March and April are Spring Break months, and since we at GCP are Spring Breaking as we write, today's Thoughtful Thursday offerings are about vacations. In "Vacation", Rita Dove, who in 1987 became the second African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1993–1995, [...]
Celebrated children's and young adult book author Walter Dean Myers has a great essay asking "Where Are the People of Color in Children's Books?" in this past Sunday's New York Times. In his essay, found here, Myers responds to a recent report that only 93 of the 3,200 children's books published in 2013 were about African Americans. He describes [...]
An interesting hodgepodge of poetry for today's Thoughtful Thursday. March being Women's History Month, we at GCP want to pay tribute to women, in all of their facets and all of their glory. So we will start with Maya Angelou's classic "Phenomenal Women", and then move onto poems perhaps not so immediately recognizable, but that pack a punch: "For [...]
Black boys as young as 10 years old are more likely than their White peers to be mistaken as older, less innocent, and more appropriate targets for police violence if accused of a crime, according to research conducted by UCLA psychologists. In their study, abstracted here, the researchers examined "whether Black boys are given the protections of childhood equally [...]
By now many of you who are focused on high school education have heard that there will be changes in the SAT beginning with the May 2016 test. This will affect ninth graders and below, so those of us with middle schoolers and high school freshmen need to pay special attention. So here's what the new SAT will look [...]
Today's Thoughtful Thursday features Maya Angelou, the esteemed poet and author. Here are two of her poems which commemorate memorable occasions. The first, "On the Pulse of Morning", was written for and delivered by Angelou at the 1993 inauguration of Bill Clinton. This is followed by the "The Million Man March" poem which she read to the throngs of [...]
In honor of the "My Brother's Keeper" initiative launched today by President Barack Obama and these being the final days of Black History Month, today's Thoughtful Thursday offerings are inspirational poems for and about our boys. The first, a Langston Hughes classic, "I, Too Sing America", reminds them that we all deserve a seat at the table. "Black Boys [...]
This afternoon President Obama will announce the launch of an initiative to provide greater opportunities to African-American and Hispanic young men of color. His "My Brother's Keeper" initiative has already received a $150 million commitment from a group of foundations and businesses who have pledged an additional $200 million towards this effort. The White House initiative seeks to intervene [...]
Today's Thoughtful Thursday offerings are inspired by "Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls", a book of humorous poetry about naughty, ill-mannered, even cruel, boys and girls. (It is a great book; hard to find, but worth picking it up if you can locate one.) Most of the poems below are from Shel Silverstein (the author of "The Giving Tree"), who [...]
Hard to imagine as frigid temperatures and snow continue to plague us on the East Coast and elsewhere around the nation, but now is the time to focus on Summer Camps. If you are interested in finding out about summer camp options, don't wait any longer to start your research, as Summer Camp research and sign-up season is well [...]