John Crowley, right, (Brendan Fraser) and research scientist, Dr. Robert Stonehill, (Harrison Ford) discuss ways of treating the fatal Pompe [...]

Last year about this time, I was walking through a long, winding hallway at Holy Apostles School with crowds of [...]

As a boy, Yogi Berra was asked how he liked school. Berra supposedly responded: “Closed.”

Obviously the baseball immortal didn’t attend St. Coletta Day School in Milwaukee. According to Sue Jiardini of St. Sebastian Parish, Milwaukee, her son Oscar and his schoolmates “all love” St. Coletta.

“All the children totally look forward to going to school,” Jiardini said in a telephone interview. “The kids are so nurtured there. They are so taken care of and treated with so much dignity.”

In Mrs. Weas’ morning science class at St. Joan of Arc School, Nashotah, nearly 24 students sit three to a table as the day’s lesson begins. Science posters, upcoming experiments and caricatures of well-known scientists such as Albert Einstein and Madame Curie surround the classroom as students patiently wait for their teacher to begin. It would appear as though this is just like any other classroom, if not for one difference: two grades in one room.

“Fifth grade girl needs to call on a sixth grade boy, sixth grade boy needs to call on a fifth grade girl!” Weas calls out as students open their textbooks to the correct page and prepare to read aloud.

“Wait, then who’s going to call on the sixth grade girls then?” she asked the class.

The students erupt in laughter, as it is just another learning experience their teacher has to go through. 

Did you get a time machine for Christmas? I didn’t either, but I did get the next best thing.

Shortly after our older son was born in 1986, I bought a camcorder. By today’s sleek standards, it’s big and bulky, difficult to balance, and records on the ancient, outmoded format known as VHS tape. My plan at the time was to use this then state-of-the-art technology to document our children’s lives as they grew up.

I was inspired by my father, who used 1950s state-of-the-art technology, namely an 8mm movie camera, to document his family’s escapades. Unfortunately, due to the unstable make-up of color movie film, many of those images – along with my memory of the original events – have faded. I did not want that to happen to the VHS tapes, which are also vulnerable to the ravages of time, so a while ago I purchased a DVD/VCR recorder-combo-unit with the intent of transferring dozens of tapes containing precious memories to the latest state-of-the-art technology, DVDs.