This past Tuesday my friend Jamie drove Whitney and me to the north suburbs of Chicago to visit four different groups of third graders there. We were in Deerfield as part of Educating Outside The Lines, a disability awareness program that uses a hands-on approach to help kids discover how things like wheelchairs, sign language, […]

Happy October! The school year is back in full swing, and yesterday morning my friend Jamie drove Seeing Eye dog Whitney and me to Deerfield, a suburb of Chicago, to talk with third graders at Kipling Elementary School. We were there as part of Educating Outside The Lines, a disability awareness program that uses a […]

As writers in the memoir classes I lead master the art of writing about their lives, they find themselves with a new challenge: assembling finished stories into book form. Many of my students have met that challenge. Some collected their essays into self-published books for their families, a few worked with an online company called […]

Lucky us! In the past ten days Whitney the Seeing Eye dog and I have had the privilege of visiting nine different classrooms at five different elementary schools. Somehow, some way, we also managed to wedge a visit to a college classroom in the midst of all those visits to third-graders –last Tuesday we gave […]

I’ve written about Patty O’Machel here before. A writer, special needs advocate and the mother of a teenager who has cerebral palsy, Patty has started her own business to encourage other schools to use the disability awareness curriculum she developed years ago for her daughter’s elementary school. Educating Outside the Lines launched last year, and […]