11 Million Paper Clips

I have been guilty of doing one of the things that I blame other people for doing especially in Iraq. I have complained as have others that we only hear the bad news.

I have done the same thing in education. I have always written about the bad things going on because there are so many of them but I have been remiss is talking about the good things and there are many. In this country there many teachers who are educators in the true sense of the word. We don't hear about them because of the same reasons we don't hear about the good news in Iraq.

Therefore when I read this story about something good that has been going on in a school in a small town where kids are really learning about the real world I knew I had to write about it.

Why would kids from a small town in Tennessee—a town without any Jews—decide to create the world’s only children’s Holocaust memorial? How would the world respond? This is the story that Bob Johnson and his group of McLean filmmakers tell in the documentary film Paper Clips.

The story started small but it evolved into a major project spanning several years.

In 1998 Linda Hooper and a group of parents and teachers in Whitwell sat down to talk about what kids were learning in school—and what they weren’t. There was one obvious gap: In a town that’s almost exclusively white and Protestant, Whitwell kids knew very little about other people.

Linda Hooper is a true educator and her community is lucky to have her. I wish there were more like her in america's schools. Thinking outside the box, trying to make a difference, this story has it all. They even attracted some real survivors of the death camps to come visit, read the whole thing and more.

If you get a chance go see the movie, I know I will.