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The lights went dark in the classroom Wednesday morning, and a video of Sean Taylor's greatest hits started playing.

Taylor slamming some hapless Dallas Cowboy. Taylor taking out Donovan McNabb of the Philadelphia Eagles. There, on the screen before the all-male English class at William Fleming High School, Taylor laid a hit on Pittsburgh Steeler Willie Parker that rattled my teeth.

When Taylor wasn't hitting, he was stripping the ball from opponents' hands or stepping in front of them and stealing their passes -- and their glory.

That was the "explosive" Sean Taylor, as junior Tre' Jones described the Washington Redskins' star safety.

But when the lights came back up in the classroom, discussion turned to the dead Sean Taylor.

"It's all over that quick," Antonio Tucker, 16, lamented. "Just all over."

He was referring not to the video but to Taylor's young life

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Rehema Ellis is a veteran journalist and NBC network correspondent who has covered just about every story imaginable. Firefighters, the environment, education, the pope and flex-time for working moms, just to name a few.

But a five-part series beginning tonight on "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams" strikes an intensely personal chord. Ellis is the lead reporter in the series called "African-American Women: Where They Stand."

"I'm an African-American woman," Ellis said in a phone conversation Saturday from her office at NBC headquarters in New York. "This is my story."

She added, "This is an American story."

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As a black woman, Tracey Wilson of Roanoke wants America to know that black women "raise our children with morals and values."

Marilyn Kershaw of Blacksburg wants America to know, "I am an independent thinker. I think of myself as a woman, then as a black woman. I have very much an affinity for my race."

Her daughter Njeri, 25, asks her fellow countrymen to understand that though she is educated and working on a graduate degree, she, too, has to "go through struggles."

Rosalyn Robinson, 49, of Columbia, S.C., implores America not to politically pigeonhole her. She isn't yet backing anyone for president. She has no particular allegiance to Hillary because she's a woman nor to Barack because he's black.

"I have problems with both of them," said the substitute teacher visiting Roanoke last week.

These black women reflect the myriad of opinions and voices of a demographic too often muted in our country and whose successes and challenges too often are dismissed or overlooked.

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In the rush of our lives, the calendar affords us a reprieve today to take stock and say thanks.

Many of our thank-yous are personal, uttered in the private sanctuaries of our hearts and minds.

But on this day, we use this space to show public gratitude for friends and neighbors who graced this column in the past year and make a community contribution in varying ways

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The shooting deaths four years ago of a young mother and her three children simultaneously broke Roanoke's heart and served as a chilling reminder.

After Angela Arrington and her children were mercilessly gunned down in their home, the Rev. Bill Lee of Loudon Avenue Christian Church urged women in his congregation to know, really know, the men they were bringing into their lives -- and by extension, their homes.

The shooter had been Arrington's boyfriend, who lived with her sometimes.

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A recent blog entry captured the frustration of dozens of readers fed up with speed demons tearing through their Roanoke Valley neighborhoods, oblivious to the speed limit.

Readers, meet Granville Hogg of Northampton County on Virginia's eastern shore.

Hogg devised a do-it-yourself speed trap to put the brakes on the leadfoots racing down his rural road, killing his lambs, neighbors' dogs and area deer. Hogg had his own speed-limit signs made to state specs and posted them in his front yard.

Voila! The speed limit on his road instantly dropped from 55 mph to 35 mph. The signs looked authentic enough to fool even a state trooper who issued a few speeding tickets based on the phony baloney signs.

The scam, er, civic activism, lasted about six months until authorities began to smell a rat. Threatened with prosecution, Hogg immediately removed the signs. His neighbor calls him a "hero." I wouldn't go that far, but he sure gets points for originality.

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There's the take of people like state Sen. Ken Cuccinelli on teens and sex.

Teach young people the virtues of abstinence, and abstinence only. Tell them not to have sex, and they won't.

And then there's the take of a Roanoke youth I interviewed 2 1/2 years ago.

He was a junior at Patrick Henry High School. His name escapes me, but his candor and cavalier attitude about his sexual encounters have stuck with me.

"You walk up behind a girl, whisper in her ear and it's on," he said nonchalantly.

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In 1990, Dale Carroll dropped out of Albemarle High School in Charlottesville, a half-credit shy of earning his diploma.

In late September, thanks to a program offered by Roanoke schools, he dropped back in.

Twice a week for three weeks, Carroll, now 37, took a government class in the evenings at Patrick Henry High School.

Last week, he received his diploma. Yes, it was that simple. Carroll took advantage of a little-utilized program that Roanoke schools offer to adult dropouts who were short of graduating by only a class or two.

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A show of hands for the folks who watched 60 Minutes last night. I'm thinking in particular of Morley Safer's segment on "The Millenials."

They need to grow the heck up. No, I didn't walk 20 miles to school through hail storms, blizzards and all that jazz. I'm all for praising employees when they do well. But I can't get with coddling grown people to get them to do their jobs. As my old boss in Detroit used to say, "If it were fun, we wouldn't call it work."

That's not to say we shouldn't enjoy our jobs. But the idea galls me of pampering some adult prima donna who thinks he's owed something i.e. the royal treatment just because he showed up. Puhleeeeze!. Admittedly, I don't know technology the way they do. But then again, they don't know life the way I do.

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A couple of weeks ago, I had a dream: I was scavenging through a Roanoke city hall Dumpster and stumbled upon this crumpled-up memorandum:

From: Roanoke city officials

To: All localities and charities outside our city limits

Re: Homelessness.

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