I have left New Haven Academy, the high school at which I first created this blog in 2017, when I and my colleague David Senderoff received our Fund for Teachers grant to enrich our "Troubles" curriculum through travel. I was a Humanities teacher then, incorporating Northern Ireland for many years into a sophomore Facing History course on Separation, Judgment, Justice and Memory. The course goes on, but I will no longer be one of the four educators teaching it.
I am joining the faculty of the ACES Educational Center for the Arts, as the Director of the Creative Writing department.
Besides my new administrative responsibilities, I will continue to teach, but now my subjects will be screenwriting, playwriting and live storytelling/monologues.
Ireland and Northern Ireland stay with me, and continue to inspire my work and life. The grant continues to be a part of me, and as a member of FFT's new Ramsden Project, I will continue to interact with Fellows and advise them and learn from them on how we keep this work alive in our schools.
My new show, I've Heard Those Drums All My Life, is six monologues about the way Ireland has always been an inspiration and a home-away-from-home for me. Each monologue is named for a person who inspired that story. The video below is the title story, but is named for Gleann in the overall piece. It is, of course, a story that could only have come about with the aid of Fund for Teachers.
The link to Gleann's story is here:
"I've Heard Those Drums All My Life"
