I teach an ethics class for little kids on Sunday mornings. It’s a small group and the kids don’t come every Sunday, because lives are complicated. The group ranges in age from 3 to 9, so it can be a challenge to find things that hold their interest.
I Wonder About Wonder
My book club picked Wonder for this month of January and I decided to be a good book club member (for once) and actually read the book I’m supposed to, rather than the books that I want to read. I read the entire thing in almost one sitting which means that I was avoiding something else in my life (grading and laundry, I stopped to play with some Shopkins and a certain blond 5 year old who wanted me to hang with her). I Wonder […]
Don’t just keep it simple, make it understandable, and make me care
When Alan Alda speaks to doctors about communicating with their patients, he doesn’t start off by saying “When you talk to a patient, try not to use jargon.” Instead, he tells them a story about his appendix operation. When Alda was in Chile filming a documentary, he suffered a life-threatening problem with his appendix. He needed an end-to-end anastomosis. This meant a yard of Alda’s intestine had to be cut out. Before surgery, his operating doctor told him that something had gone wrong with Alda’s […]
Advice on Love and Life
This compilation of advice columns was recommended to me by my 25-year-old daughter, the same daughter who introduced me to Cannonball Read and whose taste in literature I admire 99% of the time. Not a devotee of the chicken soup series, I was—to put it mildly–reticent to read something subtitled “Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar.” But after reading one question to “Sugar” and her reply, I was totally hooked. “Sugar” is the name taken by Cheryl Strayed, best-selling author of the memoir […]