WHY I AM A ROTARIAN

My selection for the Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship was what introduced Rotary to me.

An initial impression of "just any other scholarship" soon changed into a world where Rotarians act voluntarily and with their care, love and affection I was attracted and entered into an ever-lasting relationship.

All throughout the scholarship period, the support and concern of the host Rotarians (Dist. 5890) was incredible and unprecedented.

Although I could easily continue my stay in the U.S., my moral commitment to R.I. and TRF compelled me to return to Pakistan.

I am glad that I honored my commitment. Now I am mentoring new ambassadorial scholars and also serving my community as an active Rotarian. The Ambassadorial Scholarships for Low Income Countries is a wonderful concept. I would love to add to it as much as possible.

Kamran I. Makhdoom,

KARACHI PAKISTAN, Rotary Club of Karachi Cosmopolitan, D- 3270

A BETTER WAY TO WAKE UP?

If the world required that you complete an expert DDR jam each morning only moments after you awoke, there's a solid chance the global death toll would far outpace the birth rate. Thankfully, all that's typically necessary is that you actually listen to whatever device you've got ringing. If you've noticed lately that said noises just aren't cutting it, here's a little puzzler that's pretty much guaranteed to either get you up or entangle you in infinite frustration. The $16 Finger Dance Alarm Clock sounds at a user-determined time, and once your weary eyes begin to focus, you then have to use your digits to follow a lighted dance pattern in order to shut the cacophony off. It's half torture, half genius -- precisely the way we like it.

WHERE IS THAT BIRD?

AND I QUOTE

"Things are more like they are now than they have ever been."-Gerald R. Ford

INSULT TO INJURY

TODAY IN HISTORY

1976: Americans celebrate the U.S. bicentennial as President Gerald Ford speaks at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

1845: Henry David Thoreau moves to Walden Pond in Massachusetts to begin a two-year experiment in simple living.

1939: More than two months after playing his last game, Lou Gehrig is honored by the New York Yankees, telling more than 60,000 fans: “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

HAVE A HAPPY 4TH, AND LEAVE THE FIREWORKS TO THE PROS

Myth: Sparklers are safe.

Facts: They’re hand-held, easy to use, legal for amateurs in most states—and darned pretty, too. In contrast to dangerous pyrotechnics that actually explode, the fizzling brilliance of sparklers might seem harmless. But sparklers pose serious dangers.

Burning as hot as 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, they can ignite clothing and burn skin and eyes. In a 2006 study conducted by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission over a monthlong period spanning July 4, sparklers were implicated in 1,000 injuries to eyes, hands and legs. Sixty percent of the victims were under 15 years old, and a third of those were under 5. More alarming still, at least two sparkler injuries in 2007 required amputations.

“Putting it simply,” says John Hall, author of a recent report on fireworks for the National Fire Protection Association, “things can go very, very wrong very, very fast with private, amateur use of fireworks. So all the careful arrangements you think you’ve made can be easily overcome in fractions of a second, because people are that close to things that are that hot.”

Still looking for do-it-yourself fun with fireworks? Channel your passion into oohs and aahs and shower the pros with handmade applause. Professional pyrotechnists train for as long as three years to become licensed in fireworks display. For safety, as well as economy, enjoying free fireworks at a public show is the brightest idea around.

REAL EDUCATION?

(This book review appeared in the Jun 30, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journa.The book is "Small Wonder" written by Jonathan Zimmerman, Yale press.)

