-----My parents were both educators, though my mother is retired now. My sister teaches in Missouri, and I have a younger brother who teaches in Bangkok, Thailand. I resent it when the not-in-the-know "experts" complain about public education and public education educators; therefore, I have templates ready for the Daily Oklahoman, Time, and any other publications that I read, which prints negative and off-base stuff. My crostic analogy for IDIOT is simple: Individuals Dispensing Ignorant and Off-base Trash! Beleive me, most of anti-public education crowd deserves that crostic, because 99% of them haven't taken a step in a public school since they graduated. As a retired public school teacher, I plan on continuing my positive articles about education. Watch here, for articles and letters I have had published!!!
-----Marcella and I have 4 kids plus 3 foster grandchildren. They all attend or have attended public schools. Darrin, our oldest, learned to edit video during his high school career, and now he does it professionally. Nathan, our youngest, now puts his experiences from computers at home and at school, and his experience with musicals and music to work every week in many Christian ways.
-----Holli, our oldest daughter, took all the music she could. In fact, all of our children took advantage of band and therefore can read music much better than I can, since I was raised in a small school that offered zippo music training. Holli just graduated from college with a degree in Performance Piano and is working on her own business of teaching piano.
-----Our youngest daughter graduated from a public high school as well, and believe me, if she had been in a small school of any type, Drema wouldn't be what she is today. Right now she is a successfully employed Beautician at WalMart in Lawton. We expect a baby this in June.
Below are a few, and only a few, articles that I have had published using my antique Model 4P, Mac Classics, and now Power Macs. Though some of my articles have been published in secular tabloids, I consider myself, mostly, a Christian writer and a strong supporter of public schools and Christian teachers in Public Schools.
One of the great ways to hone-up on your writing skills is through submissions to your hometown newspaper. Edit any submissions and re-edit them so when they are published, the editor doesn't delete any portion of the article. You've succeeded when you get an article published which is exactly the same as the one you turned in. Sorry, but I have all the LTTE's to Time on various disks and hard drives, but I haven't including them here, because of the volume.
Letters-to-the editor is a great to hone your craft. I have had letters-to-the-editors published in the following; The Oklahoma Daily (OU's Campus News), The Daily Oklahoman, (Many Times), Edmond Sun-Times, Anadarko Daily (6+), THRASHER, Electronic Learning (Masthead quote), MacWorld, 80 Micro, FOCUS, NEA TODAY (5, World Champ), and Time. I have also had hundreds of pictures with my cutline in the Anadarko Daily, ... plus several articles. It has been my goal, even before I graduated from college, to get a letter-to-the-editor in TIME for over 30 years. But it finally happened in 1993! First letter on the letters' page pertaining to the cover. (Remember, mags painfully choose front covers, and they love comments on their chosen cover from a reader. Comment on the cover, and you better your chances at getting your letter in!) Edit, edit, then re-edit, and who knows? 10 million people could be reading your thoughts!!! Below, find some of my struggles to get published in TIME! These are only a smattering of the many letters I have sent to TIME. Discouragement, though, is only one letter at a time. Remember, too, though my computer equipment is old, most of it was paid for by free-lance writing.
5/30/2005 Star Wars raised our boys, taught them how to read and do math, and put them on the fast track to an interest in computer science. Both are now young men and college graduates. I'm sure they will save this issue of TIME along with all their other Star Wars items. For Christmas, even after they grew up, we always gave our sons the latest Star Wars gadgets. But what will we do after this year, when there won't be any more new episodes in the series?
5/15/2003 Egad! After reading your article on how inflammation is linked to death in so many ways, I told my wife to start planning my funeral, because I could drop dead any minute. Having seen so many older Americans successfully deal with illness into their 90s, however, I am taking the whole article with a grain of salt. DALE HILL Washita, Okla.
6/8/2003 Three simple questions can defeat Bush. First, is our society better off economically than it was four years ago? Second, is the world better off and safer now than it was four years ago? (Does anyone truly feel comfortable taking an airplane trip to Europe?) Third, do we feel safer in the U.S. now that we have many fewer civil liberties than we did four years ago? DALE HILL Washita, Okla.
At the OKC Public School Auction, my sister, Sharyl, a teacher in Missouri, and mother, a retired teacher, both educators, going home with some cheap goodies. I came home with a dozen TRS-80s. Not all of them salvageable.
Thrift stores are another neat place to find old computers and pay little. I've purchased a working APPLE IIE CPU with a parallel printer card for little. It is up and running in my office as I process this!
