The American Nurses Association celebrates National Nurses Week from Nurses Day, May 6, to May 12, Florence Nightingale's birthday. Nurses work crazy hours, help fight disease and advocate for their patients, making it a caring, but complicated profession. The Bureau Labor of Statistics estimates employment of registered nurses is projected to grow 16 percent between…
Better Habits Can Make You Happy in the New Year
Forget about New Year's resolutions—cultivating good habits in your life is the way to happiness, says New York Times bestselling author and happiness expert Gretchen Rubin. So instead of starting 2016 with a bunch of declarative statements about the things you will and will not do this year, maybe start to think about your habits and how…
We All Scream for Lillian Dunkle!
July is National Ice Cream Month, and my vote for this year's spokesperson is Lillian Dunkle from Susan Jane Gilman's novel, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street. Lillian begins her story as Malka Treynovsky, a young Russian child who immigrates in 1913 to New York City, where she finds herself suddenly crippled by a…
HiSet and TASC: Alternatives to the GED
Joining many other states, Illinois will offer adults alternative choices to the GED to earn their high school equivalency diploma in 2016. These alternative exams are the HiSet (High School Equivalency Exam) and the TASC (Test Assessing Secondary Completion). The announcement comes in response to the huge amount of adults who did not take or did not…
The New GED: Boost or Barrier?
According to a 2014 Chicago Tribune article, an astonishing 1.3 million Illinois adults lack high school diplomas. With the majority of those adults living in the city, this affects the entire Chicago community, contributing to increasing violence, job growth and tax revenues. Mayor Rahm Emanuel is trying to prevent this in the future with his Chicago…
The Tale of the Nutcracker Isn’t Hard to Crack
I have probably seen some version of The Nutcracker ballet every year since I was a child. There was the annual holiday field trip to the Auditorium Theater to see the Joffrey Ballet production in elementary school. Sometimes my family would cozy up in the living room to watch whatever ballet version was playing on PBS…
Baby Boomers vs. Millennials: Who Will Win The Next America?
In the revolutionary war, America fought and won against the British. During the Civil War, it was North versus South. Today and in the not too distant future, it will be Baby Boomers versus Millennials. In The Next America by Paul Taylor and the Pew Research Center, Taylor lays out through facts and figures, the demographics…
Not Your Average Supermodel
What happens to the models when a season of America's Next Top Model ends? That is the question Melda Beaty tries to answer in her debut novel, Lime. Follow Lime Prince, a young woman of Ethiopian and Jamaican descent, as she enters the world of the New York fashion industry. Lime isn't your stereotypical supermodel…
Having Children Can Be A Challenge
In honor of Mother's Day, let's take a look at two different mothers in the world of fiction. In The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis, follow the Shepherd family through multiple decades of the African-American Great Migration. Starting with the death of her newborn twins, each of Hattie's children has a chapter in this novel…
Classic Romantic Comedy Back on the Big Screen
The first movie I ever saw about adult relationships was Sleepless in Seattle. I remember my mother dragging me with her to a random movie theater in the western suburbs to see some movie with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan that in my mind was for "old people." I was 13 years old and hadn't…
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