Wife, Mom, Mema, Retired Middle School Librarian, DEN Star, PSLA, PAECT, PASCD, KTI '14. Wakelet Ambassador. Minecraft Certified Teacher, #MIEExpert.
Pennsylvania
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Sometimes the quiet kid is trying to keep from being noticed because it’s safer that way.
WHAT ABOUT THE KIDS WHO SEEM FINE… BUT REALLY AREN’T?
Some struggling kids are the ones we least suspect.
They get good grades, follow directions, and don’t cause problems, so we assume they’re okay.
But sometimes they’re not.
The quiet, compliant student sitting in the third row may be hurting inside, feeling like nobody notices or cares, and wondering whether life is worth living. That possibility keeps me up at night.
And here’s the hard truth: Kids who act out may actually be doing us a favor. Their behavior is visible. It gives us a signal that something is wrong and an opportunity to respond.
All behavior is communication. Acting out, withdrawing, becoming unusually quiet, striving for perfection, or suddenly changing routines may all be ways a child communicates that something is happening beneath the surface.
The children who suffer silently can be much harder to see.
Here are 10 things I wish we talked about more and what we can do:
1. Good grades don’t always mean a child is doing well.
Ask about feelings, stress, sleep, and pressure, not just performance.
2. Some kids hide anxiety behind perfectionism.
Praise effort, progress, and courage, not only perfect results.
3. Being quiet and compliant doesn’t necessarily mean being happy.
Check in privately, ask open-ended questions, and give them time to respond. Pay attention to the student in the third row who never causes trouble but may be carrying more than anyone realizes.
4. The class clown can be struggling, too.
Look beyond the humor. Remind them they don’t always have to entertain everyone.
5. Some children are afraid to ask for help.
Offer support before they request it, and remind them that needing help is a strength.
6. Kids need to know it’s okay to make mistakes.
Model mistakes, show how you recover, and create space to learn without shame.
7. A little kindness can mean more than we realize.
Greet them by name, notice their efforts, listen carefully, and offer sincere encouragement.
8. Notice the kids who aren’t demanding attention.
Watch for changes in mood, friendships, participation, routines, or energy. Silence and compliance can sometimes hide deep pain.
9. Sometimes listening helps more than advice.
Ask, “Do you want me to listen, help you problem-solve, or just sit with you?” If a child mentions feeling hopeless, not wanting to live, or questioning whether life is worth living, take it seriously, stay with them, and connect them immediately with a trusted adult and appropriate crisis or mental-health support.
10. Every child deserves an adult who truly sees them.
Follow up, remember what matters to them, keep your promises, and connect them with support when needed.
Ask how a child is really doing. Notice changes. Remember that behavior is communication. Remind them they don’t have to be perfect.
Never assume a child is okay simply because they aren’t causing problems.
That’s Maslow Before Bloom: children need to feel safe, supported, and understood before they can thrive.
Have you ever looked fine on the outside while struggling inside? What do you wish an adult had noticed?
#MaslowBeforeBloom #MentalHealthMatters #EveryChildMatters #Education #Parenting #Teachers
And now the rest of the story….
Dishwasher Manufacturers: If you rinse off your dishes in the sink before loading them into the dishwasher, they come out less clean!
This always gets me in trouble. I of course don’t rinse first, because it is a Dishwasher. Right?
Rinsing plates before loading the dishwasher feels diligent. Appliance makers say it is the very reason your dishes come out dirty.
Engineers at brands like Bosch and Whirlpool, alongside detergent makers like Cascade, have spent years advising consumers to stop pre-rinsing.
Contemporary dishwashers rely on internal turbidity sensors—optical eyes that gauge water clarity during the early wash cycle.
When pre-rinsed plates yield clean water, the machine misinterprets the load as lightly soiled, shortening cycle time and reducing water temperature.
