A schoolteacher devoted 45 years to helping students with disabilities. Now she’s leaving them $1 million

From CNN authored by Madeleine Thompson and Kwegybira Croffie:

“Genevieve Via Cava loved teaching and loved her students. Now, seven years after her death, they are learning just how much.

The teacher in Dumont, New Jersey, devoted 45 years of her life to helping students with learning disabilities. After her retirement in 1990, Via Cava continued to visit the school district for which she worked, checking in on classes and sometimes stopping by the superintendent’s office.
Via Cava died in 2011. And this April, the Dumont Public Schools received something they never expected: a check from her estate for $1 million.
The former educator, who had no children or immediate family of her own, had amassed a small fortune through her exceptional saving habits. She left the astonishing donation in her will to fund scholarships for special education students seeking post-secondary education.”

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How the ’90s Tricked Women Into Thinking They’d Gained Gender Equality

From TIME authored by Allison Yarrow:

“As the 90s dawned things were looking up for women. Daughters of second-wave feminism came of age and chose new paths unavailable to their mothers: delaying marriage and children, pursuing higher education, joining the workforce, and assuming independence and identities outside of the home. The gaps between men and women in education “have essentially disappeared for the younger generation,” declared a 1995 report by the National Center for Education Statistics. The equal education promise of Title IX was coming to fruition.

For more than a century, the median marriage age for women swung between 20 and 22, but in 1990, it nearly jumped to 24. By 1997 it reached 25. Postponing marriage and kids liberated women sexually; it also gave them increased economic power and paved their entry into male-dominated careers. Almost half of married women surveyed in 1995 reported earning half or more of their total family income, leading the study’s sponsor to declare, “Women are the new providers.”

The forward motion of the 90s seemed to build on the 80s, a decade of hallowed female pioneers in diverse fields. Sally Ride traveled to space. Geraldine Ferraro secured the vice presidential nomination of a major political party. Alice Walker and Toni Morrison won Pulitzer Prizes for their epic, women-centered fiction. Madonna smashed barriers in music, entertainment and popular culture. Because these firsts and many others were so widely celebrated, society assumed these trailblazing women would also cut a path for all women to advance in work, entertainment, politics and culture in the years to come. At last, the dream of gender equality would be realized.

The dream, as we know, was not realized. But a quick glance back at the 90s would suggest that American women indeed made significant progress during the decade. In Janet Reno, Madeleine Albright, Judith Rodin and Carly Fiorina, the 90s saw the first woman attorney general, secretary of state, president of an Ivy League institution (University of Pennsylvania), and CEO of a Fortune 100 company (Hewlett-Packard). More women won political office than ever before in 1992, the so-called Year of the Woman, when their numbers in the Senate tripled (from a measly two to a small but more respectable six).”

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Thousands of Migrant Children Are Being Separated From Their Families at the Border. Here’s How to Help Them

From TIME authored by Alix Langone:

“Nearly 2,000 migrant children have been separated from their parents at the border as part of the Trump administration’s controversial “zero-tolerance” policy on border crossings — and many people are still looking for ways to help the families, even as the White House acted to adjust that policy on Wednesday.

President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday reversing his stance on family separation in response to the growing outrage over the thousands of migrant children being split from their parents while trying to cross the border.

Although the executive order says a zero-tolerance policy will still be enforced — meaning that anyone caught crossing the border is still subject to criminal proceedings — the order says families will be kept intact.

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Professor Carol M. Suzuki Presents “Promoting Student Learning and Breastfeeding Behind Bars Through Multi-Faceted Social Justice Advocacy”

From The University of New Mexico authored by Hannah Farrington:

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NEWS Infant Ripped From Mother’s Breast At Immigration Detention Center, Mother Handcuffed For Resisting

From Scary Mommy authored by Cassandra Stone:

“The separation of young children and their families at immigration detention centers is a prime example of how the United States is currently failing humanity, and this latest story is no exception. While being detained in Texas, a mother says federal authorities removed her nursing infant right from her breast. The mother has been awaiting prosecution for entering the U.S. illegally.

The mother, an undocumented immigrant from Honduras, told attorney Natalia Cornelio she’s been detained under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy of referring anyone caught crossing the border illegally for federal prosecution.

While the federal authorities reportedly tore the infant from her mother’s breast, the mother resisted — because that’s what any loving mother would do.

She was handcuffed for it.”

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We asked 10 kids to “draw a leader”–here’s what they did

From Fast Company authored by Vivian Giang:

“Kids have a lot of traits commonly identified in good leaders–brilliantly perceptive, brutally honest, ruthlessly observant, steadily curious.

So when we saw the The New York Times article reporting that executives–regardless of their own gender–generally drew a man when asked to draw a leader, we wondered when that bias starts and what lessons we could gain from asking kids the same questions.

After all, a child’s brain hasn’t been wired to years of bias, assumptions, and mental associations the way an adult’s brain has, so do the same kind of unconscious assumptions influence a child’s idea of leadership?

We asked 10 kids between the ages of 3 and 12 to ‘draw a leader.'”

