Cartoon of the Week --

Cartoon by Tom Gauld, one of a series of awesome literary-inspired cartoons published weekly in The Guardian.

Let's Bring Fat Kid to Boise!

Ridiculously awesome punk-rock YA novel Fat Kid Rules the World is now a movie! It premiered at SXSW in Austin last month, and is being distributed through Tugg.

So how does Tugg work? Rather than the top-down organization of a studio release, individuals request events from the website and choose a venue, date and time. Tugg contracts with the venue--including locally-owned movie theaters--and sets a threshold for ticket sales. Marketing and promotion are up to the theater and to the group or individual who made the request, and if enough people by tickets via Tugg's website, the screening is on!

I love this model of consumers getting together to drive the market. I'm going to float this out to my librarians' book club next week and see if we can make a screening happen.

But even more than that, how could this model be used in schools to democratize activity offerings and increase student participation, particularly if promotion is student-driven? Lots of student suggestions for activities, classes or clubs, or even units of study could be planned from the bottom up by giving students the opportunity to present the idea, then promote and get a certain level of commitment to participate from other students. How powerful--and authentic--would it be to answer "Can we do ___?" with "Yes! How can you make it happen?"

Cartoon of the Week -- Cat and Girl

Existential angst from Cat and Girl.

Top Ten Tuesday -- Top Ten Pacific NW Vacation Spots I've Been Fantasizing About Since June

My summer vacation finally, FINALLY started this week after seven weeks of summer school and a week of AVID training in San Diego. That gives me a week to get the house and yard in shape after eight weeks of neglect and about ten days to get out of town until I have to be back at work. These are the places I've been dreaming of going.

I feel like the pictures are pretty self-explanatory.

1. Crater Lake National Park

2. Yellowstone National Park

3. Glacier National Park

4. The Oregon Coast

5. The Sierra Nevada

6. Coeur d'Alane

7. The California Redwoods

8. Multnomah Falls and the Columbia River Gorge

9. Vancouver Island

10. Washington's Olympic Peninsula

Readers, where have you been itching to go this summer?

Cartoon of the Week -- Tech Support

From XKCD.

Food for Thought

I think I want to let this percolate for a little while:

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham claims there’s no data to support the fact that kids all learn in fundamentally different ways. This is not to say that all children should be taught in the same way, but that the source of different learning styles has more to do with talents and interests than the development of certain parts of the brain.

Evidence actually supports information to the contrary, which states that students learn best from lessons that employ all verbal, visual, auditory and kinesthetic explanations of the material. In other words, it’s the layered experiences that really allow educational ideas to stick with students, rather than just a single method.

via Edudemic.

Habits

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about routines. Partly because it's my last day of summer school, and the giant list of giant projects I'd intended to get done is still pretty much not done, partly because I know my time will be much more constrained when school gets started and I want to keep this blog and my professional growth going, and partly because my son will be leaving for college and now I am faced with having to do unpleasant but necessary household chores myself instead of having him do them.

A post over at Vicki Davis's blog not too long ago posed the following questions when thinking about routines:

• What are the most important things if I do them every day, that will make the biggest difference in my life?
• What are the things I need to make sure that I do every week in my job that will make the biggest difference?
• What are the things I need to make sure that I do every week at home that will make the biggest difference?
• What are the 20% of my problems that cause 80% of my headaches?
• What is the one habit that is most important to start in my life right now? (Set an appointment with yourself every day this week to do that one thing.)

I was especially curious about the 80/20 split she mentioned, so I spent some time reading up on the Pareto Efficiency, including some neat mathematical equations. The gist was this: in general, 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of the factors involved. To put it more specifically, 80 percent of my time is sucked up by only 20 percent of the things I do or need to do.  Or 20 percent of the housework is pretty much guaranteed to take up 80 percent of the time I spend doing it. Doesn't this ring true for you in the classroom? Think of those six kids in that one aggravating just-after-lunch class and how my attention you have to devote to managing them so you can do your actual job and teach the other thirty.

I don't think this one blog post is going to clear everything up for me just yet, but I do all my best thinking out loud, so here goes.

Things I need to do every day to make the biggest difference, at work and at home. Exercise. Eat right. Pick up after myself. Prioritize tasks, especially at work.

Things to do every week at work. Check in with student aides and provide feedback on their work. Personal PD time, a couple of times a week, to catch up on stuff like this. Program planning and development, once or twice a week.

Things I need to do every week at home. Make time for family. Clean. Plan groceries and check financials.

Most important things to start right now.  On the home front, I have roller derby tryouts at the end of September. That makes gym and food especially important, followed closely by being sure to make up the practices I'm going to miss for work and vacation during the next few weeks. For work, I think probably taking some time to think about ways to get student aides proficient at their jobs and what to do about my unfunded plans for a computer lab in the library.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it's nice to see the relative shortness of each one. I guess the lesson is this: focus on the most important 20 percent, and let that consume the majority of my time.