaw LaserPress. Our primary product was a local magazine Out & About Georgia's Rome and Cave Spring. We also did layout and design and managed the publication of other print projects for the public in general. We had our ups and downs and I enjoyed many things about the next eleven years, but the business never made us a real living and it left little time for sleep and even our parenting of two beautiful and precocious little girls was, in hindsight, probably hampered. So by 1999 I was looking for a teaching job again.
I lucked out. Just when I decided that teaching was what I really wanted to do with my life, Anita Stewart invited me to interview for a fourth-grade opening at the school where she would be the new Principal Teacher* the next year. Somehow I landed the job and it turned into one of the great blessings of my life.
I had used the great outdoors in my teaching from the beginning in 1969. I took my students to the banks of the Kanawha river in West Virginia and hiked with them along the bluffs overlooking that river. Then tranferring to McHenry School here in Rome, my students and I made leaf collections from the woods behind the school and wrote poetry sprawled in the pine straw under the Loblollies on the campus. During my eleven years in gifted education we hiked the trails of Marshall Forest, dissected sharks for Sea Day at Floyd Junior College, explored Booze Creek as it flowed through the Pepperell campus, and took trips to all sorts of places from local cemeteries to coastal marshes and Wormsloe Plantation near Savannah and tours of Washington, DC.
But now, at Armuchee Elementary School, on the perfect campus for such an approach, under a creative and supportive principal, and with enthusiastic co-workers we went about using the real world around us as the every-day context for learning. Chief among those cohorts in those first years were Marilyn McLean, Marsha Lindsey, and my next door buddy, Ruth Pinson. It was through those good people that I and my students became involved two university studies regarding the beautiful and fascinating biennial campus visitors -- Monarch Butterflies.
So every Christmas when we hang this beautiful glass Monarch on our tree I think of those years and the joy of watching scores of kids discover the wonder of butterfly metamorphosis and, at the age of nine or ten, being a part of real ongoing scientific studies.
Thank you, Ruth Pinson for the gift of this little ornament, but more importantly your part (with all our fellows) in opening the world of outdoor education to me.
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