Teacher Tom

I am of Danish and English heritage, with some Irish and French mixed in for good measure. I know the most about my Danish background in that my grandmother immigrated to the US as a child and was therefore a bit more connected to her roots than a lot...

I can't remember a time when people weren't talking about finding themselves.
The idea is that once we find ourselves, we can then be ourselves, which sounds pretty good. The problem I'm having is that this thing called "self," at least for me, is a moving target....

One of the most entertaining parts of being a parent is collecting the charming, cute, and sometimes profound things your child says while in the process of learning to talk.
I've written before about how my family, to this day, will refer to VW Beatles as "mowers" because I once mistook the put-put-put of its engine for our family's gas powered lawnmower. A boy at school once said, "Those lights are looking at me" when they...

There is little in human history that compares to what we expect of school children today. The nearest precident was child labor during the early Industrial Revolution. Even during that era when children were routinely employed as cheap labor, as dangerous...