skills Developments

2009-04-16T09:29:00.001-07:00

2009-04-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

Got a technical question? Step up to the Genius Bar.

2009-04-16T09:23:00.001-07:00

When you have questions or need hands-on technical support for your Mac, iPod, Apple TV, or iPhone, you can get friendly, expert advice at the Genius Bar in any Apple Retail Store.
Play Watch the guided tour src="http://images.apple.com/retail/images/endframe_geniusbar.jpg"
Meet the Geniuses

Why do people flock to the Genius Bar? It’s the Geniuses, of course, and what they offer Apple customers. In this video, we’ll tell you all about the Geniuses and what you can expect when you take a seat at the Genius Bar.

Watch the Genius Bar Guided Tour

The Genius Bar is home to our resident Geniuses. Trained at Apple headquarters, they have extensive knowledge of Apple products and can answer all your technical questions. In fact, Geniuses can take care of everything from troubleshooting problems to actual repairs. Want to speak to a Genius? Make an appointment ahead of time to guarantee your space.

Intel in Macs

2009-04-16T09:22:00.001-07:00

Now every new Mac ships with an Intel processor. Experience delightful responsiveness from the smallest Mac mini to the most beefed-up Mac Pro. Use one of more than 7,000 universal applications that take full advantage of the Intel chip. Run programs from your PowerPC-based Mac in translation. Powered by Intel chips, your new Mac will do all those things that only Macs can do — and do so at an astonishing level of performance.

The new Mac core

Every Mac uses a chip based on Intel Core technology, the next generation in processor design from the world’s leading chip maker. The result of massive R&D effort involving thousands of engineers. An entire collection of revolutions shrunk into an unimaginably small space, consuming less energy, too. Two cores work together to share resources, and are designed to conserve power when their functions aren’t required. Whether in an ultra-sleek MacBook, or workstation class Mac Pro, Intel Core technology lets you get more power with less power.

Four on the floor

And that means pure creative exhilaration with four 64-bit cores inside the new Mac Pro. The Core-based Intel Xeon is so power efficient, that Apple engineers were able to remove the liquid cooling system from the previous Power-PC based model. Which means you can load up the Mac Pro with more cards, more hard drives, more memory. So you can do more with Final Cut Studio, Aperture, Logic Pro, and the growing number of universal applications for creative professionals.

Dual-roar

The Intel Core 2 Duo is actually two processors (cores) engineered onto a single chip — offering virtually twice the computational power of a traditional single processor in the same space. With two cores tightly integrated, increased L2 cache, and a host of engineering breakthroughs, the Intel Core 2 Duo delivers higher performance for all the things you do — from enhancing the family photos to rendering special effects for a feature film.

Now the only question is: Which one?

Intel® IXP465 Network Processor

2009-04-16T09:14:00.000-07:00

Intel® IXP465 Network Processor

Intel® IXP465 Network ProcessorThe Intel® IXP465 network processor is a member of the Intel® IXP46X product line for SME communications and embedded networking applications. The Intel IXP465 network processor is an addition to the Intel® IXP4XX product line of network processors, and extends Intel XScale® technology into a broad range of applications that require communications functionality. The consistency of the Intel IXP4XX product line software and hardware architecture protects customers' development investments and speeds development of a standards-based product portfolio.

The highly integrated, single-chip design of the IXP465 network processor provides a unique combination of performance, reliability and flexibility. The IXP465 network processor combines Intel XScale technology with a variety of built-in communications features to support requirements for modular routers, security appliances, line cards for telecommunications infrastructure, industrial control and automation applications, interactive clients, test and instrumentation, RFID readers, and networked print imaging applications. The high-performance Intel XScale core provides processing headroom to flexibly support a broad range of OEM applications while minimizing power consumption. Integration of multiple 10/100 Ethernet interfaces and built-in hardware acceleration for time synchronization reduces overall system cost and simplifies development.

The Golden Flow of the Now Moment

2009-04-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

“To be in the now moment means that you release all of the problems, all of the worries, and you bring the full of yourself to here and now. And within that now moment, your now moment allows your source to flow through you into your life.” The Oracle

The now moment is infinitely small, yet infinitely big. In its smallness, it contains nothing. Yet, the moment of the now contains everything. Because the now moment contains nothing, to be in the now, you must let everything go and empty.

For a moment, empty yourself of everything. Let everything go. Let your problems go. Let your to do lists go. Let your preoccupations go. Let your thoughts and feelings go. As you empty you enter the Golden Flow moves from the Source that you are, into your persona, through your body and into your life. This Flow contains a beautiful dream where all your deepest hopes and desires are manifest. The only thing missing from this dream is you. When you are in the Golden Flow of the now moment you are able to step into the dream and it becomes manifest in your life. This is one of the ’secrets’ of The Law of Attraction. To the degree you align to the bigger dream of your life, it becomes real.

When you are having mental machinations, worries, or charged emotions, your energy is pulled away from the Source that you are. You are off center. Your center exists in the now. It is from the place of being on center that spiritual growth and evolution occurs. The center of a river is where the current flows strongest. It is the center of self where Source energy flows most powerfully.

Take the time to find your now moments. Tell your mind to let it all go, even if only for a few minutes. Tell your mind it can come back to its concerns later, but for now, empty. Do this often. As you do the tremendous power of Source’s flow begins to move through you. Then, hang onto your hat as your life moves in wonderful ways.

USD/EUR: Conflicting Signals Make Predictions Difficult

2009-04-16T09:01:00.000-07:00

If you read analysts’ coverage of the Dollar decline (and consequent Euro rally), there is an even divide over whether it is sustainable. Economic data and technical indicators paint a nuanced picture, such that this kind of uncertainty is understandable.

On the one hand are the the Dollar bears, who point to an economic recession that continues to deepen, and the seeming complacency of the Federal Reserve Bank towards inflation. If there is any doubt as to how the forex markets feel about the Fed’s plan to purchase over $1 Trillion in US government bonds, consider that the the Dollar just recorded its worst weekly performance in 24 years, while the Euro simultaneously recorded its strongest week since its inception in 1999. There’s not much nuance there.

Meanwhile, the economic picture is equally depressing. Summarized by Kathy Lien of GFT Forex:

The Empire state manufacturing survey plunged to a record low in the month of March while Industrial production fell 1.4 percent, driving capacity utilization back to its record lows. Foreign investors reduced their holdings of U.S. assets by the largest amount since August 2007. Homebuilder confidence held near its record lows in the month of March as the slump in the real estate sector shows no signs of easing.

Unfortunately, there is a contradiction in the argument that the Dollar is being plagued both by economic collapse and by the risk of inflation. Writes Marc Chandler, head of FX strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman, “The pessimist camp wants it both ways. The US is going down the same path as Japan, where the end of a real estate bubble led to a banking crisis and a deep economic contraction. And they want to caution that printing of money will boost interest rates, fuel inflation and debase the currency.” He points out that history, as well as common sense, contradict this line of thinking.
Those that remain bullish on the Dollar argue that the Euro rally is a function of technical, rather than fundamental developments. First of all, we are approaching the end of a fiscal quarter. As evidenced by the Dollar decline which took place at the end of December, these periods are usually marked by portfolio rebalancing and hedging, such that it’s not uncommon to see large swings in forex markets. From a technical standpoint, when the Dollar failed to breach the $1.30 level against the Euro, many short sellers were probably forced to cover their positions, which accelerated the Dollar’s decline.

Bulls are confident that the pickup in risk-taking which catalyzed a 20% stock market rise is here to stay. “The move to the upside came after the government described a plan that will…generate $500 billion, and possibly $1 trillion over time, to buy hard-to-trade and badly deteriorated assets from banks.” The banks will be recapitalized, the financial system is being repaired, and everything will be okay, right?

The markets are certainly prone to false-starts. I can count numerous instances of government officials and market commentators insisting that “the worst is behind us.” Nevertheless, if this time proves to be different, it could be bearish for the Dollar, whose role as ’safe-haven’ currency would likely be eroded by a positive change in market sentiment.

Led by China, Central Banks Seek Alternative to Dollar

2009-04-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

“China is a hostage. China is America’s bank and America basically says there’s nothing you can do to me. If I go down you don’t get paid.”

While the Obama administration has pledged the kind of fiscal responsibility that would secure its government obligations, its actions haven’t been so responsible. The Fed recently announced purchases of $1 Trillion in government debt, while the government is set to rack up Trillion-Dollar deficits over the next decade, even by the most conservative estimates.

In other words, China is in a quandary; stop lending to the US, and you might see the value of your existing reserves plummet. Continue lending, and you risk the same result. Tired of participating in this apparent no-win situation, China is finally taking action.

First, it will petition the G20 at its upcoming meeting for some level of protection on its $1 Trillion+ “investment” in the US. Meanwhile, Zhou XiaoChuan, governor of the Central Bank of China, has authored a paper calling for a decline in the role that individual currencies play in international trade and finance. According to Mr. Zhou, “Most nations concentrate their assets in those reserve currencies [Dollar, Euro, Yen], which exaggerates the size of flows and makes financial systems overall more volatile.” His point is well-taken, since of the $4.5 Trillion in global foreign exchange reserves that can be identified, perhaps 85% are accounted for by Euros and Dollars alone. When crises occur, everyone flocks to these currencies.

