Not only young people write to me through my column. To kick off the New Year, I selected a parent and a grandparent email to share. Q. I appreciate the way you support teachers in your column and your social media posts. I taught for 45 years, mostly middle school. My teacher colleagues ...
Q. I overheard my mom and my uncle talking. I wasn’t supposed to be there. They said this may be the last Christmas we’ll have with my grandma. She must be really sick. Since I heard them, I can’t think of anything else. My grandma is the best person I know. No one else makes me feel so ...
Q. I read your column about friendship last week and wished so much I’d had you to talk with when I was 13. No one seemed to understand how devastated I was when my longest and best friend simply dropped out of my life. I was brokenhearted. I’m a mom now and my children are small – I know ...
Q. My gram died. This is the first death I’ve understood. My pap died when I was four, but I don’t really remember it. My gram meant a great deal to me. I would go to her house when I didn’t get along with my sisters. I’m the middle child and the only boy, so that happened a lot. She ...
In honor of Banned Book Week 2024 (Sept. 22-28), I’m looking back at a poignant question posed to me two years ago by a 16-year-old. A Tennessee school district had just voted to ban Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus” about the Holocaust due to “inappropriate ...
Q.: Well, I’ve been back to school almost a month and it’s not what I hoped middle school would be. I was worried about it all of August and my mom said it’ll be fine. My gram said I was old enough to just deal with it. My dad said, be a man. I don’t feel like being a man. We had a lock ...