Furthermore, the enzymes in modern powdered and gel detergents require food starches and proteins to latch onto; without debris to activate them, the surfactants simply wash down the drain, occasionally leaving alkaline film etched into glassware.
Oh there is more…
Cookware care harbors equally stubborn folklore. For decades, home cooks warned that a single drop of liquid soap would ruin a cast-iron skillet's seasoning. Lodge, which has made cast-iron cookware in Tennessee since 1896, explicitly debunks this in its care manuals.
The prohibition dates to the nineteenth century, when soaps were formulated with harsh lye (sodium hydroxide), a caustic alkali capable of stripping cured oil. Modern dish detergents contain mild surfactants that lift loose grease without breaking the polymerized oil cross-linked to the iron matrix.
A gentle wash with liquid soap leaves true seasoning intact.
A similar misconception surrounds kitchen waste disposers.
Generations of homeowners were told that tossing eggshells or ice down the drain sharpens the disposal blades.
InSinkErator, the inventor and largest maker of food waste disposers, notes that residential disposers do not contain blades at all. The central chamber houses blunt swiveling lugs on a spinning turntable.
These lugs do not slice; centrifugal force hurls food against a stationary outer ring of shredder teeth to pulverize it into a slurry. Eggshells cannot sharpen a blunt lug, and their fibrous membrane often snags in plumbing traps.
Even oven maintenance suffers from well-intended habits.
Appliance makers including GE and Frigidaire warn against lining the floor of an electric or gas oven with aluminum foil.
Modern ovens hide the heating element beneath an enamel floor. Foil traps and reflects radiant heat directly against the base, reaching temperatures high enough to melt the aluminum or permanently fuse it to the porcelain finish.
congerjan retweeted
STOP CALLING KIDS “BAD.”
I was one of those kids.
I got in trouble. I struggled to sit still, focus, stay organized and control impulses. Adults saw the behavior. They did not see what was underneath it.
I had what we would now recognize as ADHD. My body needed movement. I had undiagnosed anxiety and a brain that worried constantly. My family moved repeatedly across the country. I had an undiagnosed learning disability in reading and writing and sometimes would rather get in trouble than risk people thinking I was dumb.
I was gifted in math, so some work felt painfully easy while other work felt almost impossible. I had severe asthma that limited sports and activity. My dad lost his job. I received free and reduced lunch. At 9, I lost my grandfather, one of my biggest cheerleaders.
Then, in third grade, Mrs. Mott told me I probably was not college material.
So yes, I sometimes behaved badly.
But I was not a bad kid. I was a kid carrying a lot. That is what we miss when we only look at behavior.
Anxiety can look like refusal. Grief can look like anger. Boredom can look like defiance. Confusion can look like avoidance. Exhaustion can look like laziness. ADHD can look like “not caring.” A learning disability can look like “not trying.”
Behavior is often the EFFECT.
Our job is to look for the CAUSE.
That does not mean ignoring accountability. Kids need boundaries and expectations. But shame, yelling, labels and bigger punishments do not fix anxiety, grief, ADHD, learning differences or overwhelm.
TRY THIS INSTEAD:
1. PAUSE before reacting.
2. ASK what happened right before the behavior.
3. CHECK the need: anxious, tired, hungry, confused, bored, embarrassed, overwhelmed?
4. LOWER the load: smaller task, movement, break, clearer direction, one step at a time.
5. TEACH what to do differently next time.
Hold the boundary AND protect the relationship.
“That behavior is not okay. But I am going to help you figure out what happened and what to do next.”
Today, the “bad kid” who was told he probably was not college material became a teacher, principal, therapist, educational psychology professor and author. Also, Mrs. Mott was wrong - I have 4 degrees now!
Kids are unfinished stories.
Before you label a child by their hardest moment, ask:
“What am I not seeing yet?”
How many “bad kids” are actually good kids carrying more than we know?
