psychology dector

Once, having transferred to my first Catholic high school teaching position, I walked into trouble. I was eager to please and willing to do anything to be successful, an often fatal combination. As I signed my contract, I did not think about the principal’s off-the-cuff remark that, “the tenth grade English teacher is also the faculty advisor for the school newspaper.” I was so excited and overwhelmed planning my classes that I gave little thought to my upcoming foray into journalism. After classes began and I had a free moment, the first task I focused on was setting up the journalism room. Actually, the room was a storage closet, but I was not going to complain. I’d make it work. I carried fifteen electric typewriters up two flights of stairs to our newsroom. I wanted computers, but there were none to spare. “Besides,” the principal assured me, “journalists have been using typewriters for a hundred years. And these are top of the line: they’re electric!” As I won over my students in ...

Babette’s Feast A film by Gabriel Axel Denmark, 102 min. 1987, Color It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and of course, one expects special holiday essays about heartwarming moments and time spent with family, but what this weekend is all about is eating, pure and simple. If one is not into football and visiting with family members, the thing to do when not eating is to watch films about eating. And that brings me the long way around the barn to Babette’s Feast . Twenty-three years ago, Danish director Gabriel Axel made a special movie based on a short story by Isak Dinesen . (A little secret: Isak Dinesen was actually a woman named Karen Blixen.) The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1987. The cast is made up of relatively unknown French, Danish, and Swedish actors, and features the starkly beautiful coast of Jutland with its wind-swept beaches and harsh climate. Axel makes us feel the cold and biting wind, but he also rewards us with a feast of sensual extravagance...

I have written a previous post about Diane Ravitch and another on the film, Waiting for “Superman.” In the November 11th issue of The New York Review of Books , Ravitch does a thorough job of reviewing the film herself. One point she makes stands out. In her discussion of who, exactly, should be held accountable for the crisis in American education, Ravitch makes the following statement: "Ultimately the job of hiring teachers, evaluating them, and deciding who should stay and who should go falls to administrators. We should be taking a close look at those who award due process rights (the accurate term for ‘tenure’) to too many incompetent teachers. The best way to ensure that there are no bad or ineffective teachers in our public schools is to insist that we have principals and supervisors who are knowledgeable and experienced educators. Yet there is currently a vogue to recruit and train principals who have little or no education experience." I would add that too many ...

In Blackwater Woods By: Mary Oliver Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. We decided to get married one winter. We were miserable spending the holidays separately, she back with her parents to save money for school, and me in a crummy apartment haunted by ghosts. I remember waking up at three in the morning on Christmas day, the black and cold of winter fi...

Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life By Thich Nhat Hanh and Dr. Lilian Cheung   HarperOne , $25.99 cloth ISBN: 978-0-06-169769-2 Of all the world religions, Buddhism is unique in that it is both a philosophy and a religion. One can choose to follow the philosophy without adopting the faith. With that in mind, Buddhist monk and teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh and his student, Dr. Lilian Cheung have written a book that is of interest to westerners of all religious stripes who find themselves battling obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and other medical conditions associated with an unhealthy lifestyle. Hanh and Cheung focus on how Eastern philosophical principles can be applied to mindful eating and a mindful life, creating a plan that veers away from a prescribed diet, and centers on the psychology and science of food choices, as well as the possible root causes of obesity. They call their plan Mindful Living, and it contains three strands: in Eating, in Moving, and in Breathing. The in ref...

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.” Psalm 23:4 Through the scrim of sepia-colored memory, two ghosts walk across a ridge and drop down into a canyon. One is a man in his thirties, working class, with a stocky build. He wears a red wool shirt, jeans, and steel-toed boots. Slung across his back is a heavy-gauge, lever action hunting rifle. He also carries a canteen of water, a bone-handled hunting knife, and a snake bite kit. The other figure is a ten year old boy wearing a heavy coat and jeans. He, too, carries a canteen of water and a silver referee’s whistle on a lanyard around his neck. He is the man’s son, and he shivers with nervous energy. This is his first hunt. They make their way in the cold morning darkness to the outcropping—a bit of soft earth beneath a large, mesquite bush overlooking a deep canyon where the older man has come every fall of the year since his childhood. They settle in to wait for the de...

The Privileges By Jonathan Dee Random House Trade Paperback, $15.00 paper ISBN: 978-0-8129-8079-0 We have seen the high profile cases: Martha Stewart , Bernie Madoff , Michael Milken . These are the people who live far above the working class, and when one falls, we revel in the story. In America, we love to see the high and mighty brought low by time and fate, and almost immediately, we begin rooting for their comeback. Madoff’s return is still in the offing and probably unlikely because he is safely locked away in North Carolina with a release date, even with good behavior, of 2139. Stewart has returned to the scene with her empire bigger and better than ever, especially with her recent deal to all but takeover the Hallmark Channel . Michael Milken used his considerable wealth after his release from prison to fund a variety of charitable, philanthropic, and educational organizations as a way to give back and seek redemption for his criminal activity. For those mired in the middle cla...

“The tide rises, the tide falls, The twilight darkens, the curlew calls; Along the sea-sands damp and brown The traveler hastens toward the town, And the tide rises, the tide falls.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Longfellow was writing about the east coast, but he just as easily could have been talking about Carpinteria, California. Eighty miles up the left coast of the United States along Highway 101 sits the hamlet of Carpinteria. Incorporated in 1965, Carp, as some of the locals call it, is named for the Spanish word for carpentry, mainly because of the Chumash Indians . They had a thriving canoe-building business in the area long before the white man arrived. The Indians used the natural tar vents bubbling to the surface in the area to seal the canoes they built. The area is a sleepy small town, perfect for a getaway, for the weekend or the day. Carp is home to the fiftieth largest oil field in California, the Carpinteria Offshore Oilfield , and I cannot help but think of the possible...