Today's Thoughtful Thursday continues the celebration of Women's History Month, featuring women poets from a variety of cultures and generations. Today we offer a delightful assortment of poems about women by women. First Patricia Smith (b.1955) gives us a "Hip Hop Ghazal" celebrating femininity. A ghazal, originally an Arabic verse form dealing with loss and romantic love, consists of couplets [...]
BIG NEWS! I've developed a series of parenting classes called The Inside Guide to NYC Parenting, and it is coming to Hunter College in April!! If you live in or around NYC, you can join us to discover answers to some of the pressing parenting questions I've been focusing on for years in this blog. I'll be offering resources, [...]
It's Thoughtful Thursday, and in honor of International Woman's Day (which is tomorrow, March 8), today we are featuring a diverse slate of fantastic women poets. From June Jordan we have "Oughta Be a Woman", a poem that pays special tribute to mothers of color but is an ode to mothers everywhere. Chilean poet and visual artist Celia Vicuña gives [...]
Looking for ways to help your children stay motivated and succeed in school? Check out these resources we've recently discovered: Code.org. It is no secret that knowing how to code will put children at a huge advantage when they reach the job market. Jobs that require coding make up 58% of all projected new jobs in STEM fields, and [...]
As it is the last day of Black History Month, today's Thoughtful Thursday features several poems celebrating notable Black figures in American history and one in commemorating the history of Black people in America. GCP hopes that parents share Black American history with their sons and daughters throughout the year, (not just for one month, every month), but we are not [...]
Fifty four years ago today, on February 21, 1965, activist and religious leader Malcolm X was assassinated by a member of the Nation of Islam while addressing his Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. Today's Thoughtful Thursday pays tribute to Malcolm X, first with the stirring eulogy Ossie Davis delivered at his funeral. Then, [...]
On Tuesday, the Obama Foundation’s first national My Brother’s Keeper Alliance convening, MBK Rising!, began in Oakland, CA. This two-day event brought together civic leaders, young men of color and representatives of the MBK organizations that are supporting these young men nationwide. The opening session of the convening featured a session with President Obama and Steph Curry answering questions [...]
Happy Valentine's Day! Today's Thoughtful Thursday celebrates this day of love and romance with three love poems from one of America's first great Black poets, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906). Dunbar was known for writing poetry in both standard English and dialectic verse, and there are examples of both in the love songs presented below. While his use of dialect [...]
A recent NY Times column highlights an initiative from the College Board (the folks who create and produce the SATs and AP Exams) in which the Board determined that mastering two codes--computer science and the U.S. Constitution--were the most important skills (among the skills they test) for achieving success in college and in life. They explain their clunky-but-cleverly named [...]
For today’s Thoughtful Thursday we celebrate a wonderful African American poet whom we at GCP have only recently discovered: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911). In addition to being a poet, Harper was a journalist, fiction writer and activist. Born in Baltimore to free African American parents, she learned to read and write at the Academy for Negro Youth run [...]