One of the challenges of teaching is negotiating students with severe psychological conditions — of which we teachers are sometimes informed, but never trained for. Sometimes these students are disruptive (as in the case of a student with Asperger’s who offended and alienated other students with her socially awkward comments) but often they just suffer quietly, withdrawn and/or mysteriously absent from class.

I make an effort to bring a lot of enthusiasm and energy into the classroom. Sometimes, I’m even goofy in an effort to lessen the tension and seriousness that accompanies the difficult work I assign. For me, these past few years have been ones of almost unmitigated happiness and good fortune; I like to bring that happiness to my students. Often I forget that this could be someone else’s dark time.

Last month, at the end of a particularly jovial, engaged class, I realized that one of my students was quietly weeping in the front row. Unseen by the other students, she quickly got up at break and rushed into the ladies’ room. After class, she explained she was experiencing severe anxiety and depression (medication eventually helped). Earlier, I had attributed her stern countenance to a dislike of me, or a lack of interest in the class. I felt mildly ashamed at my assumptions and embarrassed at my overbearing humor, my need to jolly everyone into a good mood. I’m reminded of Barbara Ehrenreich’s critique of America’s relentless promotion of positive thinking, particularly how the seriously ill are encouraged to combat their sickness with good thoughts.

So I sat with my student for a few minutes after class, not offering therapy (which I am not qualified to give) but keeping her company for a minute and letting her know that her distress was not embarrassing or shameful. Since then the student has been noticeably more animated in class, making great efforts to participate, and she smiles at me gratefully whenever I see her. I’m embarrassed at her gratitude because I did so little, but professors’ small gestures often have bigger impact than we realize.

I understood this more fully after I experienced a brief, inexplicable depression this past week. While this certainly does not qualify as a serious illness, the strength and suddenness of it knocked me flat. This was not sadness, which is painful but specific, but a darkness that seemed to cover the past and the future. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.” Mercifully, my malaise lasted as short time, but in that time every accomplishment seemed hollow, every future goal pointless. Luckily, I know enough about myself to know that it would pass, and it did. But while it lasted, it was as unbearable as food poisoning. I tried to comfort myself as best I could: doing “fun” parts of work, walking, and shamelessly asking my friends (and husband) for comfort. But most of all, I just accepted it. And am thankful that I’m not one of the many people who carry this burden every day.

Friday night was a long one for my children. Two of their friends came for a sleepover, and with all four children snuggled into the big sofa bed together, there wasn’t a lot of sleep happening. In anticipation of her buddy coming over, my five-year old daughter announced that they would stay up until midnight. So when the kids weren’t looking, I changed the digital clocks on the microwave and the stove (which they could see from the living room) so that midnight would happen a couple of hours sooner. That worked pretty well, except that in the morning they all jumped out of bed at six thinking they’d slept until eight. Needless to say, the kids were zombies all day, and I dreaded bedtime.

One would think that it would be easier to put tired kids to bed. Not in our house. Exhaustion turns them into squirrels, and they become harder to settle down. On a typical night, there’s a tiny window between sleepy-time and hyper-time. Just when we think we’ve read enough calm, quiet soothing stories, or purposely droned through the last few pages of a chapter book to make them drowsy, someone will crack a joke or make a fart noise and all-out giggling ensues. Then it takes another thirty minutes to an hour of foot-rubbing, stuffed animal searches, cups of water, kisses, and bedtime tucking and re-tucking before they’re really asleep.

Siri Hustvedt writes about children and sleep in the NY Times “All-Nighters” column this week. I was struck by her description of sleep as a time when children experience separation both from parents and from wakefulness. No wonder so many kids stall at bedtime. Not only do we ask them to be alone in darkened rooms, where monsters must be hiding in the shadows, we want them to close their eyes and sleep. As someone who slept with a closet light on until I was almost ready to leave home for college (so I could find my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, of course), I try to be understanding of my children’s bedtime fears even when I’m desperate for some down time or to get to bed myself. We keep a little “nest” (a sleeping bag) that my son can pull out from under our bed if he’s had a nightmare and can’t go back to sleep in his own bed. Fortunately, he needs it infrequently, and although this practice probably goes against parenting expert advice, we alls have a better chance of getting back to sleep.