— Dr. Bryan Pearlman
#MentalHealth #Parenting #Teachers #ADHD #TraumaInformed
congerjan retweeted
Listen, do you want to hear a secret?
Do you promise not to tell…
The Beatles did not merely write catchy songs. They reverse-engineered the entire 1960s radio machine.
They were engineers.
Top 40 AM programmers lived by a brutal clock. Every extra second of music was a second stolen from advertising.
Songs had to land well under three minutes or they never made the playlist. So the Beatles stripped the traditional intro almost to nothing.
No long guitar wander. No polite buildup. "She Loves You," "Help!," and "Can't Buy Me Love" slam straight into the chorus. "A Hard Day's Night" opens with one jagged, instantly recognizable chord that grabs the listener by the collar before the first word is even sung.
Change the station and you miss the hook. Most kids did not change the station.
Lennon and McCartney also ran a linguistic operation McCartney later called the pronoun strategy.
They loaded the lyrics with "I," "me," and "you." Titles were not decoration. "From Me to You." "I Want to Hold Your Hand." "Love Me Do." "She Loves You."
The songs were written as a private conversation aimed at one teenager sitting alone in a bedroom or a car. Third-person stories feel like someone else's life. Direct address feels like the band is talking to you.
Then they attacked the hardware. Cheap portable transistor radios were flooding teenage rooms.
Those radios had two-inch speakers that barely produced bass and drowned in AM static. George Martin and the EMI engineers mixed the early singles accordingly.
They crushed the mono masters, cut the low end, and pushed midrange and treble until the close harmonies and ringing guitar lines cut through the tin and the hiss. The records were not mixed for hi-fi living rooms. They were mixed to win on the worst speaker in the house.
That combination of instant structure, personal pronouns, and speaker-optimized sound is why those early singles did not just get played.
They occupied the dial.
And yes for decades it was a secret.
congerjan retweeted
After September 11, more than a million tons of the World Trade Center was loaded onto barges and shipped to a garbage dump on Staten Island.
Then hundreds of men and women stood at conveyor belts for ten months and picked through every ounce of it by hand.
They were looking for people.
The place is called Fresh Kills. For fifty years it was the largest landfill in the world. It took its last barge of household trash on March 22, 2001, and shut down for good. New York was finally done with it.
Five and a half months later, at two o'clock in the morning on September 12, the landfill's director got a phone call at home. He had just walked in the door.
Two trucks were at the gate. They were carrying pieces of the World Trade Center.
He drove back.
The man who ran the dump would later say, without any drama, that if Fresh Kills had not been closed, this could never have happened. There would have been no room. The garbage would have been in the way.
The site was empty. So that is where the towers went.
Here is how it worked.
At Ground Zero, cranes and grapplers lifted the debris into dump trucks. The trucks drove to a pier on the Hudson. There, the load went onto barges, six hundred tons at a time. The barges were towed down the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, to Staten Island. More than fifteen hundred barges made the trip.
At Fresh Kills, sanitation workers unloaded them onto a hill.
And then the sorting began.
The debris was mechanically screened into three sizes. Chunks bigger than eight inches. Two to eight inches. A quarter inch to two inches. Anything smaller than a quarter of an inch, the size of a fingernail, fell through the last sieve.
Everything above that size went onto a conveyor belt.
And along the belts stood the detectives.
NYPD. FBI. Port Authority police. Medical examiners. Dressed head to toe in white Tyvek suits, in masks, in gloves, on a hill that stank of jet fuel and pulverized concrete and things nobody wanted to name. Looking down at the belt, hour after hour, as the towers rolled past them a fist-sized chunk at a time.
When they saw something, they reached in and took it, and placed it in a white bucket at their feet.
A wedding ring. A photo ID. A set of keys. A shoe.
A piece of a person.
The white buckets went to a tent that served as a morgue.