Mr. Zhou’s proposal is not without precedent. “His idea is to expand the use of ’special drawing rights,’ or SDRs — a kind of synthetic currency created by the IMF in the 1960s. Its value is determined by a basket of major currencies. Originally, the SDR was intended to serve as a shared currency for international reserves, though that aspect never really got off the ground.” It’s not clear exactly how such a system would work, but the idea is straightforward enough; instead of holding individual currencies, which are inherently volatile, Central Banks would be able to denominate reserves in a sort of universal currency. Instead of parking money in US Treasury securities, they would hold IMF bonds, or some equivalent.

Even before China starting becoming more vocal about its concerns, analysts had begun questioning the role of the US as reserve currency. I’m not just talking about the perennial pessimists. Within the context of the current credit crisis, a bubble may be forming in the market for Treasury bonds. “Foreign buying of American financial assets by both private investors and governments averaged $141 billion from September to December, Treasury data show…Demand was so strong that, for the first time, investors accepted rates below 0 percent on three-month Treasury bills to safeguard their capital.”

There is concern that a slight recovery in risk appetite (of which there is already evidence) could ignite a massive sell-off: “People are sitting there holding massive amounts of zero- yielding dollar assets. If there is any sort of good news, demand for dollars can drop off very, very quickly.”

Is Gold a Hedge Against Inflation and Currency Weakness?

2009-04-16T08:59:00.000-07:00

Is Gold a Hedge Against Inflation and Currency Weakness?

Until the Fed announced an expansion of its quantitative easing program two weeks ago, gold had begun to fade into relative obscurity. Sure, gold had risen in value from a low of $710/ounce back up to $900/ounce, but prices were still off 10% from the highs reached in 2008. Meanwhile, risk aversion had begun to decline and the stock market had begun to rise, such that pundits were talking more about stocks and less about gold.

Since the Fed’s announcement, however, gold has been thrust back into the spotlight. The same trading session that saw a record fall in the Dollar and a record rise in Treasury prices, also witnessed a 7% spike in gold futures prices. ” ‘Money is being pushed into the system and that’s creating the inflationary threats that the markets are contemplating…Commodities are a decent way to hedge against that potential threat,’ ” observed one trader.

Other analysts, however, caution that rising gold prices are a sign of the fear/crisis mentality, not inflation. “There are just not a lot of alternatives for global investors. You will see more and more investors moving into gold as a safe haven, and you will see more institutions putting money into commodities indexes.” In other words, gold is being driven by the safe-haven trade, which is evidenced by an increasing correlation with Treasury bonds. One commentator calls it a hedge against uncertainty: “The demand for gold is for gold coins, a massive flurry of bullion buying by ETF’s (and investors), and the institutions and traders buying the hell out of it. The reason is simple… pure fear.”

With the exception of the perennial gold bulls and conspiracy theorists, the short-term consensus is that due to “massive spare capacity now opening up in the global economy, soaring unemployment and a dysfunctional banking system – it would be very hard for central banks to generate a surge in inflation even if they wanted to.” This analyst further argues that the Fed is undertaking the expansionary program under the implicit assumption that it will have to siphon this money out of the financial system, if and when the economy recovers.

Of course, there is not even a consensus that gold is a good hedge against inflation. Mike Mish points out that the correlation between the US money supply and the price of gold is not very robust. When examined relative to a basket of currencies (rather than the Dollar), however, the relationship suddenly becomes much stronger. Especially when you filter out fluctuations in the value of the Dollar (which is affected by many factors unrelated to inflation), “gold is doing a reasonably good job of maintaining purchasing power parity on a worldwide basis.” This can be seen in the following chart:

Ascertaining a relationship ultimately depends on the time period of analysis, and the currency(s) in which prices are being tracked. Given also gold’s notorious volatility, it probably makes sense to use special inflation protected securities, rather than gold, as an inflation hedge.

US DoLLARs

2009-04-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

Archive for the 'US Dollar' Category

Concerns about Corporate Earnings Lift Dollar

Apr. 14th 2009

Last week marked the beginning of earnings season, as corporations release the results from the first quarter of 2009. The season got off to a strong start with financial heayweights Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo both smashing analysts’ expectations with large profits. Over the next few weeks, most listed companies will report earnings, which could collectively set the pace for financial markets for the next couple months. “Markets will continue to watch the corporate earnings data very closely in the short term with company comments on prospects also very important for sentiment with any optimism liable to curb defensive dollar demand.”

The last few weeks have witnessed a general decline in risk aversion, as investors have selectively interpreted economic data to support the notion that the economy as bottomed out. Improvements in corporate earnings could reinforce this trend, especially if a majority of companies beat analysts’ expectations. In short, “Forecast-busting first quarter results from Goldman Sachs on Monday encouraged optimism that the worst may be over for financial firms, but investors stayed cautious given that there are many more results to concern.”

It will be interesting to see if and how the strong Dollar will affect corporate earnings. On the one hand,the expensive currency would be expected both to drive a decrease in exports as well as a decrease in earnings from companies that do significant business overseas, since such companies earnings appear relatively smaller in Dollar-terms when exchange rates are more favorable. On the other hand, the decrease in the US trade deficit (to a nine-year low), suggests that the strong Dollar is not exerting a negative impact. “Exports sprang back in February after six months of decline, increasing by 1.6 percent to 126.8 billion dollars and comprising mostly consumer goods, automotive vehicles, foods, feeds and beverages.”

Ironically, an improvement in corporate profitability would further drive risk-taking and would thus have the effect of weakening the Dollar. One would think that an improved economic outlook would strengthen the Dollar. In actuality, financial and psychological factors continue to predominate in financial markets, and investors are looking for an excuse to dump the Dollar in favor of higher-yielding alternatives.

Their is a danger in currency markets taking their cues from stocks, given that the bear-market rally that unfolded over the last month is one of the most dramatic in history. The herd mentality has caused investors to become complacent about risk and pile willy-nilly back into the markets. Writes one analyst, “The growing potential for economic disappointment due to further growth contraction as well as overly confident, economically myopic policy-makers leaves stocks set up for a major wave of selling.”

WHAT ABOUT FOREX IN PAKISTAN

2009-04-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

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Aiming toward better language acquisition

2009-04-15T03:21:00.000-07:00

Aiming toward better language acquisition Learning about a place’s culture is as much a part of the process of language acquisition as learning the language itself; this is because there is a correlation between language and culture and an understanding of one is necessary for an understanding of the other. I assume that the relationship between language and culture is like that between “the chicken and the egg,” that is, we are not sure which precedes the other. One example pertains to the argument about the use of polite forms of address in the Japanese language. Does the fact that the Japanese are a polite people cause them to use many polite forms, or are they a polite people because the Japanese language has many polite forms? I also believe that acquiring a language entails understanding how the language is used within its host culture. We often see cases in which learners of English as a second/foreign language speak or write with correct pronunciation and grammar, but cannot express themselves precisely in English. This might be because they use language in ways that are inappropriate in the content of a particular situation or in English vernacular. For better language acquisition, learners must master the “communicative competence” proposed by Dell Hymes (1974). Communicative competence was further categorized into four components by Canel and Swain (1980): knowledge of linguistic features, knowledge of discourse rules, knowledge of language functions, and knowledge of sociolinguistic factors. The last component involves knowledge of appropriateness, which enables a speaker to know whether the language being used is suitable for a particular situation. As Silberstein (2001: 103) argues, “Grammatical knowledge alone does not guarantee communication.”
Therefore, learning a language also entails learning about its culture. In addition to teaching the language itself, teachers might need to inform their students when, where, and how the discourse should be used in English-speaking contexts.
However, teachers must select texts carefully since some texts contain stereotyped images of a particular culture. Many English texts in Japan contain only positive images of the United States and do not allow for students to critically analyze the ideas they present. These texts might mislead the students by suggesting that all English-speaking people think and act in the same manner as the Americans in the textbooks. Therefore, teachers should avoid providing stereotyped images and instead introduce texts with which students are able to negotiate and whose contents they are able to critically evaluate. As Brown (2000) states, teachers are able to exclude myths about other cultures through their instruction.
Some texts are also written from a single viewpoint and might differ from the beliefs of a student’s culture. Some students might feel uncomfortable with these texts if they think that their own beliefs or cultures are being denied in the new cultural context. As a result, introducing such texts might discourage the learners from studying a new language. In order to avoid this, teachers should accept the students’ ideas, recognize the concepts that are believed in their cultures, and implement activities accordingly, such as those that involve comparing and discussing the ideas in the texts and the students’ cultures. This can also provide an excellent opportunity for intercultural communication, if the teachers makes this connection explicitly.
However, the students might be displeased if their teachers consider their opinions as beliefs typical of their culture. The students might instead draw ideas from many of the concepts surrounding them when they approach texts. Thus, teachers should consider the students’ ideas and attitudes on an individual level and not categorize them as being solely products of their culture.
References Brown, H. D. (2000) Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. NY: Addison Wesley Longman.
Canel, M. and M. Swain (1980) Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics 1 (1), 1-47.
Hymes, D. (1974) Foundations in Sociolinguistics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Silberstein, S. (2001) Sociolinguistics, In R. Carter and D. Nunan (eds) The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to speakers of Other Languages.: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A Good Grammer Presentation

2009-04-15T03:19:00.000-07:00

1. Is a surprise
As strange as it might seem, a disbelieving look, a "No, really??" or most of the class getting what you are trying to elicit wrong are all good signs in a grammar explanation- signs that you have really got their attention, that you are teaching them something they don't know yet, and that it is something they are likely to be something they are still thinking about when they leave class and so remember for a longer time than usual. Ways to achieve this sense of surprise include contradicting their previous teacher or lower level textbook, contrasting with L1, contrasting spoken and written English grammar, and contrasting prescriptive grammar and how the language is really used nowadays. Something turning out to be much easier than they originally thought is also a nice surprise!