Why do we expect bedtimes to be easy for kids when we grown-ups have just as many hang-ups with sleep? My kids’ second wind is something I get too. If I’m really exhausted, the adrenalin kicks in and I have to force myself to settle down and not take on new projects at that crucial midnight point-of-no-return. Late nights, or worse, the 3AM wide-awake bouts, were a huge part of my graduate school life. I’d have all-night work sessions at the lab and then catch the bus home to bed once the sun came up. Perhaps because of those years of sleep abuse (or maybe it’s just parental instinct to listen for the kids), I still wake up in the night, unable to turn off my brain. An Ipod glow often emanates from under our covers in the middle of the night, as my husband or I search for just the right droning podcast to induce a return to sleep.

As I write this, my husband is getting the kids’ baths finished and preparing their bedtime snacks. They’ll soon be brushing their teeth, and then I’ll stop what I’m doing here to read stories. Having just read this week’s piece by Libby Gruner, I’m reminded to step back from my complaints about the bedtime battles and look at the big picture. It’s the process that’s worthwhile, even when it seems my kids will never settle down to sleep. After all, I treasure the reading and cuddle time, when we’re often most affectionate and expressive of our love. How much longer before bedtimes become just a quick good night, and no one wants to have feet rubbed anymore?

There are some undertakings so overwhelming that, if you knew too much about them before diving in, you might never embark on them. Having children, for example, is way too daunting if you think about the time and money spent, the income and sleep lost — you'd never do it if you drew up a detailed budget beforehand. Writing a dissertation — or a book — is a similarly unmanageable project that might cow anyone who really thought hard about how long it would take for how little reward. Sometimes I think the academy, or the human race, reproduces itself only — to borrow Samuel Johnson's quip about second marriages — through the triumph of hope over experience.

Recently I had a revelation about why we keep on doing things that might not pay off, though my experience was of far less significance than the ones I outlined above — I made a knitting mistake and kept on knitting for several more rows before I saw it. Some four and a half rows — or, say, 1300 stitches — had to come out. Neatly, so that I could reknit the pattern without losing a stitch. Believe me, I didn't count those stitches before I started in on the repair.

I happened to be a passenger in a car en route from Connecticut to Virginia at the time — another of those projects one might not want to examine too closely before beginning — and it was somewhere around Baltimore that I discovered my mistake. I thought about putting the project away. I thought about leaving the mistake and calling it a "design feature." I thought about how "sticky" mohair yarn is, how much it prefers to be knit together rather than to come apart. And I thought about how much I really wanted to be able to wear this thing one day without apologizing for it.

And so from Baltimore to Alexandria I sat in the passenger seat and slowly un-knit the project I'd been knitting. Stitch by stitch. More experienced knitters than I may simply rip out several rows, pick up the stitches, and get right back to work, but I don't trust my picking up skills — especially not while seated in a car, with no table to lay out my work. And, really, I had nothing much else to do.

We sat in a terrible traffic jam just south of DC — all the other spring break travelers returning, no doubt — and I continued un-knitting and thinking about my work. Lots of things I do require time, patience, and attention. Some of them require a considerable amount of revision — tearing out words, paragraphs, whole pages at a time — to get them right. Parenting requires all of the above and more, though it's not as if one can simply re-do to correct mistakes. But, of course — as I realized while watching the yarn I liked so much slip between my fingers for a second and then a third time — it's really not about the end result. Most things that are worth anything aren't, I guess. We often focus on the product — the book, the job, the graduation picture, the finished sweater. But it's the process that keeps us invested, keeps us coming back. As I unknit the yarn, I remembered how much I enjoyed knitting it, and how much I would enjoy knitting it again, more slowly and carefully.

I cannot, no matter how I try, extend my analogy to the nine hour drive to (or, somehow worse, from) my parents' house — that process is merely to be endured for the promise of renewed family time at one end and the return to routine at the other. (Well, except for that uninterrupted knitting time, I suppose.) But for most other things, whether it's reading to a child at bedtime, teaching a class, writing an article, or even knitting and unknitting a sweater, it's the process that makes it worthwhile. There are moments of discovery — or at least potential moments — in all these things, and those moments are, in the end, what really matter to me. It was a fine spring break, judged on that basis, full of all kinds of process, all kinds of moments of discovery. And even some knitting.

I have been meaning to write about "Paula Bolick"'s witty article "Giving Birth to 2 Babies" in The Chronicle. It brought back my own experience of defending my dissertation two weeks before my son's due date (four before his actual birth).

