Topic by Category: Thelma Reyna

By Guest Blogger, Thelma T. Reyna, PhD.
Her real name is not “Maria,” but let me tell you about this amazing young woman. She came to the United States from El Salvador as a teenager to escape her country’s violence. She came legally, struggled with English, then pushed herself through her Bachelor’s [...]

By Guest Blogger Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.
In my blog, “Ways to Help Us Avoid Feeling Hurt by Others: Part I,” I focused on controlling our emotional reactions toward others’ hurtful behavior. Here, my focus is on understanding the feelings and motivations of offensive people. Using empathy in this way, especially if [...]

By Guest Blogger Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.
Life is filled with pitfalls that trap us when we rely on pure emotion rather than cool analysis to make sense of things.
Consider, for example, how many ways our feelings can get hurt in the course of a typical day: directly, such as by someone’s [...]

By Guest Blogger Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.
For better or worse, our experiences created us, inside and out, and continue to influence who we are. For writers, personal experiences oftentimes end up on the pages of our books, poems, stories, screenplays, and essays.
Even when our creations are “fictionalized,” the heart of our [...]

By Contributing Blogger Dr. Thelma Reyna
Not a day passes in our modern American lives wherein we don’t interact with cultural diversity.  If any of us were to take an informal culture awareness test, we’d probably do pretty well.
After all—especially in places like Southern California where I live, the mega melting pot [...]

From Contributing Blogger, Thelma Reyna, Ph.D.
Carol was 68 when she died in Duarte, California, a few weeks ago. Her body was riddled with cancer, and she was in a wheelchair. Her last years of life had been extraordinarily difficult.
Before the cancer, Carol’s activities had been circumscribed by other illnesses, including bronchial asthma. [...]

Who is the oldest primary school pupil in the world?
That’s a trick question. You see, the person who used to claim that honor died in August 2009. Most likely, none of us in the United States knew him, and, in fact, most people in his own country—Kenya—didn’t know him either. His village, however, was well [...]

Thelma Reyna, Ph.D., does a piece on a woman who has found her passion in improving education, first for her own child and now for all children in the Los Angeles schools. What can we learn from this woman’s work and her passion?
MATILDA VERA: “PARENT OF THE YEAR” WITH A PASSION FOR CHANGE
Starting when she [...]

Thanks to commercialized media, the word “passion” has sometimes taken on narrow definitions with connotations that are not always appropriate in polite company, or—thanks to Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of Christ”—evoke intense religious emotions.
One of my favorite meanings of the word is “boundless enthusiasm,” the third most frequently used sense of the term, according [...]

As parents and educators, we have for decades examined and debated countless ideas regarding how best to raise our children, at home and in the schoolroom. University research, popular books, spiritual guides, and thousands of other sources have tried to persuade us that one particular strategy or another is best, that children will flourish if [...]