FreelanceBeth

Hanging around my youngest kid, Alex, is a bit like living with a red-headed history recording. He watches the Military History Channel more than Spongebob, The Regular Show and MAD TV combined. So, when he realized that today was D-Day, he immediately wanted to know when The Longest Day would be on because he could say John Wayne as clearly as he could say Mama when he was but a small lad of 1 year and that one ranks up there as one of his favorites. You gotta love a kid who preferred  In Harm’s Way to Thomas The Tank Engine.

Now that he is 11 and into karate, hockey, music and other “cool” middle school stuff, he still takes time to stop and say, “Thank you sir for your service,” any time he sees a veteran with one of those caps on his head. For Alex, the present is very important, but the past is also valuable. To quote him at the Interactive Courage Museum that he and his classmates in Mrs. Kristie Horn’s Grayson Elementary Class created this year in order to study the effects of WWII on the past and the present, “You have to study history, because it would be criminal to repeat the lessons we have already learned. All those people would have died for no reason.”

Because my kid has a passionate heart for all things military-from a mostly human standpoint-we will continue to do stuff like drive through Ft. Knox in the rain to visit the Patton Museum, wait for him to take a minute to thank a Vet and spend all day looking for him at places like the Mighty 8th Air Force Museum in Pooler, GA. Because, if it were not for kids like him, the impact our past sacrifices have made might just become lost and we would run the risk of repeating an avoidable tragedy. God Bless the Troops…past and present.

Spotlight By Fist Of Influence

Three teens from Grayson, GA have produced their first song. Drew Serrero, Ben Snowden and Brian Wilson have been playing together for two years and have performed live at their middle school talent show and with the band Guilty Pleasure. Enjoy!

Sheldon Cooper (Big Bang Theory) indicates that teachers knew he was amazing when he could recite Pi well beyond the ‘nth degree. My kids can go about 12 places or so without practicing. I struggle to decide whether I want key lime or blueberry.

Pi is an interesting concept and lots of fun to teach because the kids in class seem to “get” it in a domino effect. Abstract lessons are often like that. The teacher and co-teacher present the material per the math manuals, but when something like Pi comes along, it is time to celebrate some math! A few kids get the idea first and then pass along their view of how it works to others and so on. By the end of a class period all sorts of kids are challenging each other to decipher and then memorize the string of numbers that make up this cool tool.

Circling around to the beginning, Pi becomes more than math or a tasty slice of heaven…it becomes a challenge to take it as far as it can go…