As Bolick points out, having a due date can provide a needed firecracker under an otherwise dilatory graduate student. I had spent the evenings and weekends of my internship year over-researching my topic, moaning on the phone to friends, and raiding the refrigerator to avoid facing the blank screen. When I returned home, I got a part-time job, intending to spend the rest of my time writing. I did write, but slowly and painfully, examining each sentence multiple times, and imagining my committee striking it out or, worse, laughing at it, deciding they had been gravely mistaken about me--that I wasn't doctoral material after all.

All of those procrastination devices lost their power in the face, or rather belly, of my son's imminent arrival. I knew I was not the sort of person who could type--much less think--while nursing and crooning, and being cried at and spit up on. There was no time for nonsense -- I had to focus.

I also let go of a great deal of diffidence. Instead of deferring to my committee's nit-picky and sometimes contradictory demands, I began issuing demands of my own: "I HAVE to finish by July 8, otherwise I will be ABD forever. We need to move forward, now!" Looking back, it's hard to imagine how I got the nerve to boss around the people who held my future in their venerable hands. I guess my mama-bear protective instincts kicked in early. But they really wanted me to graduate, so they humored me.

Pregnancy helped my actual defense, as well, in a way I hadn't anticipated and am not particularly proud of. My committee was composed of nearly all men. About halfway through, someone asked me a question I was not prepared for. I must have tensed up, because my left calf started cramping severely. I needed to get up and walk around, so I blurted, "I'm having a cramp, is it okay if I..." and was immediately swamped by assurances: "Whatever you need! Do you want some water? Should we take a break?" The actual question was lost in the shuffle. (The only woman on the committee just twinkled at me.) The rest of the process was accelerated, I assume from fear that I would deliver then and there.

I've chronicled some of the difficulties I faced afterwards, trying to manage a job search and then actually function on the job with a baby. But I know they were minimal, compared with trying to organize, write, and defend a dissertation. So for me, as for Bolick, the timing was optimal.

We were both lucky, though. Our pregnancies, though not without complications, proceeded apace, and our babies were born healthy.

I bring this up because I think, generally, that the idea that we can plan our lives with children in the same way that we could before is a common fallacy. Some pregnancies are highly problematic, and time that was allotted to reading and writing is instead devoted to monitoring and, at times, making difficult decisions and grieving. Children are born ill, or with special needs. My son's ADHD, though mild, definitely had an impact on my ability to function both socially and professionally. He was extremely active for about 18 to 20 hours a day, and I was exhausted and disoriented for most of his first three years. That is nothing compared with what friends whose children have autism, cerebral palsy, or terminal illnesses have gone through.

Of course, careers are also derailed by our own illnesses and accidents. That has happened to me, and it was painful and frightening. The universe is unpredictable; yet we have to keep going as though our lives were predictable. But I think these issues are important to talk about; otherwise we can be blindsided by the difficulties embedded in a path that looks so smooth for others.

Before finding my job at Ursuline College, I taught economics or statistics at several different colleges. I taught as part of my graduate assistantship on the way to my Ph.D., as an adjunct at several colleges in the Boston area as a graduate student, and at my first job out of grad school, and the one that brought me here to Cleveland. I was recently reminded of a lecture I tried to teach at one of those schools many years ago. As part of a class in macroeconomics, I tried to have a discussion about how the United States could help people in poorer countries. I threw out the question, expecting to list ideas on the board as they were generated. I recently learned that such an approach is being picked up by a new web site that is part game and part social networking site called “Evoke.” With funding from the World Bank, this site asks ordinary people to use their imagination to compete to help solve real world problems.

However, that day in my macroeconomics class, no such ideas were generated. Instead, I heard nothing, as a group of students stared back at me with blank faces. After a few moments of silence, I asked them what the problem was. Nobody answered, until one student finally raised his hand slowly. He said that, since the U.S. had been so successful, he thought that we did not need to share our wealth with anyone. A little taken aback, I said something like “well, that is one way of thinking of it; does anyone else have any other ideas?” Perhaps because of peer pressure, no one ventured to disagree with that one student. I left defeated and disillusioned; after all were not the young supposed to be the idealists in the world?

Several hours after the Earth shook in Haiti in mid-January, my own life was disrupted as I broke first my leg and then later my arm. As I lay in bed waiting to heal enough to return to the doctor, the horror of the aftermath of the earthquake in one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere unfolded. There were scenes of crushed limbs and broken bones, and I have a vivid memory of one scene where a woman lay on a mat with a bandaged leg, with the reporter telling us that she had a broken leg. As I watched it, I felt shooting pain up my own broken leg, and realized that she probably did not have access to good pain medicine, so her pain must be multiples of my own. I was taken back to that class in macroeconomics many years ago, and wondered, what can we do to help our suffering brothers and sisters?

