Finding My Brother – Part 3.

Posted on January 27, 2014 by hdh

My story of finding my brother continues through marriage, divorce, serious illness and a second marriage that will bring to him a connection to the father he never knew.

When Franz was 19 years old he met Monique at a dance and they began to go out together. One day Monique informed Franz that she was pregnant. Franz knew what it was like to grow up without a father and decided not to let that happen to his child. Franz and Monique were married in 1959. Shortly after that their daughter Olivia was born. Franz and Monique had a second child, Eric, in 1961.

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Finding my brother – Part 2

Posted on December 30, 2013 by hdh

Having written the story of Finding my Brother from my side of the ocean, I thought it time to try and write the story of Franz from his side. Understand that most of this information has come from his wife Cathy through conversations and other text interactions with them both. I apologize ahead of time for any inaccuracies.

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Finding my brother – Part 1

Posted on September 26, 2013 by hdh

I’m not quite sure when I first heard about my brother, it was either in late high school or college. My sisters had informed me that they thought my father had a child when he was in France named Franz. The only information I could ever find was a picture in my father’s collection that had the words “Your Franz” on the back of it. I’m not sure if the picture was of a woman or of a baby. I never confronted my father about this child, because I didn’t know if my sisters were just joking with me or not.

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Black Memories

Posted on August 10, 2013 by hdh

My parents died many years ago. My father in 1982 at the age of 78 and my mother in

1998 at the age of 84. Both deaths were relatively quick; my father in a nursing home

and my mother at a hospital following a heart attack at my sister’s house. My memories

of the their deaths and the events surrounded them have passed over time into the dark

recesses of my mind leaving me with just the memories of the lives that they had led

and our times together. Continue reading →

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Thoughts of growing old

Posted on July 10, 2013 by hdh

When I was young I couldn’t wait to get older and do all the things that adults do. Then I got older and reality set in. I had to become responsible (not that I wasn’t responsible before); I had to make decisions that affected the direction of my life. In that regards I chose teaching as that direction. I’ve stated this before, my mother wanted me to become an engineer, my oldest sister was a social worker and my other older sister was a teacher. I sort of gathered all of that together, graduated from college with a double major in Education and Psychology and continued to have a fascination with math, logic and technology. I became a collection of most of my family’s aspirations. My father was a shipping clerk who at one time even had his own business, Walter De Paris, importing little knickknacks from France. His desire was to have a great professional sports athlete as a son. Though I liked sports and played them, the closest thing that I did to follow that dream was playing an ice hockey game at Madison Square Garden while in college and an indoor soccer game at Nassau Coliseum as an adult. I still watch sports.

 

I think more and more about the aging process. Continue reading →

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The Keeper of the Lists

Posted on July 8, 2013 by hdh

I had started keeping the names and classes students were in back in the late 1990’s when I was the teacher of the gifted and talented in our district. I found it useful when doing record keeping for testing in grades 3-5 that identified those students that would qualify for the program. The district did have a system on their network where secretaries in each building could input student’s names and who their teachers were in any given year.  They would printout class lists that way. I was given paper copies of those class lists and then made my own spreadsheet, using Excel. I was the keeper of the informal school spreadsheet.

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Growing up and finding stories

Posted on March 29, 2013 by hdh

I grew up in New York City in the Bronx. We lived in a section of the Bronx called Riverdale. Now growing up I was always encouraged to say that I was from the Bronx not Riverdale. My sisters and I didn’t grow up poor, but we certainly weren’t similar to the wealthier people and better housing that Riverdale was known for. So growing up I was from the Bronx. We didn’t want others to get the wrong impression as to our status in the world. At least that is what I was told. If you want a job (as a teenager) say you’re from the Bronx. Which was like when I moved out to Long Island and was told “if you want a job say you’re a Republican.” Continue reading →

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a tale of audiences

Posted on January 28, 2013 by hdh

As a storyteller I get to experience a number of different types of audiences from very young children to adults. As such, I get to see many different types of reactions and behaviors attached to those different audiences.

Spending time recently as a substitute teacher has allowed me to practice my storytelling craft with captive audiences that are just kids. I’ve been telling to Kindergarten and first graders as well as 4th, 5th and 6th graders. I’ve discovered that as I tell stories to these groups with no adults around, that I generally get full attention as the students get involved in my tales. I even get applause when I complete a tale. Students are excited when they see that I am going to be their teacher. I’m sure the storytelling piece is part of it. Continue reading →

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Way back then

Posted on September 18, 2012 by hdh

As a storyteller and a technology integration specialist, I get to go into schools and classrooms and see all the changes that have occurred since I retired from classroom teaching in 2006. There are times that I wish that I was back in the classroom and then I look at the stress that teachers today experience as they try to cope with the new core standards and teacher evaluations. I see these excellent teachers work to figure out how they can maximize their individual strengths to prepare students to be innovative thinkers not just good test takers. The multitude of mandates and requirements placed upon them make that difficult. It was much easier, way back then. We didn’t all have to be the same.

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A technological reflection

Posted on May 30, 2012 by hdh

Through all my years of teaching I never stopped writing about what teaching was like. My reflections on what was going on in my classroom were very helpful to me as I thought out problems, analyzed choices I had made, and built upon the foundations of learning that I had forged as a teacher.  Every year I would start my journals the day before the school year began. I would focus on expectations, fears and goals for the upcoming year. For the most part, I never looked back on my writing in any particular year, until after the last day of teaching, whereupon I would re-read the entire journal and then summarize what the year was all about and project some thoughts about the summer and possibly the following year. My first dozen years of teaching were pre-computer, so I hand wrote in notebooks. Once I started word processing, the journals became all typed. I even took a few summers to transcribe all of my handwritten journals to the computer so that now I have all but one of my journals saved digitally. The number of pages in each journal ranged from the low teens to as high as mid-forties.

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