Smithtown 350 Foundation Offering $1,000 Scholarship

The Smithtown 350 Foundation is offering a $1000 scholarship to a graduating senior residing in the Town of Smithtown.  The student selected will be recognized for outstanding work in social studies and must have the recommendation of a social studies teacher.  The application deadline is May 10th.  Details can be found on the application and inquiries may be directed to 350scholarship@gmail.com.  

Smithtown 350 Foundation

2015 Smithtown 350 Foundation Scholarship

The Smithtown 350 Foundation, Inc. is a not-for-profit corporation that was created by residents of Smithtown, who volunteered their time and joined together to form an organization that would organize and coordinate the celebration of Smithtown’s 350th Anniversary, Smithtown’s Sesquarcentennial. 

Click on link to download Scholarship Application.

Common Core VS Common Sense - A Grandmother's Perspective

By June Capossela Kempf

Common Core vs Common Sense

Has anyone tried to help their grandkids with their homework lately?

Recently, I sat with my granddaughter who was struggling with a reading comprehension assignment. She had been at it for over an hour. She was way too stressed, obviously on the cusp of a fully blown melt down. And no grandma on earth can stand by watching that.

As she held her #2 pencil in a death grip, digging it into her workbook, she said “I’m just going to guess the answer…that’s it!”

“Whoa! Wait a minute.” I said, ” You can’t just give up. It can’t be that bad.” I was wrong.

The homework assignment was to read selected paragraphs and answer questions on a work sheet pertaining to the text. The paragraph in question was about a chameleon. Okay, five easy sentences telling what the creature does - how he hunts for prey and where he lives. Pretty easy, I thought.

“Let’s see the questions,” I told my granddaughter.

“What is the structure of the chameleon?

“Structure???” I said. “It doesn’t tell you that..”

“Yes, the answer is somewhere in there Grandma.Read it again.”

“I must’ve missed something.”

I read it again - more carefully. I scrutinized the simple sentences. Nothing.

“Can’t find a thing…What do they mean by the word ‘structure’?”

The kid is crying now…I don’t know Grandma…you’re an author, you should know.” So I was… published and coming off a successful book signing event at the Huntington Book Revue. A third grade reading assignment shouldn’t throw me.

“Give me that paragraph.”

By this time, Jenny had thrown her pencil on the floor and plopped her head on the table on top of her work sheet…crying.

“Just pick a sentence,” she cried. “I don’t care if it’s right or wrong…I still have all this Math to do.”

“Well, that can wait. We might not even get to the Math at all tonight.” I heard myself say.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t encourage her to ditch an assignment like this, but it was getting late and it was time to clear the table for supper. She’d been at her homework so long, her concentration was shot. We needed a break. So we talked, while I fixed the mac and cheese.

“When was the last time you practiced piano ?” I asked.

“I don’t know Grandma, I don’t have time…”

“But you love piano…you were doing so well. You played ‘Fur Elise’ so beautifully…”

No reply.

When supper was over, we got back to the homework. I reread her paragraph. I noticed a sentence that went like this: A chameleon catches his prey with a suction cup attached to the end of his tongue. This says what he does… not what he’s made of - if that’s what the genius who created this paragraph meant by ‘structure’.

“This is what they might want because it mentions the suction cup…”

“I don’t care, Grandma’ she cried as she jotted the ‘answer’ down and pushed her papers aside.

“Wanna do the Math?”

“Yes Grandma, but you can’t help me with that.” She had the correct answer to that question.

As she pulled out her Math homework, I was still mulling over her attitude towards her reading assignment. She didn’t care if the answer was wrong or right. That’s not my Jenny. I pondered this change in her. What was happening? This is the kid her mother read to in utero. The one  who couldn’t fall asleep before she was read to - three stories before bedtime.

 I wondered about that Common Core Curriculum I’d been hearing about. Is this what it’s doing to the kids? To my granddaughter? This school year,she’s been cranky and tired - too overworked to practice piano? Her mother told me that she is doing homework for hours and supper time creates a gastronomic nightmare as Jenny shovels down her food and races to get back to finish her homework. Some is left to the next morning - before the mad dash to the school bus. This can’t be good for anyone’s nervous system.

