Category: Observations
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Mom to the ER with back pain 8/13/21
Facebook update: Update on Mom: After almost two weeks of back pain – including a clean x-ray – her pain escalated Friday night and I took her to the ER. They saw nothing in the initial x-ray. Further tests revealed an aortic aneurysm that they believed at the time could be associated with the pain.…
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Mom back from rehab for her back 9/14/21
A Facebook update. Good news. After a solid month of the hospital and then rehab, it looks like Mom is set to return home to the Wellington on Thursday. In many ways the roughest part of this stretch was the past few days. I was exposed to someone with COVID and had to await a…
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Daily Resolutions for Caring for my Mom Who Has Dementia
Today I resolve to care for Mom. I will do this by remembering that few of her thoughts and actions exist separate from her dementia, which is compounded by her pain, and her anxiety, and thus she deserves care, forgiveness, and patience even when a behavior is repeated over and over. This is also true…
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Racism in the Dewey Decimal System
When books about President Barack Obama arrived at the Bard High School, Early College library in Queens, New York, they were coded as 300 (Social Science) instead of 900 (History). Librarian Jess deCourcy Hinds raised what she thought was an obvious question: Why isn’t the President of the United States listed as history? Well, the…
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Best Words Weekly: Express Yourself!
This week I reached way back in time to a lesson I learned when my children were young, and I was a young teacher. As always, I learned from one of my students. This time, the lesson was the importance of telling your family you love them. My wise student Nyketa (left) with her mother…
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Tell Your Loved Ones You Love Them All The Time
When one student shared her response to a writing prompt, her teacher unexpectedly learned the value of saying “I love you” every day.