This morning I ran into Sara Bennett Holmes, co-author of the book, The Case Against Homework and operator of the blog, Stop Homework.

She told me that she’d seen my posts about my dad and that her friend, psychologist Kate McReynolds, died two days before he did at Calvary Hospice.

McReynolds sounds like an incredible person and you can read about her on Sarah’s blog where Sarah quotes McReynolds’ last article, “Children’s Happiness,” published in the Spring 2008 issue of Encounter Magazine: Education for Meaning and Social Justice where she was Associate Editor, she wrote:

If we were to look squarely at the ordinary unhappiness
of just one child—that is, if we pondered it until we had achieved the
deepest understanding of his or her experience—what would happen? I
believe that, like my son’s middle school teacher, we might be brought
to tears. We might recognize that forces behind our own unhappiness,
how we ourselves have suffered from unremitting pressure to make the
grade and the subsequent narrowing of all that was meaningful to us. If
we then let compassion overtake us, we might do something remarkable.
We might, for example, take a leave of absence to give ourselves more
time in the present. We might adopt a more modest lifestyle that
balances work with devotion to our deepest values. We might, in other
words, decide that the happiness children naturally seek is the most
important thing in life–for them and for ourselves as well.