I understand politicians have to, in this day and age, use social media. It is an excellent tool for them to spotlight the work that they are doing and the people they assist on the daily basis. However, I do not think politicians should post selfies, unless it is of them with a constituent or has a political purpose. Recently, one of our local elected officials posted a selfie on Instagram. This local politician then posted a quote and multiple hashtags. One of the hashtags was  #bored. In

This past Tuesday, August 6, was my mother’s 31st anniversary in heaven. For some reason, this does not make me as unhappy as it used to or as unhappy as Mother’s Day sometimes makes me feel. I feel a certain nostalgia, maybe because the summer holds such special memories for me regarding my mother.

Many things in our society have changed, but the one constant is that Rockaway kids have the life. When we were kids, my mother barely used the car. We rode our bikes EVERYWHERE. While today’s kids

While writing this column, I started to research the term, “bucket list.” I had remembered a movie starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, which was made in 2007, and the research online says that is generally when the term was born. The two men break out of a cancer ward and attempt to do things they have wanted to do before they die. It comes from the phrase, “kick the bucket,” which we all know means to die. Another show I enjoyed was a reality show on MTV called, “The Buried Life,”

When I was in high school in the late 1980s, I was assigned the George Orwell novel, 1984. I barely got through it and kept saying to myself, “This guy is crazy, he thinks the world would have been filled with cameras and the government watching us at our every move in the year 1984?” I disliked the book for many years. Skip to today and I teach the novel and my students and I love it because in 2019 many of the things Orwell had predicted have come true. Some of my best research projects were

Babysitter: a person who looks after a child or children while the parents are out.

What has happened to the babysitter? Do kids still babysit? Do parents still hire babysitters?

It seems recently that kids are everywhere I go. Now, my children are 21 and 26, so I like the no children atmosphere. I know the babysitter is expensive but children do not belong in certain places at certain times. Here is my children etiquette column.

Children should not be in the following places:

I recently

The end of this school year has me scratching my head. If you read my column weekly, you know that I do not think everyone should get a trophy and that we need to be a bit tougher on our children. As a high school educator, I believe the quality many kids are missing today is grit. Many kids today cannot overcome obstacles as we have leveled all of the obstacles for them.

One reason I believe we are inflating the self-worth of our children is the constant praising of our children. When I say