Ruth’s Truths by Ruth Morris

What better inspiration for my column, where The Arts is often my topic of choice, than a concert by world music star Idan Raichel at UCLA’s Royce Hall last night? I’ve loved the Idan Raichel …[READ MORE]

For the past five years or so, I’ve been comparing what my mom had been doing when she was my age. She died about a month after her 55th birthday, hence this preoccupation. This vantage …[READ MORE]

When I first became a teacher 10 years ago, I knew no different than to treat my students like corporate employees. Having just changed careers after 20 years in the business world, it made for …[READ MORE]

This essay is about “roots,” but not my “roots.” It does go back to “the old country,” though, to a part of Eastern Europe that was home to both my grandfather’s family, and that of …[READ MORE]

School started for us here in Culver City this week. In preparing my first day’s speech to this year’s students, I decided to speak not only of the four domains of English language arts, but …[READ MORE]

I had intended this submission of mine to be a travelogue/comparative essay about three beloved destinations I have visited. Instead, I was inspired by a particular arts-writing lesson I taught in my classroom this summer …[READ MORE]

I’ve been asked through my life: “why Japan?” It took me ten years to get to Japan after I became interested in Japan, at the age of ten. In 1968, there was a unit on …[READ MORE]

Describing our Pre-K/1st grade Japanese Immersion Summer Program at Culver City Adult School, I said recently that we are a cycle: we learn, we teach, we teach others how to teach, we create an environment …[READ MORE]

By the time I became an English teacher, they didn’t call the subject “English” any more. I discovered that it was called “Language Arts,” until high school. “Language Arts” sounds closer to the translation of …[READ MORE]