2. Is interactive
Ways of getting students involved in the grammar explanation stage include: getting them to give you example sentences from their imaginations, previous conversations or the textbook; eliciting the names of grammatical forms; getting them to match grammatical names, example sentences and meanings; getting students to prepare grammar presentations for the class for homework; using guided discovery tasks they work through in pairs; and deliberately making mistakes they can correct you on.

3. Is copied down
After a student has understood your grammar explanation, the next stage should be copying it down. You can ensure that everyone has a chance to copy it down accurately by having the pause for copying written into your lesson plan, making sure nobody copies before you want them to so that they join in the eliciting and don't make others feel guilty for copying down later, and putting your OHP sheets etc somewhere students can see them after class to compare their own versions to.

4. Is easy to copy down
You can make this easier by putting all the text on the board into a table (e.g. 3 columns for tense, example sentence and meaning, and three rows for the three past tenses), using very simple time lines and sketches, limiting the amount of text, and giving them a gapped version of the grammar presentation to copy the important things off the board into.

5. Can be easily referred to
As well as something that is easy to understand and easy to copy down, you will want to make sure that the grammar explanation is something that the students and teacher can easily refer to during later grammar practice and error correction stages. To achieve this you will need to make sure that the grammar explained is exactly the same as is used later in the lesson. You can also make it easy to refer to by keeping it up on the board (in which case you will need to make sure when you write it that there is room around it to write other things that come up), saving it as an OHP slide you can put up when you need it, or by making students write it in a separate grammar part of their notebooks.

6. Is actually referred to
The easiest way of making sure that students actually do refer to the grammar presentation later in the lesson is to make some of the answers to the exercises you have given them exactly the same words as you used in the grammar explanation. The same thing can also be done with useful phrases for communicative activities, or for sentences from the homework. You can also encourage its use by getting students to refer back to it every time you do error correction on that grammar point in future lessons.

7. Stays up on the board
This point is mainly just one aspect of the points above, but you will also need to make sure that at least part of the grammar presentation can stay up on the board without giving too much away- for example by erasing key words from the example sentences so they can't copy the whole of the next grammar exercise straight from the board or by briefly making it unavailable with paper stuck over it with magnets or sellotape or by turning off the OHP.

8. Is at the right time in the lesson
There are two parts to thinking about this- making sure the students are alert enough when the grammar explanation comes to understand it and remember it, and making sure that it fits in with the rest of the lesson. You can make sure they are alert by making the grammar explanation near the beginning of the lesson, perhaps after a quick warmer. The end of the lesson is the second most alert period, with the middle being the worst. You can add to this alertness by making them need the grammar by getting them used to a lesson structure where practice always follows a grammar explanation, or by asking them to do a task where the language could be useful first as in TTT and some versions of TBA.

9. Is at the right stage of the lesson
This depends very much on what your teaching approach is and on the specific grammar point. For example, do you want to introduce the grammar point after the students have had a chance to use a task or text where it could be used and so know why they need the language, or will they feel "safer" if you introduce it from the start? Do you want to tackle it after revising the most recent or most similar grammar point, or is there the chance you will get bogged down in that and not be able to concentrate on the new point? Which stage of the lesson grammar explanations come in can often be a compromise with the timing of the lesson in other ways. For example, lots of revision and seeing the language in context might put the grammar explanation right in the middle of the class when students are least alert.

10. Is at the right point in the day
Similar to being at the right point in the lesson, students are usually most alert first thing in the morning, with the second most alert time being in other parts of the morning, the next being late in the evening and the least alert period being in the hour or two after lunch.

11. Is at the right point in the week
Similar to the points above, for a particularly difficult or important grammar point the beginning and end are good and the middle is bad in terms of alertness, but you will also need to take into account having a chance to practice it enough before they forget it all over the weekend.

12. Is at the right point in the course
Ditto. A particularly big, difficult or important grammar point should be dealt with near the beginning of a course when the students are still keen and unconfused by other input, and if possible the same thing should be revised right at the end of the course after the rest of the less troublesome points. This approach of putting the most important grammar first often doesn't match with a step by step approach to grammar, and how you compromise between the two can depend on things like how likely the students are to actually use that grammar outside the classroom, how possible it is to explain the grammar without studying more "basic" forms first, and how much they will need their confidence boosted with easier points before tackling something big.

13. Is at the right point in their language development
The difficulty of choosing to tackle a grammar point just by when the students are most alert is that their brains still might not be ready to take that particular grammar point in. This is often connected to the idea of Natural Order (the theory that both L1 and L2 language learners make progress with grammar points in a predictable fashion), but sometimes is more just simple logic of whether it is easier to explain the use of will for predictions before or after teaching the use of will for conditionals.

14. Comes at the right interval since the last connected grammar explanation
Another factor worth bearing in mind when putting grammar into a syllabus is how long it will take students to really absorb a grammar point and therefore be ready for the next step with it. This factor can both shorten and lengthen the amount of time you wait. For example, students might be able to produce the first conditional at the end of the lesson but for them to really get a subconscious feeling for what it means and how it is used they will probably need at least another couple of weeks of chances to mull on it, use it in conversation and/ or see it in context before they will benefit from more conscious examination of this or a related grammar point (e.g. will for predictions or the second conditional). At the same time, the theory of Natural Order suggests that however much time and help we give students, they will still make errors with the Present Simple, so we shouldn't get stalled on that before we move onto forms we can contrast it with like the Simple Past or Present Continuous just because they are still making mistakes.

15. Comes at the right interval since the last unconnected grammar explanation
As well as needing time to absorb the last connected or contrasting grammar point, students might just need a bit of a rest for their brains after even a totally unrelated grammar or even vocabulary explanation in order to make sure they have a clear space in their heads and the energy for the next grammar explanation. Ways of giving them a rest whilst still improving their English include mechanical tasks like drilling, skills development like reading and listening, fluency tasks where they can use the language they already know, and other kinds of revision.

16. Is for the most useful language at that point
As well as looking at what language students are mentally ready to learn, we also need to look at what language they need. This can be defined by what they need for their work or studies, what they need for an EFL or other exam, what they need in order to cope with the next class they are going to go into, what they need to catch up with the better students in this class, what they need in order to boost their motivation, what they need to be able to understand classroom instructions, what they need in order to be ready for the next grammar point, what they need in order to understand important functional language (e.g. Can for ability leading onto Can for requests), what they need in order to use a particular communicative skill (e.g. relative clauses for talking your way around a word you don't know), or what they need in order to benefit from English that is all around them (e.g. popular songs or station announcements in English).

17. Is something students understand the need for
A teacher who has decided a particular grammar point is what students need will also need to make sure that students identify that need. This can be achieved by some explanation from the teacher ("With this grammar you will be able to..."), by doing a communicative activity where that grammar would be useful before you present it, or, even better, something that is obvious to students straightaway as something they can use inside or outside the classroom.

18. Is the right length
This usually means short, so that they can write it all down in their notebooks and there is plenty of time for practice. Sometimes, however, grammar presentations can be too short. You might need to plan for extra example sentences if they don't understand the ones you have chosen and/ or an extra little tricky bit of that grammar if they knew all the rest of it before you started the presentation.

19. Includes revision
This could be revision of the form you are contrasting it with (e.g. Going to when presenting Will), revision of the grammatical forms it is similar to (e.g. Present Continuous or Past Continuous when presenting Future Continuous), or revision of a different meaning of the same form (Present Continuous for Present and Future).

20. Gives the students something new
One of the biggest criticisms of PPP is that the teacher often ends up presenting language that the students already know. You can make sure that you are adding something new by gauging what students know as you elicit from them and then add one of the extra back up points you have prepared just in case. Possible back up points include exceptions (e.g. state verbs when presenting the continuous) and extra meanings (e.g. Present Simple when the word makes something true in "I name this ship" or "I do solemnly swear).

21. Gives the students a sense of anticipation
From your own experience of being taught grammar at school, it might seem unrealistic that a class of students could be on the edge of their seats waiting to see how a grammar explanation turns out. There are, however, plenty of techniques to ensure that. One is to make sure that something about the grammar explanation is completely new to them (see other points). Another is to give them a spoken or written task they cannot achieve properly without the grammar and let them try it again after your explanation. In a similar way, starting a grammar presentation with a collection of real student mistakes from that class is great for getting their attention, Perhaps the most effective is to start with a statement that what they thought about the grammar before is (at least in part) wrong.

