Just when I was starting to feel like Wal-Mart was improving.  They have started selling more organic produce, and are working to improve the nutritional quality of their food with manufacturers, partnering with anti-obesity champion and First Lady, Michelle Obama.

“We are raising another generation of girls who kind of measure their self-worth based on what’s on the outside,” Dr. Logan Levkoff, author of the book “Third Base Ain’t What it Used to Be” said to “Good Morning America.”

Read the rest of the post here.

“If teachers, parents, school boards, administrators, community members, and lawmakers can listen to each other and work on this problem together, we can lessen the tide of teacher attrition, ultimately improving the learning and working environment in schools for everyone. (p. 156)”

Those are the final words of this new book by Katy Farber. Depending on what statistics you use, we lose up to 30% of new teachers in the first three years, up to 50% in the first five. Some clearly should not have been teachers in the first place. But others bring the passion, knowledge and, at least potentially, the skill we need for all of our students. Some of those we lose early in their career are already great teachers, others are potentially so. The reasons that cost us these teachers also cost us those later in their careers, who all recognize are great.

This book can help us begin to address the problem.

Read the rest Kenneth Bernstein’s review on the Daily Kos here.

This poem opens my book, Why Great Teachers Quit and How We Might Stop the Exodus.

I am the guardian of your 10-year-old self

I bear witness, child one second

teenager the next

developing a sense

of what is right

what is wrong

and all in between

pushing the boundaries of childhood

like water on the levees

intense daily interactions

reading, writing, thinking

talking, laughing, brooding

until poof ! you’re gone

like summer in Vermont

or a flock of birds overhead

flying fast out of sight

I squint to see the tiny dots disappear.

So when I see you in town

at the grocery store,

don’t think I’m odd

because I stop in my tracks

shaken

because while I’ve stayed

the same in the mirror

you’ve gone through a

swirling metamorphosis

when I wasn’t looking

you’ve danced, sung, played, changed

and done more than I’d ever known

or could teach you.

I’m looking for the relic

for the tiny piece

of your preadolescent

clumsy, shining self

searching the pictures in my mind,

head spinning.

So when you see me on the street

stop and say hello.

Tell me who you are now

and I will tell you

who you were

then.