P.S. Kind Campaign on Dr. Phil tomorrow!

I don't watch Dr. Phil, but you should...and I'm going to try to tomorrow! Molly and Lauren will be on for the Kind Campaign!!!!

Today=much better.
Have to go work on an assignment...but didn't want any of you to think I was falling apart... :)

If only this book had Alexandra in the title...

I've now cried five times today.
It was a rough day.

On the bright side, yesterday and today my class was complimented for having a very straight and quiet line when we walked to our classroom.
Still, a huge part of me would like to curl up in bed tomorrow instead of going to school...and that's what sucks. I actually don't feel excited about tomorrow--instead I feel stressed, tired, and exhausted...

...blargh. Happy notes to come soon. I promise. :)

Kind Campaign...in the New York Times!

Lauren, one of the founders of the Kind Campaign and a Pepperdine graduate, was quoted in the NY Times. If you have yet to check out the website and non-profit, DO IT NOW.
www.kindcampaign.com


When the Cool Get Hazed

By TINA KELLEY
Published: September 26, 2009

Girl-on-girl bullying or hazing is old news by now, for anyone who has seen “Mean Girls” or “Heathers” or “Gossip Girl”: popular girls organize a perfectly-coiffed and designer-clothed gang; fringe girl is targeted; bullies use their meanness and power to further marginalize fringe girl and reassert their status.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIGHTING BACK
American Girl recently introduced a doll, Chrissa, who takes on bullies who have targeted her at her new school. (No, she doesn’t talk.)


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But news of a “slut list” at a top-ranked New Jersey high school last week highlighted two disturbing points: the increasingly explicit and sexual nature of the taunts, magnified by the Internet. And, in another twist, the perception that allegations of promiscuity — however fictional — are a badge of honor, a way into the cool group, and not a cause for shame.

The result is a 180-degree reversal of what a “slut list” might have meant, especially when the parents of these girls were growing up.

That the list and other hazing went on for more than 10 years at Millburn High School in New Jersey was only half the shock to parents and the national news media who set up cameras outside the school, which includes students from the affluent Essex County towns of Millburn and Short Hills. The repercussions to officials for allowing it to go on, only lightly checked over that time, are still playing out.

More surprising to many was the cachet that seemed to come to those on the list — even though it accuses the anointed girls of sleeping around, lap dancing and lusting after their own brothers.

The list makes unsettling links between a girl’s power and popularity and what she allegedly will do with a boy. Or seven of them.

And yet students, recent graduates and even the principal (who, with other administrators, was sent for sensitivity training last week) said a spot on the “slut list,” which spread on Facebook, has been the way popular and athletic ninth-grade girls have been tapped by their older counterparts to possibly take their place. As one recent graduate commented on The Local, The Times’ hyperlocal news Web site covering Millburn: “Being on the list means you are rich, you wear expensive clothing, and probably fall under the general umbrella of attractiveness. Essentially, the slut list is the Goldman Sachs daughters list, a distorted assertion of wealth and power within a highly pressured upper middle class environment.”

So the whiff of sexual prowess actually raises the status of girls on the forbidden list among their high school peers. It’s a celebration of machismo, but for girls only.

Experts say adults should be concerned when sex becomes a theme for meanness, in part because girls have powerful tools like cellphone cameras and the Internet to carry out their schemes.

Rosalind Wiseman, an expert on adolescent female behavior, is planning a new edition of her book, “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” because the 2002 version quickly became outdated. “There was not enough information on hazing, technology and the more graphic sexual stuff,” she said. “It’s like a generation passed in the past five years.” She mentioned cases of college girls who hazed younger ones by compelling them to have sex with or give oral sex to certain boys on campus.

More cause for alarm, experts say, is that such behavior is taking hold with younger and younger students — the girls on the slut list at Millburn High were as young as 14, and problems arise among girls in grade school as well. “They’re being conditioned, taught, parented and expected in the schools to be older, more sexualized, snippy and adolescent,” Ms. Wiseman said.

If it weren’t so insidious in its own right, the kind of childhood bullying that inspired Mattel to add a new American Girl doll this year — Chrissa, who moves to a new school and is immediately targeted by three girls in her class — would almost seem quaint.

While any form of bullying or hazing is bad, experts, school officials and most parents agree, the added element of not just sexuality but promiscuity has many of them particularly concerned.