22. Is asked for by the students
This is an example of the point above. The important thing to aim for is the letter ‘s', i.e. students asking (or at least wanting to know) rather than just one student. If more than one student asks for the same grammar explanation, then that is the ultimate sign that you have planned the lesson perfectly. Again, the best way of achieving this is to give them a task where certain grammar is necessary to complete it. Please note that many tasks in textbooks and communication games books are perfectly doable with much lower level language than the level of the book, and research suggests that at least some of your students will be perfectly happy with having dealt with such a task in pidgin English and so will be unlikely to listen carefully to any further explanation. The secret, then, is to design an activity where it comes to an end without a successful outcome without the language you are about to present, which as mentioned in a point above should be something that is in at least part new to them. It is very difficult to design a free communication task where particular language is absolutely vital, so this is generally easier with a comprehension question that most people will get wrong because of grammatical reasons (sometimes available in EFL exams like IELTS and TOEIC), or pairwork tasks where students try to achieve a language-based task together. Examples of the latter include grammar auctions and pairwork grammar correction tasks where one student has the correct version for each pair of sentences.

23. Is something the students want to use straightaway
Another advantage of giving students a task that stops half way through or comes to an unsuccessful end until they get the grammar is that they are likely to want to turn straight back to the task at hand and finish it off successfully with their new knowledge. As with anything students do unguided by a teacher, this is likely to increase how much they learn.

24. Uses a familiar format
In order to make sure that students can concentrate on the grammar being explained rather than the explanation itself, it is good to develop a familiar format of grammar explanations so that students instantly understand (consciously or unconsciously) what each part of your explanation means. Things to standardize include the colours of pens (red= name of tense etc), the layout of board (you always use tables and the right column is always the meaning of the grammar etc), the use of names and symbols (writing out "noun" or "subject verb" in full or just using first letters etc.), and gestures (hand over the shoulder to illustrate "past", always exactly the same hand positions to illustrate each preposition etc.)

25. Breaks the format
Once you have set up a format, it becomes time to break it. This can be done systematically in steps so that they gain the ability to understand more and more difficult grammar explanations (moving from labelling just SVO to labelling the adverb, noun, pronoun etc.) or just to add a bit of variety to get their attention (the use of amusing pictures, new technology etc.)

26. Is visual
This makes a grammar explanation catch the eye more, cuts down on the amount of difficult language you need to explain the grammar, caters well to students who have a visual learning style, allows you to approach the same grammar for several different directions, and can be easier to copy down and recall than the part of the grammar explanation that has words. Probably the most effective way of using pictures is to have a striking and memorable image such as a famous TV commercial or painting that the whole lesson is built around and students can use to recall the grammar point by picturing the image. Other techniques involving a visual element include the use of different colour pens to mean different things, time lines, simple stick man drawings and using flashcards.

27. Is active
This can partly be a case of getting the students involved by asking you questions or joining in when you are eliciting, and partly a case of making sure the physical movement and noise you can easily build into a warmer doesn't die to be replaced by still bodies staring blankly at the board when this stage comes. This can be achieved by using gestures to illustrate grammatical forms (e.g. pointing forward = future), example sentences ("I was jumping when you shouted stop"), word and sentence stress, and right and wrong answers.

28. Is personalized
As with many things in language learning, making sure the example sentences used in grammar explanations are personalised to the students can really help them understand more easily, and make the language more memorable and obviously useful. Ways of personalising the language include statements about individuals in the class ("William is next to John"), statements about the teacher ("He is wearing a pink tie"), or statements about the class as a whole ("Most people live in a flat"). Another way of looking at personalisation is telling students that the language covered is aimed particularly at their weaknesses, most common mistakes, upcoming test, jobs or studies.

29. Is topical
Another way to make any language stick in the mind is to make it connected to the particular time and day it is being explained on. In a similar way to using a striking picture, many people find they can then help recall the relevant grammar point by bring back to mind the time it was explained. Ways of making it topical include using recent news, celebrity gossip, weather, seasonal changes, natural events, national holiday etc. as an example sentence.

30. Is memorable
The tips about being visual, physical, personalised and topical above can all really help with making a grammar explanation and therefore the grammar you are explaining more memorable. Other tips relevant to this dealt with elsewhere include making sure students are awake and ready to take it in. The use of humour and making sure you connect the grammar to things the students already know can also help a lot. Teaching grammar in context is also important.

Importance Of English Language

2009-04-15T03:15:00.000-07:00

A language is a systematic means of communication by the use of sounds or conventional symbols. It is the code we all use to express ourselves and communicate to others. It is a communication by word of mouth. It is the mental faculty or power of vocal communication. It is a system for communicating ideas and feelings using sounds, gestures, signs or marks. Any means of communicating ideas, specifically, human speech, the expression of ideas by the voice and sounds articulated by the organs of the throat and mouth is a language. This is a system for communication. A language is the written and spoken methods of combining words to create meaning used by a particular group of people.

Language, so far as we know, is something specific to humans, that is to say it is the basic capacity that distinguishes humans from all other living beings. Language therefore remains potentially a communicative medium capable of expressing ideas and concepts as well as moods, feelings and attitudes.

A set of linguists who based their assumptions of language on psychology made claims that language is nothing but ‘habit formation’. According to them, language is learnt through use, through practice. In their view, ‘the more one is exposed to the use of language, the better one learns’.

Written languages use symbols (characters) to build words. The entire set of words is the language’s vocabulary. The ways in which the words can be meaningfully combined is defined by the language’s syntax and grammar. The actual meaning of words and combinations of words is defined by the language’s semantics.

The latest and the most advanced discoveries and inventions in science and technology are being made in the universities located in the United States of America where English language is the means of scientific discourse.

The historical circumstances of India (having been ruled by the British for over two centuries) have given the Indians an easy access to mastering English language, and innumerable opportunities for advancement in the field of science and technology. Many Indians have become so skilled in English language and have won many international awards for creative and comparative literatures during the last few years. Sometime ago, an Indian author, Arundhati Roy, won the prestigious booker prize for her book “The God of Small Things”. Her book sold lakhs of copies all over the globe.

Over the years, English language has become one of our principal assets in getting a global leadership for books written by Indian authors and for films made by Indians in English language. A famous Indian movie maker Shekhar Kapoor’s film “Elizabeth” has got several nominations for Oscar Awards. It does not require any further argument to establish the advantage English language has brought to us at the international level.

English language comes to our aid in our commercial transactions throughout the globe. English is the language of the latest business management in the world and Indian proficiency in English has brought laurels to many Indian business managers. English is a means not only for international commerce; it has become increasingly essential for inter-state commerce and communication.

In India, people going from North to South for education or business mostly communicate in English, which has become a link language. Keeping this in mind, the Parliament has also recognized English as an official language in addition to Hindi. All the facts of history and developments in present day India underline the continued importance of learning English in addition to vernaculars.

Some of the states of India are witnessing popular increase in public demand for teaching of English language from the primary classes. Realizing the importance, recently, the Minister of Indian Railways, Laloo Prasad Yadav, demands teaching of English language in schools. The great demand for admission in English medium schools throughout the country is a testimony to the attraction of English to the people of India. Many of the leaders, who denounce English, send their own children to English medium schools. Many of the schools in the country have English as the sole or additional medium of instruction.

A language attracts people because of the wealth of literature and knowledge enshrined in it. English poses no danger to Indian languages. The Indian languages are vibrant and are developing by the contributions of great minds using them as their vehicle of expression. English is available to us as a historical heritage in addition to our own language. We must make the best use of English to develop ourselves culturally and materially so that we can compete with the best in the world of mind and matter. English language is our window to the world.

English language is one tool to establish our viewpoint. We can learn from others experience. We can check the theories of foreigners against our experience. We can reject the untenable and accept the tenable. We can also propagate our theories among the international audience and readers.

We can make use of English to promote our worldview and spiritual heritage throughout the globe. Swami Vivekananda established the greatness of Indian view of religion at the world conference of religions in Chicago in 1893. He addressed the gathering in impressive English. Many spiritual gurus have since converted thousands of English people to our spirituality by expressing their thought and ideas in masterful English. English has thus become an effective means of promoting Indian view of life, and strengthening our cultural identity in the world.

When William Caxton set up his printing press in London (1477) the new hybrid language (vernacular English mixed with courtly French and scholarly Latin) became increasingly standardized, and by 1611, when the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible was published, the educated English of London had become the core of what is now called Standard English. By the time of Johnson’s dictionary (1755) and the American Declaration of Independence (1776), English was international and recognizable as the language we use today. The Orthography of English was more or less established by 1650 and, in England in particular, a form of standard educated speech, known as Received Pronunciation (RP) spread from the major public schools in the 19th century. This accent was adopted in the early 20th century by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for its announcers and readers, and is variously known as RP, BBC English, Oxford English, and the King’s or Queen’s English.

Generally, Standard English today does not depend on accent but rather on shared educational experience, mainly of the printed language. Present-day English is an immensely varied language, having absorbed material from many other tongues. It is spoken by more than 300 million native speakers, and between 400 and 800 million foreign users. It is the official language of air transport and shipping; the leading language of science, technology, computers, and commerce; and a major medium of education, publishing, and international negotiation. For this reason, scholars frequently refer to its latest phase as World English.

AMD's new mobile processor is called Turion Ultra

2009-04-14T03:50:00.000-07:00

Mountain House (CA) - Computex Taipei 2008 is just around the corner and news of what we can expect to see at the conference is already trickling in. Nvidia will release its new GeForce GTX 280 and 260 GPUs, AMD its Radeon 4850 and 4870 as well as its Puma notebook platform.