In One Room, Many Advantages The 'little red schoolhouse' of legend, whatever its flaws, made more sense than the warehouse-schools of today.
BY BILL KAUFFMAN
Tacked to my wall is a lithograph of the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington. For many years, it graced my mother's one-room schoolhouse in Lime Rock, N.Y. Antiquarian relic or enduringly relevant image? The same question may be asked of the "little red schoolhouse" itself, whose reality and legend are the subject of "Small Wonder." Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at New York University, sets out to tell "how -- and why -- the little red schoolhouse became an American icon." Mr. Zimmerman proves a thoughtful and entertaining teacher. First, the chromatic debunking: One-room schools were often white and seldom red. The teachers were usually young unmarried females, pace the most famous one-room schoolteacher in literature, Ichabod Crane. They swept the floor, stoked the stove, rang the hand-bell and taught their mixed-age students by rote and recitation. The schools could be a "cauldron of chaos," in Mr. Zimmerman's alliteration, as tyro teachers were tormented by Tom Sawyers dipping pigtails in inkwells and carving doggerel into desks. Yet these one-room schools, Mr. Zimmerman notes, were "a central venue for community life in rural America." They hosted plays and dances and box socials and spelling bees and Christmas pageants. In 1913, Mr. Zimmerman says, "one-half of the nation's schoolchildren attended one of its 212,000 single-teacher schools." By 1960, progressive educationists, growing cities and the centralizing pressures of two world wars and a Cold War had reduced the total to just 1%. The attempt to abolish one-room schoolhouses, whether by the carrot of state aid or the stick of government fiat, set off one of the great unknown political wars of U.S. history, pitting farm people who "invoked classic themes of liberty and self-rule" against the "mostly urban elites" who "would wage zealous battle against the rural one-room school." Typically, two Delaware schoolconsolidators informed the hicks that "modern education . . . is less romantic and more businesslike, more formal, more exact, more specialized, done according to tested methods and a standard schedule." Such grim exactitude sounded like prison to parents used to the comparatively anarchic and localized governance of rural schools. Progressives worshipped "efficiency," Mr. Zimmerman observes, a word that to country people "conjured up a bloodless, impersonal system that buried small-town traditions and idiosyncrasies in a maze of regulations and policies." Big was better than small, asserted the consolidators. Riding the bus to a new school over "good roads" -- the highway and automobile industries lobbied for consolidation -- was superior to walking (how old-fashioned!) to a nearby school. A system in which parents and neighbors had a say in the education of a community's children was judged incapable of keeping up with the ever-accelerating improvement of the human species. The propaganda mills worked overtime. New Deal photographers snapped pictures of decrepit one-room shacks and contrasted these premodern blights with the spotless (if sterile) multistory consolidated schools. City journalists who knew nothing of rural life (except that it was retrograde) fanned out over the countryside, filing stories suggesting that the young 'uns in Dog Patch were larnin' that the world was flat and toothbrushing was one of Satan's snares. The one-room school was "neither as rundown as critics claimed nor as bucolic as defenders imagined," Mr. Zimmerman writes. But its champions understood its flaws. They were defending the principles of local autonomy and human-scale democracy. Mr. Zimmerman quotes a "rural mother" who lamented: "Individuality will be lost, the pride taken in 'our' school and 'our' teacher gone. Haven't the parents who bear the children anything to say?" Not in the consolidated schools they didn't, except in PTA debates over which kind of brownies to sell at the bake sale. "Thousands of rural parents did resist consolidation," Mr. Zimmerman says; they struggled to save the one-room symbols of "their vanishing local communities." But true to Joni Mitchell's lyric, the rest of America didn't know what it had till it was gone. By World War II, the little red schoolhouse whose razing had been a New Deal project became a symbol of homefront democracy. In the 1960s, some liberals praised the one-room school of yore as "the precursor to group learning" and "open classrooms" -- daily Bible reading not included. At the same time some conservatives extolled its alleged (and exaggerated) hickory-stick discipline. Decades after consolidation had obliterated one-room schools, researchers discovered their advantages. The child in the small school is not just a statistic on a government chart. She receives "individual attention and recognition." She works at her own pace. She has, most important, a place. As Mr. Zimmerman remarks, recent alternatives to "the large, alienating modern school," from charter schools to homeschooling, have sought to foster "the snug, communal aspects of the one-room school." But the one-room-school model entails community control, which liberals and conservatives alike resist if the "community" sings from the wrong hymnal. The idealization of the little red schoolhouse, Mr. Zimmerman concludes, reflects a rueful awareness that in modernity Americans "gained the whole world of technological conveniences and lost the soul of their communities." Even after Mr. Zimmerman's unsentimental accounting of its defects, the one-room school shines in comparison with the over-large and remotely controlled warehouses in which too many children are educated today. Reading "Small Wonder," one wonders if Americans will ever tire of chasing after the gods of Progress and Bigness and rediscover the little things, red schoolhouses among them, that once gave us our soul.

LET'S HIT THE BEACH

AND I QUOTE

"Anything that is of value in life only multiplies when it is given."-Deepak Chopra

4TH FACTS

When the War of Independence ended in 1783, July 4 became
a holiday in some places. In Boston, it replaced the date
of the Boston Massacre, March 5, as the major patriotic
holiday. Speeches, military events, parades, and fireworks
marked the day. In 1941, Congress declared July 4 a federal
holiday.


John Hancock, the president of the Second Continental
Congress, was the first to sign the Declaration. With its
ornate capitals, Hancock's sprawling signature is prominent
on the document. Since then, when people are asked for
their "John Hancock," they are being asked to sign their
names.

                          
The Declaration of Independence itself has become one of
the most admired and copied political documents of all time.
It was written by Thomas Jefferson and revised by John
Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Jefferson.



Uncle Sam was first popularized during the War of 1812,
when the term appeared on supply containers. The U. S.
Congress didn't adopt him as a national symbol until 1961.


The first two versions of the Liberty Bell were defective
and had to be melted down and recast. The third version
rang every Fourth of July from 1778 to 1835, when, according
to tradition, it cracked as it was being tolled for the
death of Chief Justice John Marshall.

The American national anthem, the "Star-Spangled Banner,"
is set to the tune of an English drinking song ("To
Anacreon in Heaven").

MIA FARROW @ THE RI CONVENTION