When I applied to graduate school in economics in late 1984 and early 1985, the song “We Are the World” served as a background refrain as I typed (on a typewriter) my applications. While not planning to study development economics, I still had the hubris to think that my work in economics would help make a difference in the lives of those less well off. Once in my first job, I was shocked at how quickly the desire to change the world evolved into a desperate attempt to earn tenure, and I must confess that I strongly doubt that any of my academic work has made a difference in the lives of anyone who is less fortunate than I am. I was reminded of my own idealism as I watched the re-make of that song on the opening of the Winter Olympics. Surely, I want to pass my former idealism on to my daughter, who has already made the world a better place just by being in it.

And so, in the model that sees a “blog” as a discussion starter among people who might otherwise not ever meet in person, I want to propose another question. Since the U.S. has already been helping the suffering in Haiti, what can we do to continue to make the lives of the people there better? I suspect that the readers of this site will have more ideas than did the 18 year olds in my class many years ago.

I’m a great one for To Do lists. For me they work especially well when I’m organized enough to have items broken down into bite-sized projects that I can go along and knock off. When my lists are working well I rarely finish everything on it in one day. I rewrite my list and re-prioritize all the items that don’t get crossed off along with the new things that come up each night for the next day. I keep all the lists in sequential pages of a notebook, so I can refer back to old ones, and they become a reference of what I have done. Although it may sound like cheating, “organize list” often appears on my list – but my list maintenance takes time and I like to give myself credit for doing it along with that satisfaction of crossing something off.

My lists serve a more important purpose than just telling me what to do, they keep track of those things I don’t get done. My lists make a certain pattern very obvious: some of my most treasured projects stay on the list day after day after day without making much (or any) progress. In general, these are my projects that require thoughtful, focused attention. I marvel that even though they are of fundamental interest and importance to me, and that of anything on my list these would afford me the most intellectual fulfillment, they often get shunted down the priority list for matters of “greater urgency”, or because I have time only for other, less taxing tasks.

How to motivate starting and keeping up with a non-trivial, thought-, time-, and energy-consuming project? I have worked on a book for several years now, with my productivity waxing and waning. My most prolific (and exhilarating) experience with it was when I applied for a summer fellowship at the Whiteley Writing Center at the University of Washington. That external commitment (and the flexibility of my husband’s academic appointment, which allowed him to take over the family management for that time), allowed me to clear my calendar and move my book to high priority for a month and a half. I came home with a mountain of references, a full draft, and tremendous enthusiasm... and then we went back to the usual routine. I strive to find the balance where I can commit to my intellectual projects enough to keep the inspiration and motivation flowing, while still keeping up with the more immediate and do-able portions of my never-ending lists. How do people do this?

March 8th was International Women’s Day (IWD), which seems appropriate after watching Kathryn Bigelow make Oscar history last weekend (rock on …). The IWD celebrations first started in 1910-11 and were recognized by the United Nations in 1975. Many countries around the world — China, Russia, Vietnam (not the U.S.)--celebrate IWD as a national holiday. Not surprisingly, Nicholas Kristof’s N.Y. Times blog “On the Ground” noted it this week.

Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn — the first husband/wife team (and first Asian American) to win a Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting — have received well-deserved publicity for their co-authored 2009 book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Half the Sky tells enthralling stories about mothers and young women who became successful farmers and community organizers after receiving tiny micro-entrepreneur loans (and surviving violence and rape). Kristof’s New York Times column consistently hammers away at eliminating abuses against children (e.g. a recent column reflects on a ten-year-old girl in Yemen who successfully received a divorce from an abusive husband), and the political and social injustices against women.

From hunger, to education, warfare, and child sex trafficking, IWD has many issues to deal with, publicize and raise funds for. I appreciated a link on the IWD site to the World Food Program’s “Bloggers Against Hunger” program. They produced a persuasive video to raise funds for hunger and to show how hard women work to eliminate it.

With Hillary Clinton as head of the State department, and Kristof and WuDunn writing and speaking consistently about women’s issues around the globe, this year and next should both be well-publicized International Women’s Days. My university’s Gannon Center for Women and Leadership has formed a reading group around Half the Sky and is bringing WuDunn in to speak this month. With these events, director Dawn Harris hopes that students “will become more aware and interested in reducing the oppression of women in developing countries” and develop into “future leaders [who] work on human rights issues.”

