God help the teachers. I used to teach, a lifetime ago when kids actually had respect for adults. They learned this respect at home. "You do what your teacher tells you," parents said. If a teacher told you to stand in a corner all day, you did. And if your parents found out, they yelled at you, not at the teacher.

Now, of course, kids challenge everything. They know that teachers have no real authority, so they have little respect for them.

This makes teaching difficult.

I stole the idea from my friend Beth. She's a photographer and has had a picture wall in her house for as long as I've known her. It's not a formal wall where each photograph is framed and hung, then dramatized with lights, but a wall of corkboard where pictures are casually pinned. My wall is in the family room, half a wall really, filled with…

“How did you start? When did you begin? Did you go to school for this?" People constantly ask these questions of public figures, artists, artisans - of anyone whose talent and work they admire. "Where did you learn what you know?”

Often what's in their hearts…

What you want, when someone you love dies, is to make the world understand all that was lost by a single person's passing. You wish the Earth would stop spinning, the sun would stop shining, if only for a minute, because for life to go on as it always has just adds to the hurt. Yet most people die the way they live, quietly, without fanfare, special only to their families and the people who loved them…

Even now, she doesn't understand why it happened, why it's happening still. The politics elude her. She is 33, a wife, a mother of two young boys. Until two years ago, her life was urban ordinary. She lived in an apartment in a bustling city, worked as an attorney for a bank. Her husband was a businessman, her parents lived close by. Her children went to good schools and on holidays and weekends she socialized with family and friends.