THE MULTIPLICATION SONG BOOK

L.D. Dockery has been an educator for over forty years, instructing mathematics on the college, high school, and middle grades levels. The latter part of his career was steered towards teaching at alternative schools which was his awakening to improving reading skills as a primary objective. His roles as parent, pastor, performer, professor, and poet, his five P’s of personal endurance, challenge him to encourage reading as it relates to mathematics in the academic community and to make reading a community effort across all disciplines. As a child, he loved watching cartoons. His grasp of the experience was the profound imagery of animals that talked and his remembering their lines of conversation. “They could sing, dance, etc., as wished. Why not let them teach?” This was the voice of inspiration that would drive him to poetry involving animals that could tell stories as well as teach about community. In his belief, this is the core of existence around which all knowedge should adhere. His way is to allow everything to breathe from community. As in the series, reading and math are instructed from a sense of community of which his characters are viable parts with each supporting each other. The school is no more than a formal educational institution serving the needs within the community. It is said that, “He writes from the heart,” referring to his POETRHYME. It is from this “point of view” that he aspires to write, not so much from research as from insearch, as he writes from his rich “personal experience.” With the author, L.D. Dockery, what is or is to be said is “from the heart.”