The volume was beyond comprehension. In mid-September the operation was processing 1,750 tons of debris a day. By mid-October, 17,500 tons a day. Ten times more. Round the clock. The 200-acre hill was declared a federal crime scene and stayed one for ten months.
A retired NYPD detective later wrote down what a shift looked like, because almost nobody outside knew it existed.
You wake at 3 a.m. You get a giant coffee. You drive two hours in the dark from Orange County, through New Jersey, to Staten Island. You park at the bottom of a hill that looks like the end of the world. You put on the white suit. You go to your belt. You stand there. You look.
Then you drive two hours home and do it again tomorrow.
Sanitation workers pulled sixteen-hour shifts, seven days a week. One of them, a supervisor named Barry Asnes, said afterward what kept him there. We were attacked on our own soil, in the city where I was born. This was personal.
The operation did not stop for weather. It did not stop for Christmas. It ran until July 2002. Ten months.
By the end, the men and women on that hill had recovered thousands of human remains. Tens of thousands of personal effects. Wallets, badges, wedding bands, photographs, all cleaned and catalogued and returned to families who had nothing else to bury.
When they were finished, the remaining material was placed in a 48-acre section of the landfill, a mound two hundred and twenty-five feet high, and covered.
It is a park now.
Many of the men and women who stood on that hill have lung disease. Asthma. Cancer. PTSD. The air they were breathing, eight and ten and sixteen hours a day, was full of the towers. Some of them have died of it.
Almost nobody knows their names. Almost nobody knows the place.
Mention Fresh Kills and 9/11 in the same sentence, the retired detective wrote, and most people will have no idea what you are talking about.
Here is what you should know.
Two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three people were murdered in those towers. Only about six in ten have ever been identified.
Every one of those identifications came out of a white bucket.
Every wedding ring returned to a widow. Every badge returned to a firehouse. Every fragment of bone matched to a name and buried with a headstone instead of a question mark.
Somebody in a white suit, standing at a belt on a garbage dump at four in the morning, reached into the World Trade Center as it rolled past, and picked that person up, and put them in a bucket, and sent them home.
They did that for ten months.
Nobody applauded on the hill. There was nobody to watch.
They did it anyway. 🇺🇸
congerjan retweeted
Twenty five years ago today, forty people who had never met decided to die on purpose so that strangers in Washington would not have to.
United 93 should have left Newark at 8:00 a.m. It sat on the taxiway in a line of airplanes and did not get airborne until 8:42. Forty two minutes late. That delay handed the people in that cabin the one thing nobody else in the sky that morning was given. Time, and the truth.
When four hijackers took the cockpit at 9:28, both towers were already burning. The passengers picked up the seatback airphones and called home, and their families told them what was happening in New York.
So they knew. That is what separates Flight 93 from everything else that happened that day. Every other victim died without warning. These forty had roughly half an hour to sit with the knowledge that they were already dead, that the only question left was where the airplane would land and how many people it would take with it.
Think about who they were.
Captain Jason Dahl was flying that trip because he had swapped for it, so he could get home for his fifth wedding anniversary. His first officer was LeRoy Homer Jr., Air Force Academy class of 1987, a C-141 pilot who had flown in the Gulf War and into Somalia, a major in the Reserve, with a wife and a ten month old daughter at home. Both men fought for that cockpit and neither of them gave it up willingly.
Todd Beamer's wife Lisa was pregnant with their third child. Jeremy Glick's daughter was twelve weeks old. Tom Burnett had three little girls. Lauren Grandcolas was pregnant and flying home from her grandmother's funeral. Deora Bodley was twenty. CeeCee Lyles was a flight attendant who had been a police detective in Florida and had four sons. Sandy Bradshaw had two small children waiting in North Carolina.
Not one of them had a reason to be brave. Every single one of them had a reason to sit still and hope.
Listen to what they said instead.
Tom Burnett told his wife Deena, don't worry, we're going to do something.
Sandy Bradshaw called her husband from the galley and told him she was filling coffee pots with boiling water. Then she said she had to go and hung up on him.
