Dear Sandra Paperback - 2006

I recently retired after 33 years as a teacher, and Social Studies Department Head, in the Mansfield, Massachusetts Public Schools. My special interest and expertise is in ethics education and in integrating ethics themes directly into established secondary school curriculums. It was within this context that I wrote Dear Sandra.

The history textbooks found in American schools today have been so excised of controversial content and so stripped of social conflict as to be rendered values neutral, and utterly useless for promoting ethics education. Conforming to long lists of banned words and the perceived need to provide "equality" to every conceivable group, or event, has led to the creation of enormous bland encyclopedic tomes, with little or no narrative excitement or recognizable thematic purpose. In the end, this has become a nightmare for teachers trying to interest and engage young minds in the study of history.

Today, more than ever, it is necessary for teachers to supplement their classes constantly with compelling inputs or risk losing students to the mind-deadening drudgery of required textbook reading. Although there are some novels set in historic periods that are quite good, none that I have found are accurate enough, or rich enough in relevant historical detail, to coincide with comprehensive history curriculums.

As an educator facing this need for over thirty years, I began writing my own historical fiction and using it with my classes. These readings grew gradually from short stories, carefully set within real historical periods, to full novels suitable to support an entire term's work. I found that I could also structure my writing to illustrate values conflicts emerging from the events of the past and greatly strengthen my classes with ethics-rich reading material. I wrote them because they engaged and motivated my students and made my classes more meaningful and this made me a better teacher.