DaveShearon

Monthly post at Positive Psychology Daily News

My monthly post is up at Positive Psychology Daily News.  It involves a heartwarming story out of Metro Nashville Public Schools.

Positive Psychology Daily News

My 17th of the month contribution to Positive Psychology Daily News is up.  Lots of other good entries also.

Search terms

Both here and at my other site, I enjoy seeing what search terms find my site.  Here are some recent ones:

harry potter leadership styles

Do you believe that employees can learn/be trained more emotionally intelligent?

articles on bridges that you walk on (linked to this article)

blueberry story

Individual Strengths

cheap co-ed boarding school in

ohio

grammar replacement "So much for " (#1 result!)

wallmart statistics (The wonders of misspelling!)

jonathan

livingston

seagull lesson plan

mindset carol dweck

positive psychology, harvard

Adolesence - Multicultural issues for a student inAustralia to study

poof book note taking (2 of the top 5 results!)

It's a crazy internet out there!

Still here!

I'm still here, just too busy to post muh right now!

But, I did see this tonight while waiting on a batch job to run at work.

New technology is an improvement in proportion to how badly it is missed when it is not available.

Chris Lehmann's New Position, New Blog

Chris Lehmann has a new blog and a new position -- he's principal of the soon-to-open Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia!  Maybe we'll be able to get together when I'm up there for one of the MAPP on-sites this Spring.  In fact, he'd like my cohort mates, so ...

While you're at his site, check out his post on visiting Benjamin Franklin HS. He's right about engaging kids; it's critical.  And he's right about relationships.  I'm not sure he's right when he suggests that teachers can't use Like Water for Chocolate in English to support what's going on the culinary institute.  I don't know Pennsylvania's laws or what Philly has done on mandating curriculum.  There are pros to having a substantive, substantial core curriculum that every student in a system is entitled to receive.  Their are cons to taking it to the point where no flexibility is left for teachers.  Of course, some of it depends on how much you expect students to read.  If it is 25 books per year, I suspect there's room for Like Water for Chocolate and a few others besides!

Under stress, I...

Cut back on newspapers and rely on blogs.  Yep.  With my new reading schedule, I find I have a lot less time for a lot of things (blogging being one), but that, conversely, I'm getting more things done, even things I was in the habit of putting off.  No time to put them off, now.

But, one interesting thing I've noticed is that I've cut back on reading newspapers.  I didn't read bunches of them anyway, but most days I scanned or read front page stories, editorials, scanned the letters and read those on topics that interest me, read a couple of coluns, read Metro section articles, and maybe a sports story or two in the Tennessean.  Then, I'd find time at work to read several articles in the Wall Street Journal.  Now, I find I'm relying on a few blogs to keep me abreast of what's happening and what folks are saying about it. 

Why blogs instead of newspapers?  Bias and spin and poor reporting.  How many newspapers would I have to read to find out what's going right in Iraq, expert analysis of military issues, etc.?  I can get all of that and more from scanning a few blogs.  And, what the news media does report is often the spin of some "player" in the news -- what good is that?  And, they just don't report well.  Often, the journalists don't seem to realize there is anything more than "talking heads" -- much less that they should go out and report the other stuff.  And don't get me started on how bad most "education" reporting is.  So, blogs.  Of course, I have to just scan and move and don't have time for the leisurely wandering from link to link as I am amazed by the knowledge, insight, and writing so many blogs make available.

And, now, time for my walk and then some reading!!

Talented Guy

There are some incredibly talented folks bloging in the Nashville are, and this guy is one of them.  Be sure to look at the art.

A little help?

Don't you just hate it when you can't find that blog or article with the interesting fact that you just saw?  That's me right now.  Over the weekend, I was reading posts on aid for Africa, and one pointed to an article about how the answer may be in selling to the poor in those countries.  Micro-markets, was the term, I think.  Anyway, one company mentioned had developed prosthetics for only $25 apiece.  Anyone see anything like this?  Or any links to similar stories?  Thanks.

Blogs

Went looking for posts about farm subsidies, and ended up at

PaveFrance: the British need more parking

and

E-nough!  Croak, if You Dare.

Funny!  Recommended.

Personal Journalism

I wrote the bottom of this post first and assigned it to the category "media."  Then it struck me that I'd written about this before, so I went looking.  (And why doesn't Typepad have tools for this?  I get the list of posts, but have to go to Google to get the permalinks.  Maybe I'm missing something.)

A Reader-Supported Journalist   5/23/2004

Stand-Alone Journalism  6/24/2004

and

Citizen Journalists 10/28/2004

So, I get to see how my personal screening system keeps letting in this topic, and my take on it.  Interesting.  And probably educational.  So, I'm adding weblogs and education to the categories.  After all, it's my blog, right?  And here's the original post.

An article for the newspaper world gets it:

The newspaper industry has known for a long time that eventually wood pulp would give way to microprocessors. That long-awaited paradigm shift now seems imminent. We may very soon be predominately an electronic medium, and that has many print executives on edge.

Newspapers have enjoyed some of the biggest profit margins of any industry for decades, and it is unclear if those can hold in a Web-based environment.

And,

Moreover, when you no longer need the millions of dollars in capital, the multimillion dollar press, the network of delivery people fanning out across the land, to start a newspaper, the door opens to competition.