“I think girls target each other in the most demeaning way possible,” said Lauren Parsekian, a documentary filmmaker and president of the Kind Campaign, based in Los Angeles. “That’s what I’ve seen, with the types of words they call each other, rumors they like to spread about each other. It’s definitely a theme we’ve seen because it’s an embarrassing thing, to say someone’s doing things with other guys, rumors that aren’t true.”

Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, said the language of the slut list borrows from the objectifying way men have often talked to other men about women. It not only makes it O.K. now for boys to continue to do this, she said, but it confuses girls.

“I think it really undermines a person’s ability to define their own sexuality, to discover and really own their own sexuality,” Ms. O’Neill said.

She added, “you’re just continuing to create a world in which women in fact cannot participate in equal footing in the life of their community.”

Update in bullet points...

•Met with a student's mom this week. How amazing is it that her son can write from 1-24 and knows most of his letters...yet she cannot read or write. I hate that. I hate that when her son starts to read and starts to write stories and essays he will have to read them to her. SHE is the reason he tries hard and works hard, and unfortunately she won't be able to read his work, but you know what? She will be unbelievably proud of him.

•Talked with a friend who is doing TFA in a different district in the Bay. She teaches 7th grade, and oh are our challenges different. She has 29 students, 10 of whom have IEPs (individualized education plans), 5 are emotionally disturbed, and 3 cut themselves...in the back of the room...as she teaches. I'm so proud of her for teaching there and hoping that I can do something to help her make it through the next two years. Cause she has a real TFA experience vs. my TFA-lite.

•"I just FELT your sneeze on my leg. You need to cover your mouth when you sneeze, because that is how people get sick." I stopped class and cleaned off my leg. No wonder I'm sick.


•Played freeze dance with my kids on Friday. Sometimes things that have no curricular relevance can be the best part of the day.


•Also had a girl kick and scream for 25 minutes, throwing a full-fledged temper tantrum in class. I've never seen a child over the age of 3 do that until I met her. My response when she calmed down: "I'm not your babysitter, and I'm not your mom; I'm your teacher. I am here to teach you to learn, and if you are screaming, you are not ready to learn. You have a workbook page to do, so get going." Harsh? Maybe a little. Necessary? Yes. Still to come? Meeting with parents.


•Anyone have suggestions for teaching rhyming? I spent 25 minutes on it Friday...with no luck. Blank stares, far too often. I'm thinking Monday we may have to dance and sing some rhymes.

•Went to a training session today. It's always great when it ends with: "Oh, everyone, we have one more announcement before you go. Today, four cars were broken into in the parking lot. Now we've been monitoring the lot since, but please check your car before leaving to make sure everything is there." Thank goodness my car was in a different lot.

•Getting my haircut tomorrow. About time.

•Ate way too many pumpkin cookies courtesy of my brother. Thanks Chris.


Will post photos of my classroom soon.

Pressure-cooker kindergarten

A new emphasis on testing and test preparation -- brought on by politicians, not early education experts -- is hurting the youngest students.


By Patti Hartigan | August 30, 2009

Christine Gerzon is the epitome of a kindergarten teacher: warm and wise, quick to get down on her knees to wipe a tear or bandage a boo-boo. She can rhapsodize for hours about a single leaf and philosophize convincingly about the pedagogical uses of papier-mache. “I teach because it’s my calling,” she says. “It’s my life purpose.”

Yet two years ago, after 38 years as an educator, she threw up her hands and retired. (Her last job was at the Harrington School in Lexington.) She couldn’t stand the pressure.

Pressure? This is kindergarten, the happy land of building blocks and singalongs. But increasingly in schools across Massachusetts and the United States, little children are being asked to perform academic tasks, including test taking, that early childhood researchers agree are developmentally inappropriate, even potentially damaging. If children don’t meet certain requirements, they are deemed “not proficient.” Frequently, children are screened for “kindergarten readiness” even before school begins, and some are labeled inadequate before they walk through the door.

This is a troubling trend to an experienced educator like Gerzon, who knows how much a child can soak up in the right environment. After years of study and practice, she’ll tell you that 5-year-olds don’t learn by listening to a rote lesson, their bottoms on their chairs. They learn through experience. They learn through play. Yet there is a growing disconnect between what the research says is best for children -- a classroom free of pressure -- and what’s actually going on in schools.

