Teaching children: Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church. Cleveland, Ohio

Teaching children: Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church. Cleveland, Ohio

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Mom, part 1000.

She started crying two weeks ago and couldn't stop. So she wouldn't go down to meals at Sunrise because she'd cry, and "people would be annoyed". "How can you tell they are annoyed, Mom?" "Because they ignore me." "Maybe they are ignoring you because they don't know what else to do?" "No. They are annoyed. I'll stay in my room." She stopped eating, and called my sister over and over. She cried, sobbed and gulped like an abandoned child. She wouldn't watch TV because, "I used to watch TV with Gordon." She wouldn't read because, "I read when I was with Gordon". Gordon, her husband of 28 years, died in March. She went to Sunrise directly from a stay in a nursing facility where she lived while Gordon died slowly, with much struggle, and a conviction that he'd make it, and take care of her again. He promised her. She believed him whole-heartedly. She misses him dreadfully. But she won't...
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Prejudice...My Mom's Secret War

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Mom as a child. My Mother had a secret war. She didn't take it to the streets, or join with others to wage it. In her heart she held beliefs that were mightily opposed to the popular opinion of her time. She taught me that African Americans were not N****s, as the neighbors said. They were "colored people, or Negroes". They were people like us. But she taught these things quietly, as if fearing someone would overhear. The most powerful, long-lasting oppression she held within her was the oppression of Anti-Semitism . She falsified her applications for work after she quit high school because they asked for her religion. She wrote, "Protestant", instead.  In one of her first jobs she was routinely called the "Jew Girl" . This she wanted to avoid in the future. When I was small, she counseled me to never tell anyone I was half Jewish. We lived in a second-generation Roman Catholic neighborhood in Willowick, Ohio. I told, anyway. I thought, if ...
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True self-expression

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This is a former student (she's going into first grade, now). When I teach courses on young children and the arts, this picture resonates for me. A child who has the opportunity to listen to music, feel it, and respond to it is finding her creative center. In schools, today, children need to learn through all their senses, through their bodies, as well as their minds and imaginations. I teach my college students that American children are several years "developmentally delayed", musically. As a nation we are more music consumers, than music makers. I show them videos of children in other cultures making sophisticated rhythm and music when they are only four and five years old--mostly unheard of here. I emphasize the connection between musical and language development, and how those areas of the brain are close together. We discuss ways to infuse music and movement into every aspect of the curriculum. Before the state cut out the Community College class on Music & Mo...
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