Honor Elizabeth Wainio told her stepmother, I have to go, they're breaking into the cockpit, I love you.
Todd Beamer stayed on the line with a phone operator named Lisa Jefferson for thirteen minutes, gave her his home number, asked her to tell his wife he loved her, and asked her to say the Lord's Prayer with him. Then she heard him set the phone down and say to the men beside him, are you ready, okay, let's roll.
They took a vote first. On a hijacked airliner, with a man at the front claiming to have a bomb, they held a vote, because they were not going to force anyone else to die for their decision.
At 9:57 they came up the aisle.
The recorder caught six minutes of it. A galley cart driven into the cockpit door. Men shouting. The hijacker at the controls throwing the airplane into rolls and dives trying to knock them off their feet, and failing, because they kept coming. At 10:00 he asks the man beside him whether to finish it. Twenty five seconds later you can hear an American voice screaming, in the cockpit, if we don't we'll die. At 10:02 the hijackers are yelling at each other to put it down.
They put it down. At 10:03 a.m., in an empty field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 130 miles and twenty minutes short of the United States Capitol, where Congress was still inside the building.
The men who hijacked that plane were willing to die for their cause. So were the passengers. The difference is that the hijackers wanted to take thousands of people with them, and the passengers of Flight 93 made sure the only people who died were themselves.
Forty of them. Salesmen, flight attendants, a college student, a retired ironworker, a judo champion, two pilots fighting to the last second for a control yoke. No weapons, no training, no orders, no chance.
They are the only Americans on September 11, 2001 who saw it coming, understood exactly what it would cost them, and walked into it anyway.
congerjan retweeted
Today I’m thinking of all the first responders and victims of 9/11 who got cancer after exposure to the toxins released on wretched day. ❤️🩹
#fuckcancer
Don’t forget if you start bleeding after 20 years of menopause, that’s a sign to get help fast!
👏👏for reposting my most significant heart-breaking yet informative tweet @StuartLyon & @sheeza_blade
It went viral
23 June 2024 was the the start of my mission to try & help “OtherJulie’s” with #OvarianCancer through symptom awareness
It might help if it went viral again!🤞
congerjan retweeted
RIP🕊️
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Dr. Gladys West died on January 17, 2026. This post from August 31, 2026, recirculates a memorial graphic for her passing from months earlier.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_We…
nytimes.com/2026/01/27/sci…
npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-…
congerjan retweeted
Dolly Parton’s niece, Hannah Dennison, was diagnosed with leukaemia at the age of 4, and underwent treatment at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. The family didn’t know whether Hannah would survive and she received treatment for nearly 4 years.
Hannah did survive and made a full recovery. Dolly believed this showed that miracles do happen. She wrote the song “Chemo Hero” as a tribute to her niece and the medical team. She later returned to the same hospital to perform the song for sick children and surprised the hospital by donating $1 million to its paediatric cancer programme
Rest in peace beautiful soul 💜
congerjan retweeted
First new issue of The Daily STEM for the school year!
News, Careers, Puzzles, Challenges, & every issue is FREE to read at dailystem.com/news
Try them with your kids & share them with teachers you know
RIP
Oh goodness, what can I say about Shelley Fabares.
Dear sweet Shelley. I learned just now of her passing on Saturday. While I'm saddened by the news, I am filled with happy memories of filming "Ride the Wild Surf" with her, Susan Hart and all the boys!
Shelley truly was a sweet, good girl. In the acting world you never know what type of people your fellow castmates may be when you start a project. It's always a treat when you find yourself among good, happy people. Us girls all shared a little bungalow on Oahu together and it was more fun than work! The whole group of us were having a ball!
My thoughts and condolences to Shelley's husband Mike Farrell and their loved ones.
Shelley was a darling woman, a lovely actress and a wonderful singer. -Barbara Eden