According to our sources at a top-tier OEM/ODM, AMD will be announcing Puma as well as the Griffin processor on June 3 (local time), the first day of the show. Puma will consist of the Griffin CPU, which we now know will be called “Turion Ultra”, a mobile version of the 780G chipset (RS780M), the Mobility Radeon 3200 graphics chip (integrated in the mobile 780G chipset) as well as Wi-Fi chips from the usual suspects (Atheros, Broadcom, Marvell, Ralink).

Puma will show up in all major notebook form factors (12.1”, 13.3”, 15.4” and 17") and will be on display with ATI Mobility Radeon 3450, 3650 and 3850 discrete graphics chips. SSDs will be available as an option, albeit in a very limited fashion: Puma will aim for the volume business and consumer markets and SSD simply are still “too expensive” for these segments. That scenario should change with the arrival of AMD’s 2009 Shrike mobile platform (better known for its Fusion processor), which is expected to see a greater adoption of SSD devices.

At this time, we have no information whether Puma and its Turion Ultra will be available in volume from day one. Stay tuned for more information coming soon.

Despite the fact that a first Intel Montevina notebook has been announced already, don’t expect the platform to debut at Computex. Montevina notebooks are likely to have a significant presence at the show, but our sources indicated that the platform will not be launched until later in the month.

Hilton Grand Waikikian and Disney Resort come to Oahu

2009-04-10T10:06:00.000-07:00

Hilton Grand Waikikian and Disney Resort come to Oahu

Hawaii’s tourism industry remains strong. Two well known ‘families’ have made the most recent contribution to Oahu’s ever-growing hotel population: The Hilton Family and a very large family that includes one very popular Mickey Mouse!

Opening in December, 2008, The Hilton Grand Waikikian became the newest addition to the sprawling 22 acre Hilton Hawaiian Village Beach Resort and Spa on Waikiki Beach. This 38 story, 331-suite luxury time share is a vacation home to the elite members of The Hilton Grand Vacation Club. Club members will spend between $40,000 and $80,000 for an annual week-long stay at this upscale property. Suites range from one to three bedrooms and the five top floors house the three-bedroom Penthouse suites, which average $100,000 for an annual week-long vacation. The Hilton Hawaiian Village property includes a number of hotel towers and three time share towers, including the 236 unit Lagoon Tower and the 72 unit Kalia Tower.

The Grand Waikikian includes many upscale amenities as well as a 5,000 square foot pool which features a water slide, waterfalls and a swim-through grotto lagoon.

On the Western side of the island, another large scale project is in the works. The Disney Company has ventured to the Aloha state to begin work on their first non-theme park related resort on 21 acres of beach front property in Ko Olina. The $800 million resort will include 350 hotel rooms and 480 time share villas for their more than 350,000 Disney Vacation Club members. With Hawaii’s Governor’s blessing, this Disney resort anticipates creating more than 1,000 new jobs. While most hotels typically offer job opportunities for hospitality and housekeeping personnel, one can only expect that this new resort will open up more diverse employment prospects, living up to the the Disney way of the provision of entertainment and activities.

The top luxury hotels-Hotels of the World features small luxury hotels

2009-04-10T10:02:00.000-07:00

The top luxury hotels-Hotels of the World features small luxury hotels

Hotels of the World features small luxury hotels, resort hotels as well as world-renowned stately hotels offering all the possibilities for family getaways, romantic escapades and business meetings.

Top of the most luxurious hotel projects in the world

A select the most luxurious hotels in the world is like and how you try to compare champagne house with sparkling wine. Whatever you do, you will be subjective and you choose what you like or possibly what is your grasp. Although people differ regarding the passion for design, I composed a top of the most luxurious hotels in construction, able to impress those cunoscatori most selective in the field.

The Apeiron island hotel

The project is valued at over 500 million U.S. dollars and has a stretch of over 200,000 square meters on the level. Future hotel will be located on an island and will be the second 7-star hotel after Burj Al Arab. With height of 180 meters above the hotel will be equipped with 350 suites, private beaches, hi-tech equipment, conference rooms, restaurants, shops, cinemas and art galleries.

Floating hotels

Floating hotels are a very ambitious project, estimated at nearly 120 million U.S. dollars. The difference between a floating hotel and one subacvatic or land is that it can move, so if you trezi with a view other than that in front of you asleep, do not be surprised: be sure you plutit during the night to another island. The project is designed by a famous English architect who has promised that the hotel will not only remain at the stage of the sketch. It is possible that up to the end of 2020 we can travel in the world not only by plane, train or car, but also with a hotel…

Hotel Waterworld

The hotel won first prize last year for best design. The hotel is situated on the water, in a prapastie and is surrounded by walls abrupti. The 400 rooms, restaurants, cafes and rooms for guests are surrounded by water. The greatest attractions will be aquatic sports, luxoasele pools, and alpinismul opportunity to practice bungee jumping.

Poseidon project subacvatic

The hotel could be built in Fiji. The Poseidon Mystery Island was totally under water. The costs of the project amounted to over 100 million U.S. dollars and aproximeza as a room will cost 15,000 U.S. dollars per person per week. The hotel will offer over 500 apartments at the coral and aquatic life. Viitorii tourists can enjoy making scuba-diving, pilotand submarine practicand and many other water sports.

The Diamond Ring Hotel

Giganticul hotel will be built in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and will look exactly like a wheel,
and booths will be represented by spacious and luxurious apartments.
The hotel will be over 180 meters tall and wants a copy of the famous wheels
London - London Eye.

Burj Al Arab Hotel

Finally be mentioned that the ballot box projects luxurious owners who wait and finalitatea was extracted and project already famous Burj Al Arab hotel Burj al-Arab, built in Dubai between 1994 and 1999. Dubai intre 1994 si 1999.

Choice hotel-My Favorite Hotels

2009-04-10T10:01:00.000-07:00

Choice hotel-My Favorite Hotels

When we travel around, there are a couple of Hotels that we absolutely love, and would not change it for the world. You see after traveling when we were younger and experiencing horrible beds, stinky rooms, dirty tubs (other people's hair left in them after cleaning,) old and outdated lobbies, and much more, we decided to take a step up after trying to pinch pennies at the expense of our comfort.

Well, my first choice is in Houston, Texas at the Hilton Hotel next to the Toyota center in downtown Houston. Let me give you a descriptive view of this place...

1. You drive up and there are a number of people waiting to assist you.

a. The Valet Parker. This is your only option. You can not park your own car (cool isn't it)

b. The Bellhop. He is there to take your clothes out of the card and wait on you while you check in. Actually, everytime you leave and come back, you don't even have to carry your own shopping bags if you do not want to.

c. Greeter. He greets the family, gets your name, and asks you is there anything like information that you may need while staying in Houston. They will get reservations for you, directions, suggest shopping places, Realtors, anything that they are familiar with, they can find out for you.

2. Now, the inside. Once you walk in through the motion activated turning entrance, you are welcomed by every worker that lays their eyes on you. There is beautiful detail on the ceilings, the restaurant, the registration desk, even the columns and floors are immaculate in detail. Just imagine even the elevators are gold.

3. Now, the room. They are always immaculate. I have never ever complained about anything that was undone in the rooms.

4. Room Service. They will bring you food throughout the night. They are always polite, the call you by your name and will return with just a call from you to pick up their trays. Also, their food is really good. It tastes like someone from Louisiana cooks the food.

5. Checkout. Best of all. There is no check out. The last morning of your stay, you can check out on the television, or simply look at the bill that they will slide under your door first thing in the morning. If you do not have any disputes, simply leave.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lashawn_Duruisseau

Steps for Persistence

2009-03-12T15:01:00.000-07:00

Steps for Persistence

I’ve got 5 steps to follow to be persistent and I’ll outline how each of those can be applied for maximum productivity.

Step 1: Direction

Being persistent is not enough. You need to be persistent at things that continues to steer you in the right direction. I love the analogy where a plane traveling from point A to point B is off course the majority of the time and just continually correcting that course to keep steering in the proper direction to get to the destination. If people would look at productivity the same way, they would realize they need to constantly be changing paths, using new tools, ideas and methods while always going in the right direction. You have to look past any one particular setback or failure, and continue to move forward regardless of that temporary setback. Knowing your direction and where you want to get with your productive tasks allows you to work in the right direction. That is the first step to being persistent with productivity.

Step 2:Plan

Once you know the direction, it’s important to make a plan to get there. It may be an elaborate plan or just a couple of simple steps, but as long as your plan moves you in the right direction, you make progress and can move to the next step. There are a number of ways to develop this plan and it is something you shouldn’t try to make perfect. Persistence relies on doing things over and over so the plan you start with can change and evolve over and over. Some of the ways you might want to consider building a plan are:

Brainstorming ideas and just write down everything that comes to mind
Think of things that have worked for you in the past
Identify the people you could contact to get help from
List new methods and techniques to try
Research ways others have done the same things you want to do

Step 3:Prioritize

Once you have some plans or at least some possibilities, you need to look at prioritizing things. First you should prioritize your plans if you have a few ideas and look at which specific things you want to do. Make sure the plans make sense and that it is something you can work on. Do you have the resources to do it or do you need to find that still? Pick the things that you will be able to do or ensure your plan has steps that will get you what you need in order to then get started.

