August 7: Herring Gut Learning Center

My nine-year-old niece attended marine biology day camp at the Herring Gut Learning Center in Port Clyde this week, and today the kids shared with their families what they'd been up to. This included showing off their art works as well as various creatures in the classroom aquarium and a touch tank.

 

My niece and her friends

show us scallop's fifty eyes,

hold stars in their hands.

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March 12: Cursive

A friend's seven-year-old daughter was scrawling on her napkin at dinner, trying to write her name in cursive. I didn't think they still taught cursive in school. Doesn't everyone use a computer these days? I remember as a very young child, maybe still in kindergarten, being taught by my great-grandmother how to write my first name in cursive. I felt like I'd really learned something key to growing up. Then in third grade, the pleasure of filling that special lined paper with fancy capital F's with their extra slashes and Q's that looked like 2's. It was like learning a code, a code with flourish. A code that adults had all figured out, to the point that their cursive didn't look anything like the carefully rendered letters aligned on the school worksheet. They had it down so well they could improvise.

 

I once convinced a store clerk

that my signature

was written in Arabic.

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