Take the example of a girl who was barely 5 when she entered Gerzon’s classroom. She didn’t know her ABCs, but one day in class she made up a song and taught it to the other children. But because of new requirements, “I had to send a letter to her parents saying that [she] is not proficient,” says Gerzon. “You tell me that [she] is not proficient in language skills!” The Concord resident, who usually exudes a gentle presence, bristles. “It’s destructive, even abusive. That’s a pretty strong word, but what do you call it when you take a group of children and you force them to do something that they are not developmentally ready to do? What do you call that? It’s abusive.”

Psychologist and early childhood expert David Elkind, author of The Hurried Child and The Power of Play, echoes Gerzon. When children are required to do academics too early, he says, they get the message that they are failures. “We are sending too many children to school to learn that they are dumb,” says Elkind, a professor emeritus at Tufts University. “They are not dumb. They are just not there developmentally.”


* * *

It’s been more than two decades since Robert Fulghum published the oft-quoted (and oft-mocked) essay “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” The piece describes a bucolic world of wonder, a place for cookies and afternoon naps.

That world is long gone.

Earlier this year, the nonprofit advocacy group Alliance for Childhood, based just outside Washington, D.C., issued a report titled “Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in Schools,” drawing from nine new studies of public school classrooms around the country. Kindergartners in the studies spent four to six times as much of the school day being drilled in literacy and math as they did playing.

Recess has been truncated or has disappeared entirely in some schools, a double whammy, since children are stressed out by the demands and also deprived of their major stress reliever. The report cites study after study showing increasing stress, aggression, and other behavior problems, and even breakdowns.

Roz Brezenoff taught kindergarten in the Boston Public Schools for 36 years, retiring five years ago. “I have heard stories of kids having what they call psychotic breakdowns in kindergarten, kids who are distressed because they are ‘kindergarten failures’ because they can’t read and they can’t write,” she says.

To be sure, many children thrive in an academic environment, and some parents seek out institutions like the Edward Brooke Charter School in Roslindale, which bills itself as “unapologetically college preparatory.” Teachers there assign nightly homework in kindergarten. But many children that age are not ready for that kind of work, and all are being held to new standards.

These changes grew out of attempts to solve another problem: a disturbing gap between higher-achieving white students and minorities who were falling behind. The state’s Education Reform Act of 1993 led to the establishment of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Tests (MCAS), given to all public school students in the state every year from Grade 3 through 8 and in Grade 10, to identify schools and districts where student performance is not improving and to hold those schools accountable by state watchdogs. As a consequence, says J.C. Considine, spokesman for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, “some districts have developed more challenging but appropriate curricula for kindergarten. But many others have curricula, schedules, and expectations that would have been seen in first grade or beyond 10 years ago.”

Around the same time, neuroscientists were discovering a period of rapid brain development between birth and age 5. These advances helped launch the “brainy baby” business, a flood of products that promised to turn tiny tots into budding geniuses. Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of education at Lesley University in Cambridge, says that “parents are misled by Baby Einstein,” the brand that sells books, DVDs, and flashcard “games” aimed at helping very young children get ahead. “They are misled by a marketing culture and a school culture that tells them achievement in early childhood is children sitting at tables doing work sheets.”

Then came the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, which links federal funding for schools to performance on standardized tests beginning in the third grade. Its passage “put the nail in the coffin” for the old ways, says Ed Miller, coauthor of the Alliance for Childhood study. “Faced with serious sanctions, they weren’t going to say, ‘OK, let them play and do all the things they used to do,’ ” Miller says. “Instead, we have to put them in testing boot camp well before third grade.”

President Obama has repeatedly emphasized the importance of early childhood education and has committed $5 billion to early learning programs. Yet it’s still unclear exactly what changes the administration will make to No Child Left Behind. “The challenge is to attune the learning experience to how children are at that point in their development, rather than trying to make them something they aren’t,” says Carol Copple of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a Washington, D.C., accreditation group. “We need to make the schools ready for the kids, not make the kids ready for the schools.”

* * *

Some educators are struggling to bridge the gap between best practices and the politically driven demand for accountability. Teacher Michael Kenney sits cross-legged on the floor of his cheerful classroom at the Thomas J. Kenny Elementary School in Dorchester. It’s time for reading, and a teacher’s aide leads some of the children to another room to read out loud to them. These youngsters aren’t ready to read yet, and Kenney and principal Suzanne Federspiel have decided that a reading lesson would only frustrate them. “There is more pressure for children to be readers by the end of kindergarten, and we try to put the pressure on us, not on them,” Federspiel explains.