Step 4:Act

This step is simply doing what it takes to put your plan into action. While this often seems like it is making things sound easier then they are, that is not ever the case. Taking some action in your plan should not be difficult or elaborate. If you don’t know how to do something yet, then pick an action that will help you figure that out. Take an action to do some research or to learn more about the topic before you are ready to move ahead. There is always something you can do to make progress, even if it is small . That is the important part here in being productive and it will keep you from ever getting stuck for a long time.

Step 5:Repeat

The last step in to be persistent is to simply repeat these steps. Go back to step 1, to ensure you are still heading in the right direction. Keep your perspective in mind, your positive attitude and focus you’ve learned from my previous articles in this series and start these steps again. You can either reuse your plans, or adjust it as needed. Just keep repeating through these steps and you’re on the path to reaching your maximum productivity.

Repeat Your Successes

As you execute these steps and make a number of passes through them, you’ll learn some things that worked and some that didn’t. This is valuable to learn and use for continuing to improve your productivity. The things that work well for you are things you should look to repeat and enjoy the benefits of. Recognizing that progress definitely makes persistence a little easier and it will help to motivate you to keep working at it!

Don’t Make it Hard

Persistence is not something that will come quickly and it will certainly not come without a lot of mistakes along the way. Don’t make it hard for yourself by expecting too much too quickly and ensure you take your time to slowly learn this practice of persistence. You will have setbacks and sometimes the plans or actions you put in place won’t work or be productive. That’s OK. Just stop to learn from the mistake and go back to your steps and start again.

The Search for Life Purpose

2009-03-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

Image by orvaratli via Flickr

The Search for Life Purpose
Jay over at InnerNoodle has a great perspective and discussion on the search for Life Purpose and how it’s not as difficult as it’s often made. He elaborates on his journey in this and I figured I’d prefer to write a bit more then a short comment on the subject and here’s the result.

Searching for Purpose

I definitely agree with many of Jay’s points. I feel too many people spend (should I dare say waste) time searching for what they wish to find as a life purpose and they ignore for years some obvious known life purpose at that time. Some people spend years of their lives searching for a life purpose.

I think they find many things that could be purposeful along this path, but they either refuse to accept it or simply want to find something that attracts them more. Often people are so connected with their material world, the same notions bleed into their soul searching so the status and glamor of their purpose is highly important to them. This ultimately leaves them searching, taking little action and ultimately feeling lost and inadequate from not being connected to something with meaning in their lives.

Living Your Purpose

The point that people are always searching for something that has some, “cool factor” is a massive roadblock to people taking action and simply living what they know best at that time. If you were asked, “What is your purpose?” and you have no response, I can assure you that is because you are thinking you have no response because you’ve trained yourself to wait for a purpose that you want. Well, what if you purpose is something that you don’t know yet, or really don’t want? Is that still a purpose? Do you decide your own purpose or is it something you find by searching? Is it something that is revealed through experience, through others, through God? How do you live your purpose if you don’t fully know what it is.

My suggestion is this. Instead of thinking that you don’t know your purpose, break the habit and develop a new belief that you will only find your true purpose by taking action on what you feel could be your purpose at this point in your life. Act on what you feel, don’t analyze it too much or criticize it, just explore. Stop and let yourself examine those feelings and desires.

What are your strongest desires or feelings in your life right now?
What action can you take right now to explore that further?
With what you know right now, is it possible that this feeling ties to a purpose in your life?
Would it hurt anyone to follow your gut with this and see where it leads?
If this is your purpose, could you live it more fully right now?

This type of questioning can help you to explore new areas in safety by using just the imagination at first. Visualizing yourself take on new actions and living in a way driven more by purpose can enable you to avoid the seeking and start living for what you know at this point in time. It helps you open your mind to new possibilities of purpose and to discover new and more defined purpose than what you currently know. Getting out of that trap of trying to find a perfect, well defined purpose by living with what you know right now, will give you far more opportunities to know your life purpose, but to actually live it!

Purpose Does Change

I also believe you don’t have ONE set life purpose, your life purpose changes as does your life. No life is static, nor is any purpose. If you actually do something for what you feel in your gut at any point in your life instead of just thinking, dreaming, and hoping to discover something greater, then your life purpose will change as you do. It is something that grows with you and it is something you discover along your journey of life.

Purpose is connected deeply with your spiritual centers and most people seek out purpose to a point where they can find a morally accepted purpose. To me, this is driven entirely by your connection to God and your faith in that allows you to experience the joy of purpose, with hope for returns outside the worldly temporary things so many cherish in life. This is exactly why I think so many people struggle to find a purpose, they don’t have the faith or spiritual beliefs that let them connect to a moral purpose, separately from the material temptations.

So, I encourage you to let your heart and mind wander. If you follow your heart, believe in your ability to find happiness in purpose and accept the journey of discovery, it will lead directly to the purpose you have been seeking. Just make sure you get your mind out of your own way!

The Attitude of Selling Value

2009-03-12T14:57:00.000-07:00

I heard a very interesting suggestion by a colleague at work recently about the value you suggest when selling a product or closing a deal. The suggestion was this:

Do not thank someone for their business when you close a sale, complete your service or sell some product. Instead congratulate them for their investment and thank them for their time they spent with you.

The reasoning behind this is that thanks often implies that you got the better end of the deal. When someone gives you a gift, you say thanks. When they left you go first and offer you something, you say thanks. Doing this with a sale can subconsciously imply you got the better end of the deal. You don’t a customer to think that so you are better off congratulating them for the investment they make. This transfers the idea that THEY got the better end of the deal and leaves them feeling they have something now more valuable than the money in exchange for it.

When I think back now to all the things I’ve purchased and how I felt when buying them, I actually do remember several people how congratulated me on my purchase instead of thanking me and I still remember them in my mind even years later. I never quite realized or registered why that might be so, and this simple suggestion has now brought that to light for me. I hope you get some value from it and may also be able to use it in your transactions you make with others. It’s a great attitude to have and really does portray more value is transferred than when you are thanked for the business.

Leadership: Give Direction

2009-03-12T14:55:00.000-07:00

True leadership is about taking people to a place that they would not go to by themselves. Good leaders provide that by delivering and demonstrating purpose, direction, goals and guidance that is well beyond a supervising role alone. These are the areas that I feel make direction vital to leadership.

Planning and Communication

Direction cannot be given if it is not known by the leader in the first place. And a leader cannot lead if they don’t give a direction for people to follow them. This creates a big requirement to do something about that by using techniques, tools and resources to provide and develop that direction.

Vision and Mission
Problem Analysis
Brainstorming
Big Picture Thinking
Goal Setting
Involving Others

A leader must take time to plan, think and figure out the direction to steer things. This is not something that is obvious and often the things that seem most obvious tend to be very short sighted with no long term advantages. There is much to consider by a leader for direction and this comes by all the tools listed above and a variety of resources. Direction is certainly not something that should be created by one person (although it can), it is better to use other people’s ideas, hopes and plans in developing a single direction that the leader can use for everyone involved. All of this data from brainstorming sessions, ideas from other individuals, through research, experience or simply grand hopes with visionary ideas needs to be assessed by a leader. Don’t rush this process and make sure that you consider many components of a planned direction.

Ask yourself questions to challenge the direction and make sure you cover all facets of it to everyone involved.

Does this direction align with the values of those participating?
What new skills and training will be required to take this route?
Are there examples or case studies that can be used to model an approach in this direction?
Are those involved able to accept the changes needed for this?
Do you have the resources needed to achieve it?
Is it something that everyone can believe in?
How will you know that people are following this direction?
Can you clearly indicate and describe this planned direction?
Who will be the people most in favor and in doubt of this direction?
What kind of contingency can you plan for in dealing with resistance or troubles?

These are just a few samples of the types of questions you need to ask yourself to ensure you evaluate as much of the situation as possible. You certainly don’t need to have answers for all of these when planning and setting a new direction, but you should understand what the most difficult areas and unknowns will be to help prepare any followers. That is where communication then plays a huge role.

Leadership - Give Direction

Photo Credit: Lumax.com

Communicating during this planning stage with others is vital to ensure you consider their ideas and concerns within the plans and directions you decide on. Involve others as much as possible to keep them included and engaged with the decisions you make. Then once you do finally have the direction planned and decided on, it requires continual communication to ensure it is well understood and followed. Ask questions of others to ensure they understand the plans and the big picture of the contribution they can make individually. It is far easier to lead by ensuring others know your vision so communicate, communicate, communicate!

Course Correction

Leadership is not only about leading in a specific direction, it is also about correcting and steering things back on the right direction when they do get off track. I touched on this in my Persistence article in my Productivity Series that you are really continually steering things with minor adjustments back on track as a leader. However, there time when things have gotten so off course, it is no longer just a simple course correction. There are times to abandon a route altogether and choose an alternate path. A leader must recognize when an individual is heading down a path that is off course and not in the right direction. Running with ideas might seem like the right path but often it leads you further away or way of course from the direction that you have planned. When this occurs, whether is the leader themselves or someone working with that leader, it is the leader’s role to correctly steer things back on course. This can be difficult to do in a way that doesn’t break any respect or trust developed.

