Next week is Thanksgiving. Why is Thanksgiving so shunned in society? I remember in elementary school, coloring wonderful pictures of cornucopias, and close dinner gatherings between the Native Americans and the Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving. Is it because now the story is out and the origin is that we technically pillaged the Native Americans and caused their destruction that Thanksgiving is on its way out?

Why doesn’t Thanksgiving get any recognition in the world of media and retail

 I understand politicians have to, in this day and age, use social media. It is an excellent tool for them to spotlight the work that they are doing and the people they assist on the daily basis. However, I do not think politicians should post selfies, unless it is of them with a constituent or has a political purpose. Recently, one of our local elected officials posted a selfie on Instagram. This local politician then posted a quote and multiple hashtags. One of the hashtags was  #bored. In

This past Tuesday, August 6, was my mother’s 31st anniversary in heaven. For some reason, this does not make me as unhappy as it used to or as unhappy as Mother’s Day sometimes makes me feel. I feel a certain nostalgia, maybe because the summer holds such special memories for me regarding my mother.

Many things in our society have changed, but the one constant is that Rockaway kids have the life. When we were kids, my mother barely used the car. We rode our bikes EVERYWHERE. While today’s kids

So I have been teaching high school English, and tutoring writing and reading for over twenty years and one of the things I have noticed in the classroom and in sessions with students while tutoring, is kids are lacking in background information. In my opinion, while taking a standardized exam, I tell the students the two most important things while taking a standardized exam are: vocabulary and background knowledge. If they do not know the words in an answer section, they cannot accurately

When I was in high school in the late 1980s, I was assigned the George Orwell novel, 1984. I barely got through it and kept saying to myself, “This guy is crazy, he thinks the world would have been filled with cameras and the government watching us at our every move in the year 1984?” I disliked the book for many years. Skip to today and I teach the novel and my students and I love it because in 2019 many of the things Orwell had predicted have come true. Some of my best research projects were

Babysitter: a person who looks after a child or children while the parents are out.

What has happened to the babysitter? Do kids still babysit? Do parents still hire babysitters?

It seems recently that kids are everywhere I go. Now, my children are 21 and 26, so I like the no children atmosphere. I know the babysitter is expensive but children do not belong in certain places at certain times. Here is my children etiquette column.

Children should not be in the following places:

I recently