These days, I don’t keep up much on the politics of the new educational trends, but it doesn’t take much common sense to see a correlation between the CCC and my stressed out frustrated third grade granddaughter, sitting at a kitchen table, holding her head in her hands - tears dripping down onto her homework assignment - the one that I don’t understand either. Was the answer right? Who cares? Certainly not my Jennifer.

It looks like some legislators, in an attempt to impress the tax-paying constituency,  came up with a ‘rigged to fail’ system that rates teachers according to the grades their students achieve in tests designed by Frankenstein. So they flushed through a law, without any intelligent fact-finding, debate or review, totally ignoring the final impact to the system down the line. In an effort to purge the system of a few lousy teachers, they effectively threw out the baby with the bathwater  Well guys, that baby is my granddaughter and she is stressed out big time. She is missing a well rounded education that teaches beyond cramming for tests. So are her classmates. And Grandma is pissed.

“Do I have to go to school tomorrow, Grandma?” “What? I thought you loved school.” “Not anymore.”

She still hadn’t touched her Math homework.

The teacher said that they are trying to get the kids to think ‘out of the box’. That is why answers to the Math word problems are not exactly exact. They are being taught to round out the numbers, so if you divide 3999 bubbles by 2, you should round out the answer to an even 2000. Geeze, I wish the bank calculated my interest rate that way.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse Jen pulled out a sheet of 100 examples with these instructions: See how many problems you can solve in sixty seconds.

“Here’s the clock, Grandma. You can time me.” When time was up, she finished about 45. Then stuffed the paper in her folder. “Are the answers correct? Do you want me to check them out for you.” “No, it doesn’t matter, Grandma. It’s just to time us…for the tests.”

Oh, your grandchild is not having a problem?

“My grandchildren ace these tests…” my neighbor smugly snorted making the  implication quite clear. Well lady, my grandchild is no dummy. This kid knew how to problem solve and think outside the box when she was just a baby. At six months she figured out how to drag her toys to her side by tugging on her baby blankets. And at two, she was climbing up to my piano and could play and say the five finger study, C D E F G…1 2 3 4 5. Now she is crying, “I have no time to practice, Grandma. My head hurts.”

WHAT?

Now, I don’t claim to be an expert on common core politics, but it doesn’t take a genius, thinking out of the box, to see that a smart lover of learning had morphed into a frustrated, stressed test tazed kid - dreading the thought of going to school to take those tests. if those tests are anything like the homework I saw, the kid is doomed to failure and so I understand, is the teacher. While I am thinking about it, how do teachers of low functioning students fare when their students can’t compete or raise their grades enough to rate a higher teacher score? Is there a separate scale for them?

Upon reflection, I saw many trends come and go as my kids grew up. They had good teachers and even better ones, but I only encountered one that I would have recommended for a career change and not even he sent so many kids to the school nurse with piercing headaches - THAT”S what I care about.

Before she went to school the next morning I wrote a little note to the teacher.

“What’s that for…?”

“I’m just asking your teacher to let me know the right answer to that chameleon question.” I didn’t tell her what else I wrote.

“Now Jen, give this to Mrs.Sterling when you get to school - and don’t read it.

“Don’t worry Grandma,” she replied .” I can’t read that…You wrote it in script.”

Go figure .

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June Capossela Kempf is the author of  Yo God! Jay’s Story. 

Earth Day At Sunken Meadow State Park - Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Earth Day at Sunken Meadow State Park 9am, Wednesday, April 22, 2015. Special thanks to Carolyn and John for allowing me to photograph them as they enjoyed the wonderful weather at Sunken Meadow. 

Theater Review - "My Mother's Italian, My Father's Jewish, and I'm in Therapy!"

