I’ve been visiting elementary schools with my Seeing Eye dogs more than 25 years now, so it’d be reasonable to think I’ve heard every single question a kid would dream up when it comes to blindness or guide dogs. Jackie Petrozzi But hey, who ever accused kids of being reasonable? Last Friday afternoon my Seeing Eye […]

Last week was chock-full of school presentations for my Seeing Eye dog and me. I already wrote here about our Tuesday trip to Elmhurst. Two days later, Whitney and I got on another commuter train in Chicago to visit two more suburban schools. “I’m blind,” I told a group of second-and-third-graders at our last session […]

My Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I started our new year of elementary school visits in a big way: we took a commuter train to Elmhurst (The Chicago suburb where I grew up) and gave a presentation to 250 kindergartners, first-graders, and second-graders. All. At. Once. Whitney usually leads me to the train station in […]

You might recognize my friend Lynn LaPlante Allaway’s name: she is principal violist with the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. Lynn wrote a guest post here after Whitney and I visited her kids’ elementary school, and your fun comments to that post helped encourage her to start a blog of her own called Backwards and in High […]

A writer in the Monday memoir-writing class I lead grew up in Germany, came to America through a study abroad program at Vassar, and stayed. Brigitte has retired from a career in academia now, and twice a week she volunteers in a third-grade class at a Chicago Public School. Nearly all the students in Brigitte’s […]