The Girl Effect

I can't believe I never saw The Girl Effect before; tell me this is new. So, I’m copying this straight off the page that has floored me tonight:

Here’s the thing: Girls living in poverty are uniquely capable of creating a better future. But when a girl reaches adolescence, she comes to a crossroads. Things can go one of two ways for her- and for everyone around her.
One: She gets a chance, gets educated, stays healthy and HIV-negative, marries when she chooses, raises a healthy family, and has the opportunity to raise the standard of living for herself, her brothers, her family, her community, and her country.
Two: None of these things happen. She is illiterate, married off, isolated, pregnant, and vulnerable to HIV. She and her family are stuck in a cycle of poverty.

It’s no big deal.
Just the future of humanity.

Sometimes I want to write. Sometimes others have already written so eloquently, there is little left to do but share.

Art, art, art, I love you.....

On YouTube by Andrea Dorfman.
Sit back and smile for 2 minutes.

Sir Ken Robinson Strikes Again: TED Talks

Attached is a new speech by Sir Ken Robinson, who several years ago addressed the TED audience with How Education Kills Creativity. Just posted is a new address, Bring on the Learning Revolution, in which he challenges the old paradigm of linear, industrial education and supports an organic, agricultural approach, one that emphasizes individuality and community. He ends with a poem by W.B. Yeats, suggesting that as educators must tread softly on our children's dreams:

"He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven"

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)

Wash a Pelican?

Surely don't know how much "fun" this would be, but I have this hankering to help these birds. I started reading about the wherefore and how-to. Maybe a few weeks or a month of help in Louisiana....


Lauren. Wanna go?