THEATER REVIEW - “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish, and I’m in Therapy!” Produced by: Presley Theatre Group - Playing at: Theatre Three, Port Jefferson, thru May 10^{th -} Reviewed by: Jeb Ladouceur 

Yes, “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish, and I’m in Therapy!” is one of the longest-running, one-man, comedy shows in history. And during two hours which seemed like four, that’s exactly the way it felt at Theatre Three on Main Street in Port Jefferson last Saturday: long … very long!.

Even in the hands of the gifted dialectician, Peter J. Fogel, this unrelenting half-Italian, half-Hebrew commentary on New York-style shtick is remarkable only inasmuch as it manages to resurrect jokes we’ve all heard time and again over the past thirty or forty years … and more. 

Even a shy Jewish boy’s recollection of stumbling on a mud-caked Woodstock honey named ‘Blossom’ might have seemed an amusing incident to a crude adolescent at one time … but it certainly no longer does. Woodstock is a sad chapter in our culture (if that isn’t too oxymoronic a construction) and history has rightly judged that there was nothing funny about it. Accordingly, the phenomenon has no place in this show.

Okay … that said, its inclusion is relatively harmless. But the play’s script (written by Steve Solomon) takes an altogether misguided tack toward the end of Act I. There, the ethnic harangue departs unwisely from its almost exclusively Jewish and Italian peccadillos (which the monologue’s very title leads us to expect) long enough to get itself into a bit of trouble. This is occasioned by a string of tasteless jabs that stray beyond the Jewish penchant for Chinese food, and take a poke at the Chinese themselves. Totally uncalled for.

It has been widely reported that writer Steve Solomon gave up teaching school in New York in order to write jokes … and ultimately put a series of them together and launched “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish, and I’m in Therapy!” at the Shubert Theater in 2006. Fair enough. Where Solomon might be stretching credibility, though, is in his contention that other modern comics have made a habit of stealing his material. 

Hmmm. How does that reconcile, I am compelled to ask myself, with my distinctly recalling hearing several of Solomon’s punch lines bandied about well before he was born?

Ah, me! It’s rare that anyone leaves Theatre Three feeling less than satisfied with their theater-going experience, but guess what? I was not the only aficionado eager to depart the comfortable old building when comedian Peter Fogel was taking his final bow. I noticed during Act II, for example, that a fortysomething woman beside me had been texting on her iPhone since intermission. She was apparently determined to conclude her private message even as the star of “…Therapy!” was being applauded politely, if not lustily during the play’s curtain call. 

When I looked left and right I saw, alas, that many of our neighbors in Row F Center were doing exactly the same thing. Texting … not applauding.

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Award-winning writer, Jeb Ladouceur is the author of ten novels, and his theater and book reviews appear in several major L.I. publications. Ladouceur’s upcoming THE QUANTUM SYNDROME is patterned on the Atlanta child murders of the 80s and will be introduced at Long Island’s famed Book Revue on April 28^th.

Police Officers Daniel Sable, David Vlacich, Vincent Liberato - Saving Lives Is What They Do!

SUFFOLK COUNTY POLICE OFFICERS AND RONKONKOMA FIRE DEPARTMENT EMT’S SAVE THREE LIVES

Three Suffolk County Police Officers from the Fourth Precinct and members of the Lake Ronkonkoma Fire Department saved the lives of three individuals who overdosed on the afternoon of Monday, April 13^th. 

 Police Officers Daniel Sable, David Vlacich and Vincent Liberato responded to a 911 call about individuals who were found unconscious in the bedroom of a home on Kirby Lane in Lake Ronkonkoma.  When the officers arrived at approximately 4:15 pm, they found the unconscious bodies of two women, aged 39 and 43, and a 46-year-old man.  The officers carried the victims out of the house, the Fire Department personnel immediately administered intranasal Narcan and they all regained consciousness. They were transported to Stony Brook University Hospital were last reported to be in stable condition. 

“These three individuals have another chance at life. We are proud of our member’s role in saving these lives and stand strong with the communities across Suffolk County in fighting and preventing drug-use.  We remind concerned parents that the PBA offers free drug-testing kits, which are available to the public at our Bohemia,” said Noel DiGerlolamo, President of the Suffolk County PBA.