In November 2008, Lara Love Hardin was arrested in her suburban home. Her habit of pretending to have a perfect life had led to an opioid addiction, which had imploded her life completely. Now, she’s a bestselling author who has worked with Oprah and the Dalai Lama—and most importantly, she no longer has to pretend. In this episode, Lara shares her story of starting over after drug addiction.
America’s students are struggling. Chronic absenteeism has doubled from pre-pandemic numbers. Districts are implementing grading floors to soften the sting of failure. Grade inflation is widespread. Many students seem to have lost the motivation to learn, and traditional systems of grading and ranking aren’t helping. What’s wrong with the A-F grading system? Should school just do away with grades entirely? What interventions work to get kids back in classrooms more consistently? In this podcast episode, a high school teacher shares how she changed grading in her classroom to better engage her students and an historian explains why grades are a “can’t live with ‘em can’t live without ‘em” conundrum. We also speak with a coach who works with students that struggle with motivation because they lack executive function skills and a leading expert on chronic absenteeism explains why so many kids are missing school these days and what we can do about it.
Our first IGF Book Club of 2024! In this episode, we're reading the Bhagavad Gita, as translated by Laurie Patton. We actually interviewed Laurie on this show in 2020, so if you want to hear her voice, check out episode 77.
In this week's Council of Moms, Lisa is joined by Lavonne Wells, Shari Lyon, and Brittney Phillips to answer a listener-submitted question: What do you do when your teenager doesn't seem to care about school, and you can tell they're heading down a difficult path?
A foundling newborn owl on the brink of death was rescued by a passionate conservationist. After a couple years, she was released to the wild, where's she's lived a healthy life—she's even raised two broods of chicks. But she still calls to and pays regular visits to her rescuer, right in his own back yard. A miracle of hope and connection. Also, in this episode of Constant Wonder, a bonus conversation about tracking the world's largest owl in Siberia.
Whether we like it or not, almost all of us will find ourselves in the position of wanting to start looking for love at some point in our lives. Maybe it's after a summer fling as teenagers, or maybe it's after the end of a decades-long marriage. For Shannon Jenkins, host of the Starting Over podcast, it was after deciding to leave a toxic marriage with her young son. In this first episode of The Lisa Show's new series on Starting Over, Lisa talks to Shannon about how so much of starting over for her was less about finding a new romantic partner, and more about figuring out how she felt about herself.
Our “Stick With It” series on the Top of Mind podcast continues with journalist Isaac Saul, founder of the daily political newsletter Tangle. He talks about why it’s so hard to find unbiased political news and what news consumers can do about it. He also shares a “Stick With It” story about moderating a conversation between two guests with opposing views on the Israel/Hamas conflict that got so heated one of the guests demanded Tangle not release the interview. What happened next strengthened Saul’s belief in the power of tough conversations.
This week on In Good Faith, host Steve is joined by Melissa Inouye and David Peters. Both guests discuss the idea of Sacred Struggles: trying times with a higher emphasis and draw to God. They also both draw parallels between the Christian Crucifixion and their own lives. Inouye and Peters are both published authors on the topic and we loved speaking to and learning from them.
Sheila Arnold and Paul Strickland live recordings from the Apple Seed Studio.
When his daughter is diagnosed with Down Syndrome, an anthropology professor must test his commitment to the lesson that his field had long taught: that someone is different doesn't mean something is wrong with them. He discovers, though, that even leading social scientists like Margaret Mead and Erik Erikson struggled to accept Down Syndrome as part of a normal life. In this episode of Constant Wonder, he and his family embrace an expanded concept of what a "normal" childhood looks like.