It is Black History Month! We all know what this means: Lots of tributes to and images of President Obama, Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, and a host of Black "paving the way" entertainers and athletes will be floating around our children at school this month. While we at GCP believe our sons and daughters and [...]
Season's Greetings!! With Christmas but a week away, today's Thoughtful Thursday brings you some holiday cheer in the form of poetry from two of the great ones. Here are two Christmas poems by Langston Hughes and one from Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Enjoy! Christmas Eve: Nearing Midnight In New York The Christmas trees are almost all sold And the ones [...]
It is finals time for our high school and college boys, and our younger guys are likely to have year end testing as well. Here are a few tips from the internet and GCP that you can suggest to your sons to help them do their best on these tests. 1.Create a Personal Study Guide. Even if the teacher [...]
It's that time of year when students everywhere face tests and papers before the holiday break. Today's Thoughtful Thursday brings quotes to inspire your sons as they hunker down and get this job done. The will to succeed is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare. -Bobby Knight Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated [...]
In the aftermath of the recent killings in Lebanon and Paris, today's Thoughtful Thursdays offers poems about grieving after catastrophic events. "Facing It", by Yusef Komunyakaa, the only African American man to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, details his experience of loss and remembrance when he visits the Vietnam Memorial. In "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100" by [...]
Over the years that GCP has been around, we have had to write an alarming number of posts with the same basic message: how do we talk to our sons about unimaginably horrible and senseless killings that they can see footage of over and over on CNN? This time it is Paris. It has been Lebanon, it has been [...]
Happy Fall! Today's Thoughtful Thursday celebrates fall with the poem "Merry Autumn" from Paul Laurence Dunbar. Enjoy. Merry Autumn It's all a farce, — these tales they tell About the breezes sighing, And moans astir o'er field and dell, Because the year is dying. Such principles are most absurd, — I care not who first taught 'em; There's nothing [...]
Unless you have been sleeping under a rock, you know that the musical "Hamilton" is on Broadway, and you should also know that it is one of the most amazing pieces of musical theater ever. Ever. The story of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton brilliantly told through genius writing and composing using a mash up of hip hop and a [...]
As I talked with a good friend recently about our sons and their social lives, he quoted an old saying that rang so true: "Show me his friends and I'll show you his future." Our sons will most certainly have a lot of friends over the course of their childhood and adolescence. But at some point he will develop [...]
Another horrific shooting on another college campus. 10 dead and 7 more injured. The shooter is among the dead, leaving a nation with never-to-be-answered questions as to why. President Obama grimly commented on this most recent tragedy with concern and frustration: "[A]s I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I [...]