Inspiration,
Women, NFL, Security
Read and Watch:
“Behind a nondescript
doorway there was a meeting. Men from the FBI, local police and the sheriff's
department were receiving a high-level security briefing about one of the
biggest terrorist targets in the world. The recently appointed head of Homeland
Security was there, surrounded by men in blue uniforms, brown fatigues and
black suits, many sporting translucent cords curling around their ears.
At the head of the
table sat a 49-year-old woman with shoulder length blonde hair barely touching
her new black suit coat. She had purchased it a few weeks earlier when, for the
first time in her adult life, she actually had to go out and buy "work
clothes." She never spoke at that February meeting, just listened politely
to the men around the table because she knew what they were going to say before
they said it. More than 4,000 officers from 40 different law enforcement
agencies were about to follow her lead, even though she had been on the job for
only a few months. Even though she dropped out of high school when she became
pregnant at age 14. Even though many said she destroyed her career when she
filed a complaint to her police department, claiming sexual harassment on the
job.
As chief of security
for the NFL, Cathy Lanier has one of the most coveted jobs in law enforcement.
Once a headstrong teenager who drove her mother crazy, she now commands respect
and admiration from men not generally accustomed to seeing a woman in charge.
Her path to the top has been unorthodox, as she keeps breaking society's norms
to enforce its laws.
But Lanier will tell
you she didn't have any choice. She needed to make a better life for her
newborn child. For Cathy Lanier, it has always been about taking care of
family.”
Gun
Laws
“The relationship between state gun laws and the flow of
firearms between states can be measured using data from the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which traces guns’ origins and where law enforcement
recovers them. An analysis of data from 107 pairs of bordering states2 throughout the country shows a
relationship between the strictness of a state’s gun laws relative to its
neighbor and the number of firearms recovered3 from that neighbor.4
Jens Ludwig, a professor at the University of Chicago and
director of the University of Chicago crime lab, notes that ATF data “that has
been analyzed by academics across the country regularly shows that in cities
that try to control gun violence by supplementing federal regulations with
additional local gun laws, those laws are regularly undermined by crime guns
coming in from other states.”
For instance, an NPR fact check of the White House talking point noted that Chicago is
close to the borders of two states — Wisconsin and Indiana — that have weak gun
laws. A 2014 report from the city of Chicago noted that 60 percent of guns
used to commit crimes in Chicago from 2009 to 2013 originated outside of
Illinois, and Indiana and Wisconsin were two of the biggest sources of
recovered guns.5 And Illinois is not alone.”
Cancer, Appearance
“Look Good
Feel Better is one of several nonprofit programs that taps into the power of
tending to personal appearance to bolster the spirits of people with cancer.
Currently in its 28th year, Look Good Feel Better is a collaborative effort
among the Personal Care Products Council, the American Cancer Society and the
Professional Beauty Association. Licensed beauty professionals, including hair
stylists, makeup artists, aestheticians and nail technicians, volunteer their
time to teach participants about skin and nail care, as well as how to use
cosmetics, wigs, turbans and accessories.
“We recognize that living with cancer can be
overwhelming,” says Louanne Roark, executive director of the Look Good Feel
Better Foundation of the Personal Care Products Council. “Our goal is to help
people with cancer feel more confident about putting themselves out there,
whether they’re going to work, taking their kids to school, grocery shopping or
just looking in a mirror at home.””
No More White Saviors: Let People Lead Their Own Movements
“A new book by Jordan Flaherty, No More Heroes: Grassroots Challenges to the Savior Mentality, offers insight into how the practice of “saviorism” injures our movements and provides visions for an alternative and much-needed praxis.
You’re no doubt familiar with the White savior: a person of privilege picks a cause they know little to nothing about and insists on solutions that inevitably cause more harm than good. As Flaherty explains, the savior mentality cannot exist without turning people into objects who need rescuing.
“It is as old as conquest and as enduring as colonialism,” he writes. As an activist and a journalist, Flaherty has witnessed firsthand the harms of saviorism and neatly lays out countless examples of its failure—perhaps most poignantly when he writes about Brandon Darby. Flaherty cites numerous articles and other activists for his well-researched chapter about Darby, a man he’s known for several years.”
Education, Homework
“How can we fix homework?
Cory Bennett is doing his part to answer that
question. Bennett, now an assistant professor of education of Idaho State, was,
for many years, an eighth-grade math teacher in Hawaii. His school was
unusually diverse, both ethnically and socioeconomically. Bennett's initial
approach to homework was traditional—to teach math concepts in class and assign
relevant homework to drill them in. Basically, a lot of rote work. Students
weren't onboard. They rejected the homework; soon, most of the class was
failing. Rather than blame the students, Bennett re-examined his approach and
realized, as he told me, "I didn't know what they knew." Likewise, he
had no idea what their lives were like outside of class.
So one day he quashed
the planned homework assignment and asked his students to write a 100-word
essay about what it was like to be their age. What Bennett received from his
kids changed the way he taught. Having a "lens into their mind"
helped explain why the traditional homework regime failed. The kids did not
have a place to study at home; they had to care for siblings after school; they
were overly preoccupied with being accepted among peers to focus on homework;
they were dealing with parental problems at home. Normal stuff—but it all
mattered. Together, these accounts, according to Bennett, not only explained
the broken homework model, but "transformed my instructional
practices."
By better
understanding "the lives of my students," Bennett says he was able to
appreciate how they needed to be empowered while at school. Everything they
wrote about, all their insecurities and ambitions, spoke to a neglected desire
for some level of autonomy over classroom learning. To pursue this goal Bennett
did something simple but powerful: he let the students know he wanted them to
succeed. Then he asked them to provide ideas about how to master the
mathematical material in the confines of the classroom. Essentially, he said,
"Here is what we have to learn; do you have ideas about how to do it?”