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Anthony Bourdain, Kate Spade, and the Preventable Tragedies of Suicide

From The New Yorker authored by Andrew Solomon:

“The pattern of highly accomplished and successful people committing suicide is transfixing. It assures the rest of us that a life of accolades is not all that it’s cracked up to be and that achieving more will not make us happier. At the same time, it reveals the fact that no one is safe from suicide, that whatever defenses we think we have are likely to be inadequate. Kate Spade’s handbags were playful and fun. Her quirky look was unmistakable and bespoke exuberance. Anthony Bourdain was almost inconceivably high-functioning, and won so many awards that he seemed ready to give an award to his favorite award. High-profile suicides such as these cause copycat suicides; there was a nearly ten-per-cent spike in suicides following Robin Williams’s death. There is always an upswing following such high-profile events. You who are reading this are at statistically increased risk of suicide right now. Who knows if Bourdain had read of Kate Spade’s suicide as he prepared to do the same thing? We are all statistically more likely to kill ourselves than we were ten years ago. That increased vulnerability is itself depressing, and that depressing information interacts with our own unguarded selves. If life wasn’t worth living for people such as Bourdain and Spade, how can our more ordinary lives hold up? Those of us who have clinical depression can feel the tug toward suicide amped up by this kind of news. The gap between public triumph and private despair is treacherous, with the outer shell obscuring the real person even to those with whom he or she had professed intimacy.

There has long been an assertion popular in mental-health circles that suicide is a symptom of depression and that, if we would only treat depression adequately, suicide would be a thing largely of the past. We learn of Kate Spade’s possible marital woes as though marital woes rationalized a suicide. It is true that, in someone with a significant tendency to suicide, external factors may trigger the act itself, but difficult circumstances do not usually fully explain someone’s choice to terminate his or her own life. People must have an intrinsic vulnerability; for every person who kills himself when he is left by his wife, there are hundreds who don’t kill themselves under like circumstances.”

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Toddler racks up miles as world traveler

From WFAA authored by Kevin Reece:

“If you are one of those people who brags about your airline frequent flyer miles and all the free stuff they give you, stop.

A toddler in north Dallas is putting all of us to shame. His name is Oliver, he’s 21-months old, and his story goes like this. His mom, K.D. Shull, is single, and she was nearing 40 years old.

“And my doctor kind of basically said it’s now or never,” she said. So, after one in vitro fertilization attempt, “I had Oliver and it’s been a whirlwind ever since!”

A whirlwind because Shull is an attorney for a Chinese telecom company. She travels a lot. “I tried once taking a trip without him. He did fine. I did not,” she laughed. “So I’ve continued to take him with me.”

And, almost exclusively on American Airlines, she’s taken him everywhere. By the time Oliver hit his first birthday, he’d had already been on 50 flights.

“He’s a fabulous flyer. It’s so easy to travel with him,” his mom said.

Sometimes a nanny travels with them to watch Oliver during meetings or courtroom trials. Shull says leaving him behind in Dallas, just isn’t an option.”

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If It Doesn’t Suck, It’s Not Worth Doing

From Inc. authored by Benjamin P. Hardy:

“According to psychological research, the anticipation of an event is almost always more emotionally powerful than the event itself.

The dread of asking your boss for a raise is paralyzing and can last months. Yet, once you get yourself to finally do it, it’s over before you know it. The excitement of attaining some object or objective can become obsessive. Yet, shortly after you obtain your desire, you’re bored and in search of something else. “We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed. But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them,” says Dr. Thomas Gilovich, Cornell psychologist.

Interestingly, your mind can seduce you so much so that the idea of something becomes more satisfying than the thing itself, so you stop at the idea and never make it real. Thus, in his book, Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday explains that a primary obstacle to success is the idea of success.

It’s so easy to dream.

It’s easy to tell people about your ambitions. It’s easy to create vision boards and write down your goals. It’s easy to stand in front of a mirror and declare affirmations.

And that’s where most people stop.

The very act of dreaming stops you from achieving your dreams.

You’ve played-it out in your mind with such intoxicating detail that you become satisfied enough. You become numbed. And you deceive yourself into believing you’ve actually done something productive.

Consequently, when you attempt the activity itself, you immediately hit a stone wall of resistance. More often than not, you quickly distract yourself from the discomfort with some form of momentary pleasure. Yet, Robert Greene explains in his book, Mastery, that you can learn to love this internal resistance. In his words, ‘You find a kind of perverse pleasure in moving past the pain this might bring.'”

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Law Student Who Took Final Exam While In Labor Has Now Graduated From Harvard Law School

From Above The Law authored by Kathryn Rubino:

“This recent Harvard Law School’s Instagram account is going viral for all the right reasons.

Briana Williams is part of the Harvard Law School Class of 2018, and as both a proud grad and a proud single mom, she posted pictures of herself and baby Evelyn — in an adorable matching cap and gown — celebrating. The picture is cute and all, but it is really Williams’s inspiring caption that is getting the attention.

Seems Evelyn wanted to be born mid-final exam. That’s right, last year, Williams went into labor during her Family Law test (talk about perfect timing). Williams got an epidural and went on with the exam. I don’t care what law school exam horror story you’ve got, Williams has you beat.”

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