Addressing the remaining students, Kenney pulls out a fly swatter with a hole cut in the middle. “In our classroom, this isn’t a fly swatter, it’s a word swatter,” he says. “I want to find a word, so wham, boom, I swat it!” He whacks the word “the” on a large text mounted on an easel. The children giggle, and for the next 10 minutes, they take turns swatting words. Their glee is infectious, and their swats are precise.

Later, it’s time for a writing workshop, and a little break. “If you are done with your drawing and your sentence, you get 20 minutes to play,” Kenney says to resounding cheers. “But do a good job, capiche?” In unison, the children respond “Capiche!” In the housekeeping area, two girls are dressing up in hospital scrubs. A boy crawls around the room, meowing like a cat. No one bats an eye.

This is a place of creativity and joy, but it’s a tenuous balance. “I try to mix the fun and the lessons,” Kenney says. “But we are testing them so much that I barely have time to teach the curriculum. These are 5- and 6-year-olds, and there is so little time for them to be kids.”

Ben Russell, assistant director of early childhood education for the Boston Public Schools, is struggling to find the right formula, too. “Some kids aren’t ready, and I fear for those kids.” Children who struggle in kindergarten are the ones who grow to hate school and who will likely continue to fall behind, he explains. “What becomes of kids who are not reading at the third-grade level?” asks Russell. “We use those numbers to create prisons. And that is a tragedy.”

* * *

Leadership comes from the top down in schools, but even the most enlightened principals and other administrators are bound by state and federal requirements. “In my mind, the expectations for our kindergartners should be a little higher, but that doesn’t mean the practice should be more rigid,” says Valerie Gumes, principal of the Haynes Early Education Center in Roxbury. After 21 years in the field, she says, she is weary of the demands to assess, assess, assess. “I’m not opposed to standards, but the amount of time we spend doing these assessments

. . .” A pause. “It’s really criminal.” A sigh. “But I’m not in charge.”

Anthony Colannino, principal of the MacArthur School in Waltham, objected this spring when the state began requiring schools to administer a standardized test to kindergartners whose first language isn’t English. “If you gave this test to the general population, people would be beating down doors,” he says. “There would be an outcry. If they gave it to my kid, I would say, ‘Tell me what day you are giving it, and he will be absent.’ ”

In fact, Colannino has a 5-year-old son who is about to enter kindergarten in Woburn. He says that his son, like many 5-year-old boys, is spontaneous and active. And since children are now expected to sit quietly for at least part of the day in many kindergarten classes, Colannino is more than a little worried. “He is curious and asks a lot of questions, and my wife and I are concerned,” he says.

What does it say when an elementary school principal fears that his own child won’t thrive in kindergarten? And what is the new emphasis on academics doing to the children? The Alliance for Childhood report contains chilling statistics. In Texas, the rate at which kindergartners were held back rose by two and a half times from 1994 to 2004. And in 2007, a 6-year-old girl in Florida was arrested for having a temper tantrum in school.

And what of Christine Gerzon’s former student, the girl who failed the official proficiency tests but who showed so much potential? “She’s still struggling,” Gerzon says sadly. (The teacher has kept in touch with the girl’s family.) Students get labeled young, at a time when their ability to perform can vary widely from day to day, and it’s hard to shake those labels later on. Children’s impressions of school, too, are formed early, and when they feel like failures at 5, it’s hard to turn that around later. The city of Boston recognized this last year when it formed a public-private partnership with United Way called Thrive in 5, an umbrella agency that is conducting a citywide effort -- starting support and play groups, distributing flyers about health and other kinds of resources, and more -- to help parents prepare their young children for school.

But these grass-roots efforts can only go so far. Early childhood experts have been publishing books, releasing reports, and testifying before Congress, with little change in public policy. Why isn’t anyone listening? “It’s not the educators, it’s the politicians,” says Russell of the Boston schools. “The schools don’t make the decisions. The politicians are making the decisions to meet political needs.” There is also an element of fear among educators, especially in a troubled economy. “You have to be willing to get your wrist slapped a little bit,” says Russell. “If the folks who know what’s right don’t talk about it, we’re never going to get anywhere.”

