Dateline: May 1957 East Hampton, New York

A wiry freckled-face young girl, who could pass as Alfalfa's little sister, carried the milk crate from her front porch and placed it directly behind the apple boxes already positioned in the barn. In her imagination the rows of containers began to take on the look of an organized classroom. Filling the "desks" would be easy. Stuffed animals were willing students, and with the new blackboard she had just received for her sixth birthday, school just might open on schedule. Searching for a stick as her pointer, an apple for her desk, and a chunk of white chalk, our young lady was ready for her first day of teaching. However, right in the middle of her lesson about the ABC's, her Mother's voice could be heard calling out the front screen door. "Linn...daaa, enough playing school, it's time for lunch."

I have spent my life playing school. Majoring in English and minoring in Child Psychology, I received my teaching credentials from the University of Miami and went directly onto graduate school to work towards a Masters in Fine Arts. My first appointment was teaching English 101 and 102 at Marymount College. Most of my students were either trying to avoid the draft and Viet Nam or had just returned from Nixon's nemesis and were looking for "answers". Returning was something on my mind too, and I found myself back on Long Island as far east as the two lane road would take me.

And so I began teaching at East Hampton High School in the early 1970's. At that time, seniors rotated every ten weeks among electives, and I was asked to write curriculum that would appeal to young people while instructing them in the fundamentals of reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. Along with my incredibly creative mentor, author and educator, Barbara Bologna,(wife of the renowned artist Francesco Bologna)the new English curriculm took shape.Children's Literature; Film; The Bible as Literature; Science Fiction; Death and Dying; Criminology; Poetry of Dylan, Lennon, McCartney et al; Shakespeare; The Art of Writing; Words, Words, Words; and What's so Funny about American Humor? became very popular electives.

Those early years were stuff that dreams were made of. The student population consisted of the children of local shopkeepers, farmers, haulseiners, and baymen. It was not unusal for me to find a quart of scallops, bluefish (eyes, scales and all), four dozen littlenecks, or a cooler of live crabs on my desk. East Hampton High School had just been built in the middle of potato fields and was surrounded by rows of fall produce and Iacono's chicken farm. At the end of the school day, I would pick up potatoes that had bounced out of the gleaning trucks and snap myself an ear of corn. Walking home "upstreet" to Newtown Lane, briefcase and dinner in hand, I would watch the seniors pull their pickup trucks out of the school parking lot, shot guns meticuously balanced on gun racks in rear windows ready for the first day of hunting season, or "gunnin" as they called it. After I had publically cried when Tommy Martin brought me "Bambi" for dinner, they knew not to "gift" me with venison anymore.

Weekend nights were spent west. Bridgehampton boasted a place called Bobby Vans where "creative types" hung out. It was at this local watering hole that I met and began to socialize with some of the authors and artists who retreated to the East End for solitude and, for some, solace. James Jones (From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line) James Baldwin (Giovanni's Room); John Knowles (A Separate Peace); Winston Groome (Better Times than These, Forrest Gump); Truman Capote(Breakfast at Tiffany's, In Cold Blood); Willie Morris (Editor of Harper's Magazine) Irwin Shaw (Rich Man, Poor Man) Gloria Jones (Literary Agent)and Shana Alexander (60 Minutes correspondent).Here I was, teaching at the local high school during the week, and absorbing the conversations of some of America's greatest living authors on the weekends in winter. On Monday mornings,I would bring their stories back into the classroom. While teaching A Separate Peace, I told my students, "Jack mentioned last night that he knew the ending of the book before he knew the beginning." I distinctly remember the night Winston Groome complained how reclusive his Aunt had become, turning to Capote and saying , "Right, Dill?" Was I imagining this, could his aunt be Harpur Lee? "One and the same", he whispered into my ear. The Dill allusion to Capote, of course, referencing To Kill a Mockingbird. This was the greatest place in the world to live and teach.

More than three decades later and those early experiences still flavor the way I view the East End. It is more than a fertile place of land and sea, it is a crescent of rich life, a nourishing home of artists who come to create and commune. This atmosphere has infused my teaching with a passion for the incorporation of the arts into my literacy program. TEAM has not escaped this influence either. Our Summer Camp collaboration centered on the theme of Impressionism, how artists have been impressed by this environ, and our EEV collaboration was conceived with the same premise. It was our vision to create a site where technology could bridge the arts and artists together.

My classroom is a place of laughter and learning, of artistic expression and, with my new found tools of TEAM, I hope it is to be one where technology feels comfortable enough to pull up a milk crate, sit down, and play school.