Obituaries and Letters

[alanajoli]

I like obituaries. This is not out of any sense of the morbid (although people have accused me of that). What I think is neat is how a person's life can be summed up in two hundred, eight hundred, or two thousand words, and you get this snap shot image of who they were. I used to clip the obituaries from the old copies of the Branford Review as

Comments

[sartorias]

So very true about what kids will hear and how they will interpret your words within their experience.

On my tests, I learned what they remembered from lectures, and it was always the little stories I'd make up to illustrate an event, a feeling at a time, what it was like to be there or live out an event, etc. Always. Dates? Forget it. Carefully worded messages and interpretations of events? I may as well have spoken Urdu, and the text we so diligently went through line by line could have been written in Old Klingon. It was always the little stories. So I ended up having to fictionalize history if I wanted them to remember it. (This was fifth and sixth grade history.)