|
|
|
 |
||
 |
"In Williamsburg this summer I bought two of your books. They are great!" George, six-year-old from Georgia |
 |
 |
||
Posts Tagged ‘Bentley Boyd’
Multimedia Mantua Elementary
Written on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 [permanent link]
Earlier this month I spent a day at Mantua Elementary in Fairfax County – a wonderful neighborhood school in a wooded, older and quieter section of bustling Northern Virginia. My presentation needs are simple because I travel with my own overhead projector, but Mantua’s library was tricked out! There was a digital projector for me, several computer stations and even a scanner (the tech I use all the time to get my hand-drawings into a digital form). It was tantalizing (I’ve used whiteboards at schools and shown my PowerPoint to civics groups) but I stuck with my old overhead because it allows me to work the magic of drawing and still face my audience.
The funniest tech interaction was between me and the signers who came to two of my four sessions. The school has several hearing-impaired students, one who needed me to wear a mike so he could hear. It all went well – I asked the hearing-impaired students some questions directly as I did my Phil Donahue routine in and around the audience. But the poor signers had to figure out what to do with my active style. I literally walked circles around one signer. The other one decided to trail me when I went to the back of the audience for one questioner, and she and I got back and forth just fine.
And the snowfall that day gaveth and tooketh tech away: school wasn’t cancelled, but I spent too long talking to teachers after my presentations and got stuck behind the afternoon bus line. A PT Cruiser’s car wheels won’t get me around big buses in the snow! So I just stayed in the library – where some of my earlier audience members discovered me and gathered around my Mac laptop to see me coloring one of my new cartoons. That was a fun day!!
Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, Fairfax County, Mantua Elementary, snow day
Posted in Author's Purpose | 1 Comment »
An Author's Stride
Written on Friday, January 25th, 2008 [permanent link]I’ve spoken to school groups for more than a decade. Each visit energizes me as much as it does the students and teachers I meet. Last week I was up in Fairfax County, Virginia, for a whole day at Mantua Elementary and had a great time talking to students about rough drafting, language, symbolism and my Author’s Purpose in creating Chester’s adventures — and I think I even held the students’ attention from the snow falling outside!
Now I’m going to work with WorldStrides to connect to school groups VISITING Virginia! I worked for this great Charlottesville-based company last spring as an on-site coordinator, steering school groups to their destinations in the Historic Triangle and making sure their hotel stays were pleasant. Now I’m offering an evening program for WorldStrides client groups called “Hysterical History” for school groups looking for something to do after the museums close.
We’ll brainstorm ideas as I cartoon about the historical stories they’ve witnessed that day. We’ll talk about what the early American experience says to our lives now. We’ll talk about Why things happened. And we’ll draw a big nose on George Washington. It’ll be fun! I have five school groups scheduled for the spring already, so if you’re coming to Virginia with WorldStrides, ask about my “Hysterical History” program. You can find out more about this school travel company at www.worldstrides.com.
Tags: Author's Purpose, Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, student tours, Virginia, WorldStrides
Posted in Author's Purpose | No Comments »
Dialogue in Democracy
Written on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 [permanent link]You know a forum on democracy is cool when they include the cartoonists! A few weeks ago PBS gathered about 50 American leaders to Colonial Williamsburg to debate a 21st Century description of American citizenship. Mixed in with the founder of the online Craigslist and the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, was Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Mike Ramirez and Kansas comic book publisher Alonzo Washington. I wasn’t there as a cartoonist but as a reporter for the Daily Press, where I have worked to varying degrees since 1992.
The three days put air under my feet and ideas in my head. Democracy matters! And these people practiced it with great care and vigor. Sometimes it got heated as they discussed immigration and health care and service to the larger community, but they also did the one thing that seems to be a vanishing skill in our loud media society: they listened to each other.
We live in an age when opinion is bursting out all over, thanks to cell phones and blogs. We’re yakking and yakking. But democracy happens only when we listen and then decide in a group way which is the favored solution to the problem at hand. Some people aiding this conference are pushing hard to exercise democracy in this new century. This session at Colonial Williamsburg will air on PBS early in 2008, but if you or your civics students want to read about it now check out
www.pbs.org/newshour/btp/did2007.html
Extra credit: check out the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University. Prof. James Fishkin has a new way of political polling that involves online debate and Q-and-A with experts, and he told this CW session that the numbers are clear: the more people learn and study an issue, the more their opinions change! It’s exciting stuff to realize that we the people CAN have the power!
cdd.stanford.edu/
Tags: Bentley Boyd, Center for Deliberative Democracy, Chester Comix, Colonial Williamsburg, history cartoonist
Posted in Colonial Williamsburg, History Teacher | No Comments »
