Kickstarter - Experience Fun History With Us!

Kickstarter - Experience Fun History With Us!

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Camp Snipesville: Become a Stakeholder in Historical Fun!

If you look to the left of this post, you'll see a link to my campaign for Camp Snipesville, my newest program for kids. This summer, we spent a week at the pilot program, Victorian Adventures playing make-believe that the kids were factory workers, workhouse inmates, and guests at a proper tea party...playing Victorian games...making crafts...and generally having a fine time.
The Kickstarter.com campaign is to raise funds so that we can offer up to ten free places for low-income kids at this fall's Camp Snipesville. There are so many kids in Statesboro, GA who would benefit from the intellectual stimulation (and fun!) of a week with us, but whose parents cannot afford even the modest $120 we charge.
At this time, we have raised $755, but we must raise another $750 in the next 17 days...or lose all our pledges.
If you pitch in, you may qualify for one of our many fun rewards. Check it out! Please click on the Kickstarter box to the left of this blog, or simply click here.

Put REAL Food In Schools!

How do you feed a kid on $1 a meal? The answer: Badly. Believe it or not, that's the USDA's allowed cost of school meals' ingredients. Join Time for Lunch, the Slow Foods USA National Day of Action to put real food in schools, and stop... serving our kids junk. National launch is tomorrow, but you heard it here first: Sign the petition and share with friends!

Why not get kids on board, too? For historical perspective, I strongly recommend Chew on This, the kids' version of Fast Food Nation. My 10-year-old son loves it, and he is fascinated by how recently we have developed our national reliance on fast food. He is also increasingly aware of the difference between real food and fake food, even the supposedly healthy stuff.

Geeking the Library

I Geek Schooners. I Geek Beekeeping.I Geek Worms. If you live in Georgia, you may have seen those great posters. Being a bit of an oldie, I had to figure out that geek, used as a verb, means to be passionate about, or obsessed with a subject. Historians, by their nature, are obsessives, and that obsessiveness tends to spill over into our amateur interests: My geeks (if you will) have included baking, the music of Edward Elgar, and (lately) vintage postcards.

Without libraries, geeking is not just expensive, but impossible. At some point, usually early in the process of geekery, one's need to know everything about a subject demands that one consults books--and not just those that Google has so helpfully uploaded, bless them.

Geeks need libraries. And America needs geeks. Do I really need to give examples? Okay, then: Bill Gates. Thomas Edison. Julia Child (yes, I just saw the movie, thank you.)
More than that, geeking adds soul to every life: Our passions define us, entertain us, soothe us, and make us happy.

But why a campaign about geeking?
Folks, America's libraries are in huge trouble. Nationwide, we're seeing slashed hours and services, even closed libraries. Before public libraries, libraries belonged only to the wealthy (a point I make in Book 2, by the way.) The web has helped democratize information, but we cannot rely on it: In-copyright books remain accessible only through our public libraries, which are essential to our democracy.
Did you know that the operating revenue per head for libraries in America is just $35? And that, to our utter shame, it is only $20 here in Georgia?
$16 comes from local sources
$3 from state sources
$0.08 from federal sources
$1 from donations and fees.
We need to make sure that, here in Georgia and throughout America, our local governments stop cutting library budgets. Even during the boom years, the budgets were lean: This is a question of priorities, not resources. To find out how you and your community can help, please visit www.geekthelibrary.org
Oh, and by the way? The Geek the Library Campaign is brought to you by OCLC, and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, not frpm library budgets because, trust me, your library can't afford it. Please spread the word in your community, and I'll do the same right here in Snipesville.

The Snipesville Chronicles, Book 2: A Different Day, A Different Destiny To Be Released October 1

I am delighted to announce that A Different Day, A Different Destiny (The Snipesville Chronicles, Book 2) is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com, and will be released October 1.

Here's a blurb:

When you wake up in the year 1851 on a Scottish hillside…or in an English coal mine…or on a plantation in the Deep South, you know you’re in for a bad day. Nothing for Hannah and Alex Dias has been normal since they moved from San Francisco to the little town of Snipesville, Georgia. Bad enough that they and their dorky new friend Brandon became reluctant time-travellers to World War Two England. Oh, sure, they made it home safely—just—but now things are about to get worse. Much worse.
From the cotton fields of the slave South to London’s glittering Crystal Palace, the kids chase a lost piece of twenty-first century technology in the mid-nineteenth century. But finding it is only the beginning of what they must do to heal a wound in Time.

Testing Season: Another Fiasco's A-Comin'

While speaking to fifth graders at an elementary school this week, I joked that I would hand them all a number two pencil and scantron, and test them on my presentation. Fortunately, they laughed along with me, but perhaps the joke was a little unkind, since the kids had just spent a mind-numbing week filling in scantrons.
Yes, testing season is upon us in Georgia. The powers-that-be from Atlanta to Washington D.C. can pontificate all they like about the importance of accountability, and other self-righteous claptrap, but the reality is all too observable in our elementary schools: Burned-out kids, frazzled teachers, anxious administrators, and education giving way to the worst possible mentality: Follow directions and work to the test.
This year, I understand, will be the first in which third-graders take the Georgia state test in social studies. States are adding tests in subjects like history and geography to the menu of reading, "language arts", and math. Never mind that giving a child a multiple-choice test in grammar is a guaranteed turn-off to creativity: How an earth does one test "social studies" with a multiple-choice test across the insanely broad range of state curriculum?
The answer, of course, is that you don't. Or rather, you do, and then you watch the kids bomb the test.
I have seen some of the efforts to teach third-graders the official curriculum and, frankly, they smell of desperation. A time-line of major events in Susan B. Anthony's life? Honestly, I don't care, and I doubt the average third-grader does, either.
So I carry on breezing into every school that will have me, talking about children's lives in wartime England, and encouraging the kids' interest in anything that grabs them, and listening to teachers share with me their bewilderment and pain. I hear them, and I'm talking as loud as I can.

Web site up and running!

My web site, AnnetteLaing.com, has been suffering from neglect ever since I realized that the designer had made it so hopelessly complicated, neither I nor my engineer husband could maintain the wretched thing. I finally came to terms with the fact that if I wanted to maintain my site, I'd have to rebuild it from scratch.
And so, it is with great pleasure (and relief!) that I announce the NEW and IMPROVED version of AnnetteLaing.com! Please check it out: There's info here about my various enterprises, including my visits to schools. Feedback appreciated, especially since it's still a work in progress...