And now is the time. The Obama administration has pledged billions, but some experts remain wary that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is proposing policy that sounds like No Child Left Behind. “I think he has bought into the standards and testing model,” says Miller. “What we need is a whole reassessment and change of direction.”

Meanwhile, more and more children are “failing” kindergarten, according to the Alliance for Childhood report -- and missing out on the kind of early schooling that does help develop 5-year-old minds. Winifred Hagan is a former kindergarten teacher and a vice president at the Cayl Institute in Cambridge, a nonprofit that sponsors conferences for principals and fellowships for the study of early childhood education. She worries that vulnerable kids are being sent down a path to failure inside a system that was created to meet purely political goals. “Kids are spending hours of their day sitting with pencils and tracing dotted lines,” she says. “And we call that education? We are kidding ourselves.”

Patti Hartigan, a former Globe reporter, blogs about education at http://TrueSlant.com. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.


© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company



http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/08/30/pressure_cooker_kindergarten/?page=1

...I learned how to use the absence reporting system...

While I'm looking forward to resting tomorrow and Tuesday, I'm going to miss being at school with my kids.

I was really excited for an activity I had planned for Tuesday...and now the sub gets to do it. :P

Here's an email from one of the kinder teachers that made me laugh and also made me really appreciative of the K-team at my school (and clearly I'm ignoring her advice for this brief moment to share it with you all):

Dear Alex,

Here's hoping the combination of antibiotics and rest will restore you to heath. But I've got this feeling that, because you are very conscientious and full of good ideas, you might not be completely honest with yourself about what resting entails. So, as an older woman with a lot of experience in this area, I'm telling you:
-resting is lying down.
-resting is napping.
-some reading can be resting.
-some television watching can be resting.
But the following are not resting,
-writing lesson plans.
-creating flip charts.
-completing assignments.
Oh, I know that all of the above can relieve stress. But they use a lot more energy than one realizes, so I suggest that you set a timer and limit yourself to an hour's work at a time, maintaining a minimum work/rest ratio of 1:2 (8 hours or work, 16 hours of rest per 24 hour period.)

I know. Easier said than done.

Get well, Alex! We want you back at full power.

See you Wednesday at the earliest,
Laurie

PS Two more things that really are not resting:
-reading most emails, including this one.
-answering most emails.
Sorry 

"Well, your flu test is negative, and your chest x-ray looks like you have bronchitis, but you have none of the symptoms. So, here's a z-pack."

3 in 1 day??

I emailed this out but forgot to post it on September 11th.

http://attacked911.tripod.com/

Stupid is as stupid does.

Phone call home to my dad today (well, truth be told, I call him everyday, but this is an excerpt from today):

Dad, maybe you can just clarify this for me, but will I really have to deal with BS for the rest of my life? I thought just maybe that since I graduated from college, maybe, in graduate school, I might deal with MATURE and GROWN-UP people, but I guess I'm wrong. So really, will this be how the rest of my life is?


...Today was a good day, although the end, at class tonight, was a reality check for me. Sometimes I think my optimism can bite me in the butt (I can't think of any other phrase! :P). I've realized that while I may choose who I consider a close friend and the people I spend most of my time with, for the rest of my life, there will always be people who I have to interact with who on occasion drive me a little crazy.

Tonight was just one of those nights when it hit me, and it was kind of a bummer. There will always be people who don't grow up, despite the fact that many of us grow up far before we should. Maturity does not necessarily come with age.

...and while I do genuinely like 99.9% of people and I try to be open-minded (and I will also give the people who drove me a little crazy tonight 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and millionth chances if it comes down to it), I have to toss these quotes out there:

"Don't waste my time, cause I'll never get that back." -Nnnenna

"I hate stupidity." -Chris and Dad...perhaps it's a family motto?

I really do hate wasting my time, and I also hate stupidity. (FYI as far as I'm concerned, stupidity has nothing to do with actual intelligence. In fact, I know a couple extremely intelligent people who I would consider stupid in some respects).

Long story short, I don't want to be judgmental, but the truth is, that's the heart of this post. It's been a long day, I'm tired, and I'm venting. This is momentary judgment on my part, and I'm not necessarily proud of it, but at the same time, every now and then I have a day where this is how I feel. Tomorrow, I may feel different.



