Beginning this blissful journey of writing for the first time has made me excited and scared all at once. My goal is to explore the world of parenting and education through social media.
As a mother, wife, teacher, and writer, I am constantly bombarded by the demands of my different facets of life. Each facet comes together to create what you read about and see on this site! Raising two young children and teaching Psychology and World Cultures to high school students has shaped who I am and the topics I find important. My interests tend to focus on parenting and education, but in the end are infinite in scope!
Personally interviewed Scott Rotermund, president and a founder of CafeWell, last week. What a wonderful conversation about the combined effort of CafeWell and HealthAmerica to create a fitness program in tune with todays world. They ingeniously combined elements of fitness and social networking to create an incentive based program to get and stay fit! Perfect for todays world!
http://www.examiner.com/article/race-to-the-moon-event-and-launch-of-return-to-earth-harrisburg-pa
I would love to know your opinion about this unique approach to fitness! Comment on my article (link above) and I will respond!
This is my bulletin board from student teaching. Oh how things have changed since then! I hope everyone took the time to recognize a teacher for their hard work and dedication this week! I appreciate all the educators in my life.
http://www.examiner.com/article/teacher-appreciation-week-central-pennsylvania-may-7th-11th
Twitter: AngelaLandon1
I am so in love with Twitter…what a fun way to interact. I interact with so many people about important topics….actual meaningful interactions that I enjoy and look forward to. Are you interested in interacting with me as well? Follow me on Twitter!
Love, Marriage, and Society
Over the last 2 days my psychology classes and I have been discussing the science behind love. Fascinating conversation to have with a generation brought up on romantic comedies; a generation that has witnessed the decline in the status of marriage to society.
We began this journey by discussing what happens in the brain when someone experiences love. After covering the basic neurological changes, my students wanted to discuss love through the lens of sociology.
We ventured into discussions about love and marriage, love and cohabitation, the history (or lack there of) of romantic love and marriage, the importance of marriage to society, how love changes over time, the limitations and practicality of marriage in the past and present, and the future of marriage in society.
My students were shocked to learn how relatively new the concept of romantic love was. Once they learned that romance was a relatively new concept, they questioned the purpose of marriage before romantic love. What role has marriage played in society thus far, and what is the future role of marriage?
Interesting topics to broach with a room filed with hormonal teenagers. They wanted to believe that marriage was always this fairy tale dream of romance and happily ever after. It was a stretch for them to understand the importance marriage used to play in society. It was a way of life, a practical financial tool, a method of diffusion, as well as a way to maintain societal peace.
Really…don’t you have to be in love to marry. This reaction from my students was a bit shocking. Did they really live in a fantasy world? In the end it was more than being filled with idealistic romantic notions supplied in unlimited numbers by hollywood, but a more unfortunate and severe truth…they were already jaded. My students, coming from difficult circumstances and low SES backgrounds, had experienced so much disappointment and frustration in their own relationships…or the relationships modeled to them by family…that they were eager to accept idealistic dreams and forgo the reality they were trying to escape.
This hit me suddenly and was more like a slap in the face.
The goal of the lesson was to teach about love, the purpose of marriage in society, and the relationship between marriage and love. I tried to enforce that although love is not essential to marriage (wanting my students to be open to learning about cultures that do not embrace this notion) it is a wonderful piece of a relationship that I hope they all experience in a healthy way. I explained how relationships are built through friendship, trust, and compromise.
Hopefully my students will allow cultural relativism to guide them as we discover and learn about different cultures together. Looking at cultures as objectively as possible is important, and I hope my students can accept the different roles love and marriage play in varying societies.
In the end, I learned more about my students than I expected. I uncovered a piece of them that was real….a confusion mixed with sadness that I hope does not taint their future relationships. Only time will tell.
I just wrote an article about Race to the Moon, a program pioneered by HealthAmerica and CafeWell. The goal was to combine social networking and the health industry in a way that would encourage people to live a healthy lifestyle. Read more about it (but a little preview: it totally worked!)
Reblog if you’re a mom in your early - mid 20’s
I want to follow moms more my own age! :D
i turn 20 june 30! :D
Just turned 22 :(( lol have a 2 year old daughter!
Im 26 with 2 kids
Delicious Rainbow Cake! Such a hit in my house last night. The baking bug struck me and I rushed to the store for a couple of essentials! This is so easy….I needed to buy 2 boxes of white cake mix, 3 containers of whipped cream cheese frosting, rainbow sprinkles, and a couple candy butterflies for the top. You also need food coloring and anything the boxed cake mixes call for as well!
So I mixed together the cake and divided it into 3 bowls. Added food coloring until it was the color I liked, and poured the colored batter into pre-greased pans (follow the boxes instructions on cooking temperatures and times).
Once the cake cooled, I began layering. Now the cakes were domed on the top, so I took a knife and leveled them a little bit. I added frosting between each layer and frosting over the entire thing.
The next part was fun! I got to drench the sides in sprinkles! My son loved the sprinkles. A couple candy butterflies on top completed the Rainbow Cake.
Ok so I cannot take credit for the taste…Betty Crocker covered that for me…but the look is all mine. I am super proud! I think it turned out pretty well.
What do you think? Hit or miss?
