Carol McClain     @carol_mcclain Have you ever wondered if your life mattered? If you made a difference. I taught for over thirty years. Never was I nominated as teacher of the year. Maybe once someone put my name in for teacher of the month. Without accolades, life went on. Sometimes I overachieved as an instructor. Sometimes I …[ read more ]

Carol McClain   @carol_mcclain With childlike faith, I decided I would write a novel about a paramedic. I naively researched the profession and assumed I had the correct information. I wasn’t so naive as to think it was perfect. During this time period, I wondered, too, if I was called to write. I belonged to a floundering critique group …[ read more ]

by Carol McClain      @carol_mcclain   Fifteen fourth graders crowded my classroom eager to make a stained glass heart. I gulped. Fifteen nine-year-olds. Then I stopped breathing. Fourteen active, normal nine-year-olds and one older, disabled child. How can the teacher instruct him along with all the others? I exhaled and breathed normally. In one day I had to send …[ read more ]

by Carol McClain     @carol_mcclain I’d heard being stranded in a cave could cause blindness. Mostly it’s true for infants, but not for adults. Darkness impairs everyone’s vision. For example, miners develop jerky eye movements because they spend so much time in dark spaces. This concept of the damage living in the dark causes brings to mind a study by …[ read more ]

by Carol McClain    @carol_mcclain Have you ever toured a cave? Last year, my family and I explored the Lost Sea in Speedwell, Tennessee. Lights strung along the path led us over ledges, around stalagmites, past underground streams. Deep into the cavern, the tour did what all cave tours do. They turned off the lights. Darkness so …[ read more ]