In other news, I have a kid who wore a fedora to school last week.

Crazies.

My voice is back!

Good news-I can talk. It hurts, but I can talk.

Bad news-Sleeping all this weekend means that the getting ahead I had planned to do=lots of catching up to do now.

This is just frustrating, because it means that instead of getting to recover, I'm just pushing forward and hoping I stay where I'm at and don't get sick again.

In many respects, I feel REALLY good, but in others, I'm bummed. It's stressful having all this stuff to do and feeling like there really isn't enough time in the day to get it done.

Example:
Today, I woke up at 6:35.
Left for school at 7.
Photocopied/set-up/etc. from 7:25-8.
School 8-3.
Staff meeting 3-4.
Grad school seminar 5-8.
Office Depot run, dinner, shower, work. 8:30-11.
11:12-Write a blogpost. :)
Time for bed.

**I recommend buying stock in Office Depot since I spend so much money there, surely stock will go up.

"Teacher, what's wrong with your voice? Do you feel bad?"

Well, we survived Friday. In fact, we did more than survive. I didn't have to move ANY clips on my behavior chart on Friday, which was VERY exciting. Everyone went home with a sticker and a pencil for being awesome.

However, I still cannot talk! In fact, it's worse! Yesterday I was able to make it through classes, but today I have barely been able to get out a whisper. Actually, I know it's bad to try to whisper, so I tried to talk normally when I asked my roommate to go buy honey for my tea, and my voice just comes out as a whisper!

The good news=I have no symptoms apart from losing my voice. I've coughed maybe twice today, and Thursday was the only night that my throat hurt. I had trouble swallowing food then, but the past two days I've been fine. I was actually very excited to go out this weekend and ENJOY being in San Jose since I don't feel as stressed by all the work I have ahead of me for teaching. Last weekend I felt quite the opposite!

The bad news is obviously that I still have no voice, and I have four days of teaching ahead of me. Plus, there really is nothing I can do except drink fluids and rest my voice.

So, fingers crossed that my voice will recover by Tuesday. Thank goodness for the long weekend!

Please send any magic cures for laryngitis my way!!

Easier but not easy

Each day is getting easier, but it's certainly not easy yet, and I don't expect it to ever be that way.

I am really proud of my students for how they have been making good decisions and helping each other, and while I feel that we have a challenging class, I can see how hard everyone is trying each day. I cannot wait to see how much my students grow and blossom this year, because I firmly believe each of them can be ready for 1st grade at the end of the year.

Also, I am very excited about the fact that the kindergarten team seems to be working together more. There are 8 of us, and for some reason, the team has never really worked together that well (or so I've heard from everyone). However, today, when my co-teacher left, she told me she hasn't felt this happy in a long time, and she really thinks that we are getting to a point where the 8 of us can make our classes great.

I told her I intend on being the glue that makes our team stick together. :) ...and she said she thinks I may be just the person to get us working as a team...so let's hope she's right, because I think if we're going to give ALL our kids the best start to school then we need to work together.

Off to bed.

(Oh, and by the way, I am currently driving a Jetta. It's odd having 4-doors on a car. Hopefully mine will be fixed by Friday...for those of you that don't know, someone made a 6-inch cut in the convertible top back in June. Pointless, but I had to get the entire top replaced so it's finally in the shop.)

September is...

September is National Ovarian Cancer Awareness month.

Many of you may know this is a cause very near and dear to me, and the statistic I'll toss out this year is:

* The overall five-year relative survival rate for all women with ovarian cancer is 46 percent.
* However, the survival rate improves greatly to 93 percent if the cancer is diagnosed at an early stage before it has spread. Only 19 percent of ovarian cancer cases are diagnosed at this local stage.

If you, your sister, your mom, (etc. etc.) are diagnosed early enough, the survival rate is FAR greater than the later stage diagnoses. If you don't know the symptoms, it's hard to know the questions to ask a doctor and to catch the disease early.

Friday, September 4th, is National Teal Day. "Teal is the ovarian cancer community’s color and serves as a reminder that ovarian cancer is the deadliest of all the cancers of the reproductive system and a leading cause of cancer death among women." (ovariancancer.org)

I hope you wear teal on Friday!

Oh, and by the way, I REALLY want this shirt. :) Perhaps when I finally get paid...


P.S. I am getting pretty darn good at making up songs for pretty much anything for my class.