The links between women’s issues and ending the wars in the Middle East have been made by Kristof, WuDunn and other writers. The biggest threats to some traditional Middle Eastern values may not be sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, but Sheryl WuDunn, Kathryn Bigelow or 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. These women’s lives, however, attest to the fact that eliminating oppression is often a risky and exhausting process that demands perseverance.

Wangari Maathai’s inspiring ‘Mama, Phd’ story is documented in the recent independent film Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai.Taking Root covers the challenges that Maathai has gone through as a mother, a scholar and an activist--spending three days in jail after divorcing her husband, earning the first PhD by a woman in East Africa, founding the Green Belt movement (planting 30 million trees lost to deforestation), and standing up to political corruption in the Kenyan government.

The film is comprehensive and well done, but I was a bit disappointed that Taking Root did not give us a little more information about Maathai’s family life. (I'm guessing that she was not comfortable with these issues on camera.) Maathai had the courage to allow her ex-husband to raise her three children while she worked and traveled with the U.N. to build a sustainable Kenya -- she visited her children when she could. I feel certain that the pain she felt in leaving her children to accomplish her work was one of the motivating centers of her life.

The complexities of Maathai's life and the lives of the women in Half the Sky reenforce the validity of the African proverb Clinton popularized, "It takes a village to raise a child..." Take a minute to honor the working women in your life this week…

A colleague e-mailed me recently — would I be interested in getting together an informal group of folks, every now and then, to talk about teaching? Would I! This colleague, I should say, is a master teacher himself — winner of innumerable awards, author of a book on teaching himself. I've been wanting to reach out to him for a while to talk about some of the things I'm hoping for our first year seminar program — but he got to me first.

He got to me, in part, from this blog. It's an odd thing, writing a blog. Folks I know — or colleagues I don't know, for that matter — can stumble across it in ways they're unlikely to come across my academic work, but they don't often let me know they read it. That's fine — one of the great pleasures of reading is how private it can be at times, how personal, how intimate. And if they don't like it I certainly don't need to hear it! But when I do hear about it, then writing a blog post becomes part of an ongoing conversation. I think we need both kinds of reading, the private and the social; the first allows us to drink deeply of new ideas and to reflect on them, while the second can allow us to put them into practice, to hone and refine them. (Or, one allows us to skim hastily while the other forces a certain accountability — that's always another possibility.)

I've read a couple of articles on teaching recently that I'd like to read more socially than privately. Recently I read in the January/February Atlantic about Teach for America and its studies of teachers, and then just this past weekend The New York Times Magazine had a piece about "Building a Better Teacher." Both articles focus on K-12 teaching, not college teaching, but I think we have much to learn from them anyway. The Atlantic piece on TFA suggests, for example, that a big part of excellent teaching is reflectiveness: " Great teachers ... constantly reevaluate what they are doing." The Times article focuses on specific classroom management practices as well as content-area skills; both, perhaps surprisingly, rely on what Elizabeth Green, the article's author, calls a "close reading of the students’ point of view." Good teachers, she suggests, try to figure out who their students are, breaking down directions for those who aren't following the general guidelines, examining why they make the mistakes they make — imagining, in other words, what it's like to sit in their seats. (It's worth noting here that in the comments on Aeron Haynie's terrific piece last week were two references to a teacher who is literally sitting in her students' seats by eating a school lunch every day — a noble and probably instructive sacrifice!) Reflectiveness and an empathic imagination seem to me related qualities—are they enough? And, can they be taught?

I'm not sure yet how to adapt the insights of these two articles — and I'm sure there are many others — to college teaching. Some of my colleagues will say we don't need to — that students who have made it to college have the responsibility for adapting to our methods rather than vice versa. And certainly I don't advocate pandering or "dumbing down." But if I can help my students better to learn the material I care so deeply about, to better acquire the skills of critical thinking and close reading that have so improved my own life, why wouldn't I want to do that? So, yes, that's a conversation I want to have.

I sometimes feel unqualified to write this column. I work with clients who teach, but aside from the occasional speaking engagement, I have not been personally involved with academia for over 15 years. So what I have to say may be outmoded. If so, I count on you to set me straight.

I have three graduate degrees from two universities: a master’s in drama therapy from New York University and both a master’s in clinical/school psychology and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Adelphi. In all three programs, there were two cardinal rules of scholarship:

1. Read your sources carefully; and

2. Stay close to the data.

I have strayed from #2 occasionally on this blog—most recently in my assertion that the world is less safe for middle class children now than when I was growing up. Readers have called me on these errors, and I’m grateful.

