Many moons ago, my first grader came home with the drawing of a hatchet. Even though it was February, and George Washington, as we now know, did not chop down a cherry tree, I’m bristled at the idea that this stencil image was an art lesson. It was then that I offered my services as an artist, […]
My granddaughter, as a child, always loved to go for dance lessons at Steffi Nossen School of Dance (SNSD). Not for the lessons necessarily, but she loved to laugh at herself in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors. I always wondered why dance studios had so much “look/see“ space. Shelley Grantham, Executive Director at Steffi Nossen, explained to […]
I usually describe myself as “just a kid from Far Rockaway.” It’s sort of a salute to the modest beach town on the Rockaway peninsula where I grew up. A few blocks away from our house in the Bayswater area was the Gustave Hartman Orphan Home. The kids who lived there were homeless. They had […]
As a kid, I was a musical disappointment. My mother, a proud teacher, tried every pedagogical tactic–first, of course, piano lessons; later the clarinet, then the saxophone and finally a bass clarinet, hardly a lady-like choice. Then there were the Saturday young people’s concerts at Carnegie Hall under the baton of Leonard Bernstein. At the […]
My first piano came with the house that my mother rented, with an option to buy, on Deerfield Road in the Wavecrest section of the Rockaways. The landlord, Mr. Silverstein, insisted that the piano was key to the deal (no pun intended there). It was a George Steck baby grand, which took up half of our […]
Back in the day, teaching was one of the very few career paths open to women. That was not for me, I told my parents. Teachers work harder and more creatively than anyone I know. They do this in crowded classrooms, with public address systems blaring directions and with fewer resources than they […]
Back in the day, my dad, Irving, thought of himself as a cross between Irving Penn and Ansel Adams. As a photographer, his signature mark was cutting off people’s heads… in the photos, that is. My brother Charles and I were his subjects. We would stand for hours in a bow, curtsy or other ridiculous […]
What’s in a name? There’s a new upbeat movement afoot in education circles called Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). It’s a “wishful thinking” piece of legislation in which the expected outcome is right up there in the program’s name. Near as I can tell, it does not carry the baggage of the program it replaced […]
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