8 Methods to Find Inspiration

2009-03-12T14:53:00.000-07:00

Search Out New Experiences

Inspiration comes about because of change or seeing the possibility of change. If you always do the same things, this will be either minimal or non-existent. You must search out and have new experiences in order to find inspiration. This works by seeing new places or people that can inspire you. There are many ways to find and the inspiring moments and things will different for everyone. They might include some of these which I often find inspirational:

Nature and God’s creations
Creative art and writing
Stylish music and sound
Innovation and brain science
Life impact stories (Arswino always has great examples of that at his blog )
Underdog stories. Check out Lance’s example here at Jungle of Life: So Much More Than A Football Game
Overcoming crisis and trauma

These are just a few and everyone will have their own personal favorites that interest and inspire them. If you don’t go searching for this material to inspire you however, don’t expect it to simply come knocking on your door. You must search for it!

Keep An Open Mind

Once you do find new experiences, the unknown often drives fear or a defensive attitude towards it. The change that inspiration is generated from will only be held back by those initial worries or reactions so you must keep an open mind in these situations to see them from new perspectives. You want to let it shape you thoughts, change your initial response and give yourself some time to ponder the new things before denying any possible acceptance or further exploration of the subject. You never know what you could be missing if you close your mind to new ideas.

Watch Your Emotions

Emotions are often tied to that initial response but they also relate so closely to your past experiences they are often limiting or blinding what we dare to see or believe. A story that might be inspiring to one person can easily make another upset or angry based on how they relate their own experiences to that. Pay attention to your emotions, watch them carefully and try to control them. They can hide many subtle things that lead to inspiration at the wrong time or place. Keeping them under control and always trying to change the perspective you experience things in can help with getting past a negative emotional response.

Your emotions could just as easily be signals to find inspiration as often you feel deeply connected to something or you care a great deal about specific topics so you naturally gravitate and have interest their. Use this when it ties in well with the types of inspiration you want in your life.

Share the Experience

Finding inspiration comes a whole lot easier when you are actually talking about it doing that and talking with other people. This is where inspiration feeds inspiration in many cases as simply sharing one inspiring story with a friend or colleague can spark them to think of their own inspiring messages and it often waterfalls into a deeper relationship as you discuss important things between you. Each of those items shared also reveals something that has meaning to a person and knowing that thing is meaningful to them will automatically add importance to it in your life, especially if you already valued it.

Sharing stories of meaning and value are also a great way to discover new things and inspiration as well. The first step about searching for inspiration is made a whole lot simpler when other people bring those stories to you directly in conversation. Of course you will never feel the same hear about a story then experiencing it directly but often it inspires you enough to go make a similar experience yourself and get over your fears of leaving your comfort zone. Offering that same to others by sharing your experiences builds a stronger relationship where you can continue to share the inspiration and drive each other to find more of it.

Seek Out Solitude

While sharing your experience with others has it’s set of advantages and methods to find more inspiration, so does solitude at the opposite end of the spectrum. Solitude offers a way to focus your mind and body, which can allow you to tune in to your surroundings, your thoughts and your life. It lets you notice some of the things that inspire subtly and that you would have missed if stuck in a hectic noisy environment.

Solitude is also a place where we can find time for reflection and deep thinking. It helps a person link their actions and experiences to their thoughts, their hopes and their faith. Spending time in solitude can relax the mind and sharpen your senses which makes the impact of inspiration often more intense and lasting. Solitude will be different for different people, some may enjoy that time to think and study, others may meditate to relax the mind and body, and some may spend the time connecting spiritually through prayer and their internal connection to God. All these things help calm the emotions, alert the senses and help to make points of inspiration more obvious in your life, an important way to find more of the inspiration you are looking for.

Keep in Mind Your Role Models

Role models come about because they either inspire a person or make them jealous. Ask yourself what does your role model do that you like about them. Don’t look for what they have or can offer you, but only in what they do. Is it how they handle a situation, the steps they take to overcome hardship, their ability to lead and accomplish great things or perhaps it’s the methods they use to build and encourage strong relationship. Whatever it is, you can draw on that not only for seeing the inspiration but also to seek out more.

Do your role models align with the areas in your life you are passionate about? In other words, are they the source of inspiration that is most important to you? It’s worth looking at how your role models steer you as often people have role models that steer them away from the important areas of their life and do so more because of social influence than heartfelt inspiration. I’m not suggesting you carve out your role models only from what is important to you right now, as that would limit finding new inspiration, however, it is important to ensure your role models are truly impacting you with inspiration that matters to you and not just because of social influence.

Align Your Actions

While most of this step will be broken out in my next article about taking action on inspiration, I think some alignment of your actions with what inspires you will also help you find more inspiration. Taking action towards something reinforces in our minds that action and it can quickly build the neural connections in your brain to learn that new action and associated inspiration that led to it. This makes inspiration last and grow in value in your mind so putting attention to something that inspires you along with specific actions will only strengthen that. This stronger connection will drive you to seek out even more, as the value you have towards that grows stronger and stronger. If you continue to take action on new inspirations, they will develop easier, strengthen themselves and associations with other inspirations and lead to developing new beliefs and passions .

Follow Your Faith

Finding inspiration is not easy, especially in our hectic world with so many false social influences and media bombardment. Connecting what is really important to you with what you encounter is something that you must learn to do to separate the noise from the inspiration in your life. This comes as no small tasks and while the steps above might all help in that, it’s going to come down to you trusting yourself and your beliefs to actually recognize what is inspirational to you. You must learn to trust your own judgment here, no matter the source. That source of judgment is founded in the faith you have towards knowing what matters, knowing what is right and knowing you will recognize the differences as you encounter them. This faith, whether you consider it spiritual or not, is one to be followed when seeking out inspiration.

8 Steps for Acting on Inspiration

2009-03-12T14:52:00.000-07:00

Research and Learn the Subject

Obviously I’m a big proponent to learning and so learning more about any subject or person that inspires you is a great starting point for activating your mind on the subject. Once you activate your mind by learning more about the subject and by thinking more about it, it will more easily lead into action in your life. If you can excite your mind and generate more and more interest in doing something, then the actions come much easier later on.

There is a definite balance here to maintain between too little time before action and too much. That point will not be equal for everyone and I think it needs experimentation to realize. If you spend all your time learning about a subject and don’t take any action, then the learning can be more of the inspiration than the action and when it does come time to take actions, then the learning component is greatly reduced. On the other hand, if you take action without knowing anything about the subject, it’s possible to cause more harm than good by either frustrating yourself or in some cases causing emotional, physical or relational pain because of the actions you took without understanding them well. Balance this by knowing at least enough about what new things you are getting into and find the right people to help or guide you and you can make the learning experience align with the actions you take keeping the inspiration that drives it satisfied and in balance.

Connect with Others

A great way to act on inspiration is to look to share and connect with others that have similar interests and activities. As I outlined in the finding inspiration article, this strengthens the inspiration and gives you people to talk with and share more experiences about the events that drive this.

These connections can easily develop into closer relationships and friendships and these will give you friends and colleagues to act out your inspiration with. You can use each other and work together to achieve the results you want in this related area.

Ask For and Accept Help

Connecting with others is great when perfectly aligned as your energy and synergy can be very motivating, but that is not enough with inspiration. Inspiration is about change and new things, so there are always areas you will face that will be a challenge to act on. This is where these connections come in as you now have people to ask for help when you need it. They can guide you in areas they are stronger at and they can encourage you to drive through challenge far more than you could tackle on your own. Don’t be afraid to ask for help already , and then be willing to accept it. Accepting it is the part that means action and there is no exception with that here.

Do the same for others by helping where you can you will continue to promote your inspiration not only in yourself, but also in those learning from you.

Take Action Soon

Don’t wait too long to take action towards something that inspires you. I already mentioned the item of learning and researching a subject, but there’s more than that. Often people are afraid to do something because it is so grand or noble or simply outside their comfort zone. It can be the simple things that as an action, shift from from a wisher on inspiration to an actor on inspiration.

Look at the things that inspire you from the first section on finding your inspiration and pick some action to do more of that or to begin implementing one of these items in this article to make it real. A small step today that gets you closer just lets you take a bigger one tomorrow and it will send you down the path towards the results you hope to achieve from whatever inspired you in the first place. If it is a person that inspires you, then contact them. You’d be surprised how easy this can be, even if they are busy people, famous or in some other way, hard to reach. People who inspire others, do so because of connections and they know this, so will generally be happy to talk to you, to help or to at least give you some direction to get you started.

The sooner you start doing something real with your inspirations the sooner you will gain the results hoped for. This enables you to then move on to new inspirations or to grow the original one with more intensity, more importance and dedication in your life.

Visualize Results

Action is definitely more important to take than this step, but this one can give you nearly all the same benefits when the action is simply not possible yet or because of where you are. The imagination of the mind is a wondrous thing, it simply doesn’t know the difference between what is imagined and what is real. This gives you a fantastic ability to experience achieving what you want from these inspirations even when you are not doing an real actions on them. There have been countless studies and brain research conducted about how the mind’s imagination can be used to become stronger, more creative, confident and even better at actions when they are finally performed for real either the first time or after many repetitions.

If you add visualizing your results into your steps for acting on inspiration, you will see the benefits without the practice. Beyond this, it also helps you to realize what your true desired outcomes are as you can imagine it before it happens. This visualized results can be a strong motivator to take even more action!

Be Persistent

I’ve touched on persistence before in my productivity series, and it is just as valuable here. Persistence is about being headed in the right direction , making progress in that direction and consistently steering your actions toward your goals. Since taking action on inspiration will always be in some way challenging, it’s important to accept setbacks and failures along the way. If you learn from those, get back up and be persistent by trying again, you will make great progress and eventually be where you want to be. You can’t let a setback stop you!

