Back to Classrooms and the Glass Half Full... or Half Empty

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Back to Classrooms and the Glass Half Full... or Half Empty

As teachers and students confined to their homes in 2020 and 2021, we thought that the solution to our frustrations would come the day we could get back into the classroom. In this, we were so naïve. Don’t misinterpret me as a negative, “half empty” person, though. This is just reality.

The latest report on learning poverty, The State of Global Learning Poverty, estimated that 57% of the world's ten-year-olds could not comprehend age-appropriate text before the pandemic…

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Blooming in the Time of Covid

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Blooming in the Time of Covid

There’s a scene in the movie The 5th Element where the villain, played by Gary Oldman, bloviates about how all the evil, destructive things he does are actually good, because they prompt the creation of industry and provide work for countless people. While we disagree strongly with the idea that the good that can come after evil things have happened somehow transmogrifies that evil into good, the fact remains that truly awful things—like a global pandemic, for example—can bring about some positive change…

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Information That Saves Lives

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Information That Saves Lives

Do you hate going to the doctor?

Imagine you went to the doctor’s office and she held up a strange-looking medical instrument and said, “Hello friends. I want to give this opportunity now. It can die like a mosquito, but it can also save your life.”* You would probably be more than just confused—you’d be scared. And the next time you felt sick, you might avoid the doctor altogether (and tell others in your community to do the same).

This is a problem that millions of people all over the world experience every time they go to the doctor, or some well-meaning healthcare provider attempts to give them vital, life-giving information…

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Together We Can

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Together We Can

During the past few weeks, there have been times when it has felt like we’ve all decided to just take a vacation from talking and worrying about Covid-19 as we’ve focused, instead, on the #BlackLivesMatter protests and the history of systemic racism in America.

But as necessary and important as all this soul-searching and activism are, the fact of Covid-19 remains. By the end of May, the virus had been the world’s leading cause of death for almost exactly one month—having caused around a hundred thousand more deaths in 2020 than its closest lethal competitor, malaria…

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The Cancer Patient's Mite

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The Cancer Patient's Mite

You’ve probably seen this picture before, but did you know that the woman in the photograph is named Florence Owens Thompson? She was thirty-two at the time Dorthea Lange took her picture, and a widowed mother of seven children. Thompson told Lange that she had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, as well as birds that her children had killed. Dorthea Lange’s portrait of the “Migrant Mother” has come to be one of the most iconic images in American history. It helped galvanize the American public during the Great Depression. It drew people together, and is part of the reason why Americans came to remember that era as a time when the community gathered to help those in need…

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Now You Know...

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Now You Know...

Empathy is hard.

It’s not necessarily that humans are inherently self-absorbed—although that does describe an uncomfortable percentage of us—it’s just that life is complicated and challenging enough without having to step out of our own shoes and into someone else’s. This is why the current period of enforced empathy may prove in some ways to be a good thing—an opportunity, even.

For perhaps the first time in the history of the world, all of us are experiencing the same thing, at the same time.

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