Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

I am not a teacher, I have worked in education in some form for about 15 years.  I took 9 years out of public employment to raise my kids and even then I was a substitute teacher a few times.

I have heard people fuss and complain about schools, kids, teachers, parents - on and on.   None of the complaints directed at any particular group ever rang true to me because I have always believed that  institutions reflect the greater community they reside in along with all the individual entities that make up the community.

If I think - really think, about how change is effected, problems solved, from this starting point -  I feel so overwhelmed.  How can change happen if each entity is not moved somehow?

Maybe the reverse is true.  Maybe each little change affects the entire community.  That approach seems a lot more hopeful to me.  That means any piece of the puzzle that I come into contact with can be a part of a positive or negative change.  There is hope in that and also accountability.  That means that every single interaction I have, somehow creates change and that brings everything down to individual responsibility.

It means that my actions and interactions need to be thoughtful and intentional.  It means that not only am I my brother’s keeper but each of us is the keeper of our entire local community which has it’s interaction with the rest of the global community.   It means that I can’t blame anyone else for the state of the world - I can only make my individual actions count.

That makes sense for the individual.  If the entire community thinks like me - has the same belief system, and is willing to take the same level of responsibility then we will move as a group in a particular direction.  The reality is, individuals have their own agenda’s, their own belief systems, and their own ideas about what is the best direction for a community to move.  How to we reconcile the different views and not end up simply sitting still or moving backwards and forwards instead of making progress?

If you don’t think our thinking is splintered - look at your community.  How many churches are there?  If we are unable to unite in our belief system when in most communities in this area, it all revolves around a single book then….well, you can see the difficulty.

The catalyst for this whole discussion was a website called 2 Million Minutes.  There is a dvd you can order and I am planning on purchasing one.  There are lesson plans and clips of the making of the video.  The premise is that our young people have about 2 million minutes to spend in high school.  How will their two million minutes stack up result wise to students in China or India.  There is an exam to take to see how you stack up.

The exam challenge is the brainchild of Bob Compton after hearing a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education  “We have nothing to learn from education systems in Third World countries, “Much less a Third World country that lacks freedom of speech.” when he viewed the Two Million Minutes video.

The exam “is a shortened and greatly simplified version of the multi-day proficiency test that every 10th grader in India must pass to go on to the 11th grade.”

Go.Read.Think.

As a part of the global community, what are our priorities?  What are we willing to sacrifice to get there?  What are the consequences?

It has been so hot that I don’t care to cook but today I was thinking about summer ending and school starting and I love to cook when it is cold.  Part of the reason for the winter food dreams is left over sauerkraut that I didn’t want to toss out.  I decided to make Hunters Stew or Kapusta as it was know when I was a kid.  I grew up not to far from Detroit Michigan and  a lot of my family’s friends were Polish.  My mother learned how to cook several Polish dishes and this was a favorite.  It is a stew made from drained and rinsed kraut, sausage (cubed pork of you have it), more chopped cabbage, mushrooms, and like most stews, pretty much whatever you have around.  I added a can of pinto beans drained and rinsed, a cubed potato, some baby carrots, and some chopped onion. Put it all in a crockpot and leave it on low all day, fix some cornbread and you have some good eating.

In the winter you could put it all in a big kettle on your wood heater and after a day of running around in the snow, trying to work and run errands, you would come home to wonderful smells and curl up with a good book and a quilt and life would be good.

While I am in the food mood I am going to share some of my favorite food websites.

http://www.chefmd.com/

Healthy recipes and recipes that contain ingredients that are tailored for certain health problems.  There are videos, you can sign up to receive recipes by email or subscribe by rss.  He is selling a book of course and advertising the tv show on Lifetime but the recipes seem pretty good.

http://www.hungry-girl.com/
Good recipes - again she is selling a book but the website is fun - there is even a game (whack-a-snack) and a section on tips and tricks for dining out and staying healthy.

There are two sites that give you comparison foods - something you shouldn’t eat and a substitute that is a healthier choice.  These are not necessarily sugar or fat free choices - just better.  There are some surprises here.

http://www.menshealth.com/eatthis/index.php

http://www.womenshealthmag.com/files/eat-this-not-that/index.html

New on my wishlist!

One of my faves - good country cooking, pictures, and you will feel like you have known her all your life!
http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/

Let’s make a quick guide for someone planning to visit Paris soon. there is more that could be included but this will be enough to get you started! The instructions came from the Google Docs Blog which is a wonderful resource!

First, determine the sites you will use and open a Google docs spreadsheet

In the first column put the addresses

In the second column put the names and a short description (you can include a link)

Click and drag to highlight both columns

Click Insert on the toolbar and choose gadget

Select Google Maps

You can add a title but you now have a list of sites with their addresses and links and a map to boot! Cool and simple.

