Good Friday.

In some corners today is referred to as "Black Friday" but not here, not on this blog. Black Friday is being turned into Good Friday on the blog. We are reporting only on the good.

I have never heard the choir mentioned in the following article sing but the article makes beautiful music with me.

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2010/11/phame_academy_choir_reminds_au.html

Most of the followers of the blog and myself have been on deaths' door once or twice during our lives and the fight in us closed the door on death and kept us here to enjoy a few more years on earth. Want to read about a fighter that is still here? Then read the following article:

http://nhl.fanhouse.com/2010/11/24/for-mandi-schwartz-and-family-truly-time-to-be-thankful/?icid=main%7Chp-laptop%7Cdl5%7Csec1_lnk3%7C186404

I share a lot of articles on positive medical research. New discoveries in treatments of different diseases make me happy because it means less suffering in the world. That is why I would call the following article a good article.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101124/ap_on_he_me/us_med_aids_prevention_pill2

Your comments are appreciated and also let me know if you braved the malls and/or the stores today. May this be anything but a black Friday for you, may it be a fun and rewarding Friday for all of you.

WHO AM I?

I was born in 1864 and died in 1938. I was born as a twin to a close knit family in Minnesota attending public schools. After graduating from a state Normal School I taught in rural elementary and secondary schools, and served as a training teacher in normal schools. I found success and popularity as a traditional instructor, priding myself on how quickly I could teach first graders to read. After a decade and a half of classroom work I suddenly rejected the very methods I practiced and demonstrated so impressively. With all the force of a religious conversion experience I was convinced that my well-intended but misguided teaching methods violated the order of development of the nervous system. I realized that my enthusiasm was destructive, and the more efficient I was, the more I injured the pupils. The catalyst for this change was a personal reading program that led me from child psychology books into works by Jean Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Froebel, and John Dewey. Through these readings as well as my own observation, I came to see that children move through distinct stages as they grow and that parents and teachers should key their educational efforts to the developmental process. My belief in social reform made me unusually receptive to ideas on educational reform. My husband & I were socialists and moved to the small Gulf Coast village of Fairhope, a utopian community dedicated to the single-tax philosophy of Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty. At home among former Midwesterners and northeasterners who seemed determined to set an example for the rest of the world I added an educational dimension to the Fairhope experiment. I immediately began searching for ways to educate each student as a complete organism–a "whole child," as Progressive educators would soon have it–paying balanced attention to body, mind, and spirit. The success of the program catapulted me into national prominence. Soon the School of Organic Education that I founded was attracting talented teachers and well-to-do boarding students from throughout the country. Johnson's approach to education was genuinely radical. I steered students away from books until the age of nine. Younger children, I maintained, were not ready for print. They could learn more through direct experience with the environment. Every student did daily handwork in the shop, while students and teachers joined in daily folk dancing. Students did no homework and took no tests until high school; nor did they receive grades or report cards. I refused to compare one student to another and rejected "external, competitive" standards in favor of the "inner, human" standard of simply doing one's best. To critics who charged that the school was a "do-as-you-please" school & common caricature of child-centered Progressive education I countered that "children have no basis for judgment and do not know what is good for them. I was a charismatic woman who projected self-confidence. In an era when males imposed a business-oriented, measurement-driven version of progressivism on public schools, a few women opened private schools as child-centered alternatives. But I was less autocratic than most of my peers, and my school differed in significant ways. During my lifetime, one-half to two-thirds of my communities white families chose to send their children to my. school. I worked to create a climate of equal opportunity for females, accommodated disabled students, but reluctantly yielded to community pressure to bar African Americans. I spent much of her time on the lecture circuit, speaking throughout the United States and in several other countries, recruiting boarding students whose tuition and fees subsidized the attendance of local students. I was especially popular in the New York City area, where a group of socially prominent women organized the Fairhope Educational Foundation to support my efforts. If you don't know who I am by now maybe you should wonder about ORGANIC EDUCATION: and TEACHING WITHOUT FAILURE.