The last time I had driven up the hill of Hamilton Heights in West Hartford, Conn., I was a high school senior at Mount Saint Joseph Academy, steering the gigantic wheel of my father’s asthmatic ’65 Chevy Malibu.



I was in the last class to graduate from “The Mount.” That was 1978 and by then a school that once had 600 girls in grades 7- 12 had dwindled to less than 200. When I was a student there, The Mount was an ancient queen that had once been beautiful and graceful. The school…

How can you cheat on the SATs? I count 9,600 ways. That’s the number of investigations Ray Nicosia’s office initiated over SAT testing improprieties during the 2010- 2011 academic year. Nicosia is the director of testing integrity for the Educational Testing Service – the group that administers the SAT – and the complaints he received ranged from fire alarms randomly going off during testing to alleged impersonations of test takers.



By now you’ve probably heard about one of the…

The day Anna got her nose pierced, I spent the morning reading up on body piercing with regard to Jewish law. My daughter was about to get a small hole on the left side of her sweet nose, and I wanted to understand if she was adorning her face or mutilating it.



The rabbis historically have been divided on the issue of body piercing. Some sages liken piercing, even of the earlobes, to inflicting a wound on a body that belongs first and foremost to G-d. Others see it as an act of…