Save it, click publish and check the box - republish changes and you can continue to add to it and you can email a link to it to your friends and family!

Here is a link to mine:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pgVdUefx1CH0V_U5tumJrHw

Here is a screenshot:

This may be old news to some of you but I thought it was such a cool little tip to share.  Open Notepad and on the first line type .LOG (dot log all caps - just like that) and save it as notes.txt or something you can easily find. Now close the document.  Open it back up and you will see that the date and time automatically append.  This will happen each time you open it.

This is an easy way to take notes or journal - not much in the way of formatting but you can always copy and paste hunks of text into your favorite word processor.

My very environmentally conscious friend Frances submitted a bag design in the Kroger(R) Design a Reusable Shopping Bag contest.

PLEASE!!! Vote for her Kroger reusable bag design at kroger.com!!! You can
vote once a day - thanks!!

View design and vote

http://www.designagreenbag.com/vote-for-designs/bag.aspx?BagId=9662

Interactive Biology Websites

Medtropolis

Human Anatomy Online

Nature’s Best The Human Body

The Human Heart

Interactive Biology

Do you have any favorites to add to the list?

I love this!

kwout | A brilliant way to quote via kwout

Type the URL of the page, drag your mouse to select the area you want, click the “cutout” button. Kwout then generates the code to embed the image in your blog or post directly to flickr or tumblr.

If you try it out and like it go to the bottom of the page and save the bookmarklet to your favorites or drag it to your Firefox toolbar to make it even easier to use!

You can even make a few little changes in how your image is displayed!

Home Page via kwout

My personal blog got a junior high rating.  I wonder if that has some kind of significance?

Go to FreeRice.com and take the vocabulary quiz - for every correct word they will donate 10 grains of rice through the united nations to help end world hunger.  Here is an example:

Spending some time cleaning out email entails reading through some newsletters that contain websites. There is so much out there and not enough time to really look at it all but I am going to try to find good links for this post and in the process, shrink my overloaded inbox.

One website that caught my attention was this interactive version of The Raven. This would be a great Halloween lesson! The website is appropriately spooky and they have marked all the alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme in the first half of the poem - just hover over the different colored words! You will also find vocabulary words highlighted and defined. This is found at TeachersFirst which is an educational resource site that has been around since 1998.

Here is a website that lets you upload a photo, choose the month, year and size and then print out a personalized calendar. The Reflection Generator let’s you upload a photo and it creates a new image with a reflection added to the bottom. I used the reflection generator to create a new image that I uploaded to the calendar generator and made a November Calendar with our High School pictured at the top. It is here in PDF form if you would like a copy! November Calendar to print It was fun, easy, and free!

I recently signed up on Twitter. If you haven’t looked at it, it is basically instant messaging but throughout the day online by thousands of people. You can sign up to “follow” people. I have resisted because I lead a pretty boring life for the most part. If I am going through a time that is not boring, chances are I won’t have time to “twitter” it, and will blog about it when things calm down.

I signed up because I thought I would try out the “follow” option and follow some of the educational bloggers that I read. During conferences some interesting conversations take place on twitter. You can have Twitter send notifications to your cell phone too so you can keep up with people that way. I’m not clear on how it works as I am a pay as you go cell phone person and didn’t want to use up phone time having Twitter call me.

If you see a Twitter badge in a blog that you read and think you might want to check it out you can sign up for an account for free. Once you have verified your account via your email you can type an update (just tell what you are doing), then search for people you want to follow. I was interested in what some of the early adopters thought about the new version of the Mac operating system and the “tweets” were pretty informative! If you sign up and search for me prepare to take a nap! I basically work, watch TV, surf the net, and go to church.

My last recommendation is Dy-Dan - and his blog entry on a math lesson that was taught on TaaDaa…How I Met Your Mother (called the Hot/Crazy Curve). There is a clip on YouTube which is blocked at school but if you missed the show last week you can watch the clip at home, wait for re-runs, or read the dialog he has below the embedded video on his webpage.

See, as Barney explains, being crazy is fine so long as you match your neuroses with good looks in a one-to-one correspondence (or better). Which makes sense. In a fantastic hey-mister-scientist moment, Barney terms that line the Vickie Mendoza Diagonal, which, I mean, holy cow, I don’t care who you are, there’s no way to mess that one up.

Of course Mr. Meyer couldn’t leave it at that - he has created an entire lesson in which the students graph the data (which he claims he fabricated from ten ex-girlfriends LOL) and their rank on a ten point scale of looks and craziness. He then has the students graph them and tell him which ones fall below the Vickie Mendoza line. I’m not sure but I think at the end of the day he may have had more fun with this than the students! I want to go back to school and learn math in your class Dan - you ARE the man!