I bring this up because I’m puzzled by two responses to last week’s post.

Paul Rutter titled his comment, “Basing a theory on one experience?” when I had specifically stated, “This is not a comment on Irish pub music, or Irish music, or Ireland.”

And mb asserted, “While indeed there is gender-based discrimination in academia - many times the ‘soft’ type described here, but often overt - it is against men, not women,” without offering any supporting data.

Have the rules changed, or am I missing something else?

You may have seen what math folks call “Venn Diagrams”. These illustrate sets and subsets using circles that may or may not intersect. For example, a graph illustrating all college students may be shown as a large box, with a (very) small circle in it representing college students who go to Ursuline College. I found myself thinking of this way of portraying the world when I recently found myself with not just a broken leg but also a broken arm.

It all started when I was multi-tasking and stopped on my way out the door to drive my daughter to school. Oh- I forgot to bring some papers I needed for my morning meeting; I would just run back in to get them. However, when I had almost reached the door, I slipped on some ice and fell, hearing a “crack” that signaled to me that I had broken my leg. Luckily, my husband was still home, and he was able to call the ambulance for me. I was also lucky that my daughter, while frightened, listened when I told her to stay in the car, thus preventing both of us from being injured at the same time.

I was patched up and sent home with a boot and crutches, being told to stay off the leg for a week and then to come back to see the orthopedic doctor. However, after one week, as I was trying to get to the car to go back to the doctor, my crunches slipped and I fell backwards, banging my leg on the entrance to my house and breaking my right arm in the process. Instead of getting better, I found myself in the hospital with a broken arm and a (re-)broken leg, almost completely helpless and in need of assistance to do anything as simple as get out of bed. I felt like Humpty Dumpty, as I waited for the surgeon to put me back together again.

As I waited for surgery on both my limbs, one nurse told me that she had seen such injuries before, but that they were in people who were much older than me, by about 40 years, at least. It soon became clear that my bones broke so easily because they had been robbed of calcium from the anti-seizure medicine I have taken for almost 20 years. While I did take calcium supplements for the last three years, at the suggestion of my neurologist, it seems that the damage was too severe to prevent the results I encountered. I have since taken it upon myself to alert everyone of this side effect of the miracle drugs that allow me to live a normal life and to even function as “mom’s taxi”. If you take them, you might want to talk to your doctor about taking calcium supplements, perhaps along with vitamin D.

As I lay in bed, unable to move half of me, I entered the world of people with disabilities. When I think of people with disabilities, I think first of a woman who is my own personal hero, whom I have known most of my life, whom I will call “Elizabeth”. She was born prematurely over 40 years ago, before medicine knew what to do to help such tiny babies, and was so small her grandfather said that she was “smaller than a loaf of bread”, which was an understatement. On her first birthday the doctors gave a name to the fact that she barely used her right arm and leg; “Cerebral Palsy”.

Despite her difficulties, she never faltered as she navigated the world of children who had full use of their limbs. I remember her trying out for the cheerleading squad in her small grammar school, and being amazed that she would have to courage to even try out for it. When the coach called her mother to tell her that she was being put on the squad, she did so saying something about how she would probably not be able to participate all of the time. Funny, from what I heard, she never sat out one cheer during those years on the squad, but instead became the darling of the squad because she was so tiny and cute. Even in her second year on the squad, she was the “littlest cheerleader”.

Elizabeth was in the final years of a very rigorous college program before anyone figured out that she had a learning disability. She went on to earn a master’s degree, and today works with people who have developmental delays or have experienced traumatic brain injuries. She is married with a little girl who is both beautiful and brilliant, whom I am proud to call my goddaughter. More conversant than some children twice her age, I fully expect her daughter to earn some letters, of some form, after her name someday. Elizabeth has taught me what it means to triumph over physical adversity, and has been my role model these past few weeks as I have learned to live without my right limbs.

So what does this have to do with Venn Diagrams? This connection was suggested to me by a conversation I had several years ago with someone from the office of Multicultural Affairs at Ursuline, and may actually have relevance to the current discussion about health care reform going on in our country. It was suggested that, instead of thinking of disabled people as a subset of all people, perhaps we should, instead, think of most of us as being temporarily able bodied. As I learned in the last few weeks, such a state is one that is most likely only temporary, although it is a state that, thanks to my health insurance and some wonderful health care professionals, I am well on the way to rejoining.