Set Goals

All of this is based on getting somewhere new with inspiration and so you can’t do that without some goals in mind. It may be some new ability to learn, material possessions, or a special talent or ability, no matter what it is, you won’t easily get their without setting some goals for guidance. Goals are a brilliant tool if used well and typically abysmal failures if not understood well or planned properly.

Your goals must connect to something with meaning in your life. Luckily this topic of inspiration largely addresses this as inspirational expectations are usually seated in something already important to a person.

Goals must also be measureable. This inherently makes them something you need to consider and be realistic with as you will have to have a way to measure it. Something to count, to see or specifically identify and recognize. Go ahead and set audacious goals but if you do, ensure you can easily recognize progress and keep driving forward. If you struggle with goals, be a little less aggressive and set easier goals to train yourself and gain some ground with accomplishment while acting on your inspirations.

Also, ensure your goals are time based with specific dates so that you can focus on them and know when they need to be checked, changed and rewritten. Don’t leave your goals to be static. Taking on a challenge with something that inspires you will be new, and so will the goals so you can’t expect to set them early and never need to adjust them along the way. Go ahead and drive towards them, work hard to reach them but don’t worry if they need to be adjusted along the way.

Be Enthusiastic

I just love this one! It is so powerful and yet so under used by people who want to act on something that inspires them. Even more of a crime is when people are inspired by another person, and that person is extremely enthusiastic yet that doesn’t seem obvious to the person looking to then act on that enthusiasm. Well, I can tell you, if you put more enthusiasm into your actions, you will make much faster progress. Enthusiasm will build confidence as well and it automatically attracts others and inspires them to find out more. Wouldn’t that be impressive to act on an inspiration and take it full circle, by inspiring someone else with the same thing! I think so!

Not only will enthusiasm drive even more inspiration but it will help to engrain deeper beliefs in your mind. Energy and excitement in the mind build stronger neural connections with new activities and things you learn so that enthusiasm can slowly turn into a deeper passion or conviction. This will ensure you lock in place the beliefs needed to act on that inspiration at any time. The passion will become stronger and in turn, that will continue to then be something you express, where once again you’ve come full circle as you begin to inspire others with it.

Archive for the ‘Success’ Category

2009-03-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

Goal Setting Pitfalls

In all of the self-help books and seminars out there, we are always taught how to set a goal. It needs to be measurable, it needs to have a due date, and it should make you stretch. But what happens if we start setting goals that don’t work for us? Could a bad set of goals throw you off course, or worse cause you to lose interest?

Setting the wrong goal can cause or reinforce a fear of failure and also drop your confidence in making progress toward your goals. The same is true when tiny accomplishments add no meaning, they feel empty and make you feel like an underachiever. The right goal is one that will energize you, rather than strike fear in your heart. The right goal will also pique your curiosity enough to get you moving, and it won’t feel like you could reach it without trying.

The best way to think about goal setting for your personal or professional life is to think of your body’s muscles.

If you use your muscles the same way all the time, they will never grow. On the other hand, if you suddenly overextend your muscles, you risk hurting yourself. But you really do need to challenge them enough to make them grow. The same is true about how you set your personal and professional goals.

Trying to Lose Weight Too Fast

For example: Jessica wants to lose weight, and she decides that setting a goal with a concrete number is the way to go. Concrete numbers really do work wonders. She decides that she wants to lose 100 pounds by the end of the month. Anyone who’s ever tried to lose weight, will realize that this is a very unrealistic goal.

Although most people probably don’t set extreme goals like that, there exist equally unrealistic goals that are considered acceptable. Jessica might have decided that she would eat only cabbage for two weeks. Or that she would exercise five hours a day for the next week. While these may appear to be milder than her original goal, they are both self-defeating.

Trying To Earn More Too Fast

In another example: John decided that he wanted to make $100,000 in the next six months. He’s not quite sure how he’s going to do it. Maybe he’ll use a little bit of law of attraction mojo, and hopefully get lucky at the lottery or on horse betting. Again, unrealistic.

Now Johnny’s goal itself is not an unreasonable one, assuming he has the background for it. Depending on his circumstances, and whether he currently has a form of income that he can leverage. If Johnny already had a $100,000 per-year business, he could try to double his business.

Taking a Reasonable Approach to Goal Setting

Both Jessica and Johnny would benefit from taking a more realistic look at their current lifestyles. One step in proper goal setting is to stop to take stock of where we are. Without truthfully taking a good look at ourselves, we cannot pick the goal that will really get us to grow. Certainly goals should allow you to stretch as a person and go outside your comfort zone. But goals should not be set so far away that you feel you cannot ever reach them.

The opposite situation could also take place. What if Jessica decided that she wanted to lose only 1 pound between now and next month? Or if Johnny decided that he wanted to make only one dollar between now and the next six months? It happens that we pick goals that are too easy for us. We think an increase of 10% over last year is all we should aim for. We take the easy way out, so we don’t have to feel bad if we don’t reach our targets. And at the same time, there isn’t enough satisfaction in that to keep the goal process motivating!

The trick is to be honest with ourselves, and to pick something that will challenge us, without destroying our motivation. You would never go to the gym and reach for the hundred pound weights on your first visit. Likewise, once a weight becomes too easy for you, you should move up to a heavier one.

Warning Signs To Watch Out For

The following is a list of warning signs that you should take note of when you reevaluate your goals.

— Resistance : Even though you chose this goal, you feel it’s not right for you. You don’t want to go through with it, and you feel overwhelmed or unhappy about it.

— Stress : Whenever you think about your goal, you get really stressed out. Maybe you can’t focus, or it feels like there is an annoying uneasy feeling at the back of your mind at all times.

— No action : You can’t get yourself to do anything towards your goal. You can’t even think about starting to take action, your goal just keeps you in this stuck frozen state.

— No belief : You don’t think it’s even possible to achieve your goal. Why bother if you’re not going to make any real progress?

— No motivation : If your goal is too hard or too easy, you might not feel like doing anything to get yourself moving towards it. You might get discouraged, or simply think that your goal is not important enough.

If you’ve ever set a goal that didn’t quite resonate with your current life experiences, you’ve probably recognized some of these warning signs showing up in your own life. Setting goals is just like anything else in life, it takes practice to pick the right goal to get you going.

Parting Words

Don’t be too hard on yourself if the goal that you made for your New Year’s resolutions didn’t work out. It’s always perfectly fine to reevaluate your goals, and there’s no better time than right now.

The Burden of the Self

2009-03-12T14:44:00.000-07:00

The Burden of the Self

There is a massive shift in today’s society in thinking that every individual has everything in them that they need to be successful, be happy and to achieve, no matter what they want in life. I certainly believe in each person having a great ability to accomplish things they desire and I also believe that that ability is not entirely driven by one self.

Societal Shift

Society in North America and other 1st world nations is all about enabling individual control, power and ability. This is further extended by continual shift that is marketed, publicized and encouraged for independence and individualism. People strive for this, believe in it and I believe at the cost of burdening themselves. There is less and less dependence on each other and even on systems that have long been depended on like community, family, agriculture, and especially, spirituality. This continual drive to control life and become everything you want on your own is obviously one that ties in heavily with personal development as well. I try to encourage that relationships, community, people and God are foundations for many of these things and I believe it’s important to keep those things real even among any desires to become the best person you can be. I think there is a need to realize the connections to each of those and how they are necessary.

Self Pressure of Failure

When a person spends a great deal of time on there own attempting to live up to some great expectation, there is often a great sense of pressure on that person. This is common for creative folks, artists and authors, especially ones who have create great works and have further works to produce. They have this continuous pressure to outdo and produce something at least as good and the creativity that might otherwise drive them to a new area can become a huge burden driving them into a pit of despair. (You may want to view this TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert for her perspective on that topic, as it is what triggered me here).

The Creative Mind

Gilbert looks at how a person in this state of mind must separate themselves from the creative aspects and realize that the creativity will come and go and should not be expected. I like this perspective and think that creativity must be left on its own to surface as it is something that cannot simply be turned on and off. I’d consider myself a creative person and while there are always things I can do to help spark creativity, my best creative moments are still never controllable and I must allow that to be separated from me as a person hoping to be creative on demand.

Escaping the Burden of Self

So, I believe there is a way to escape this burden of self. It’s in looking at the source of our desires, our talents and our creative juices. Those things do not come from within, we are given our talents by God, our desires are triggered by actions and influences in our environments and we learn how creativity can be revealed in our lives through interests, mindsets and understandings of everything around us, whether that is the work of others or Nature itself.

We must allow ourselves to avoid the self pressures, self expectations and self love that can drive us to a world of disconnected independence and despair. Those are often led with a message of achievement and success at the expense of others. Escape those burdens by basing your achievements, your relationships, and your creativity on the One who empowered you with those abilities through His gentleness, kindness and love. Know that who you are and what you are capable of is not your own doing, but by the hand of God.

20 Ways to Save Your Brain

2009-03-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

20 Ways to Save Your Brain

Do you feel like it is getting more difficult to focus your attention, or calculate numbers in you head? I hope you haven’t accepted the notion that a slowdown in mental acuity is an inevitable part of getting older. It’s not!

Many things can contribute to a decline in mental performance, and one of the major contributor is what I like to call the use it or lose it syndrome.

This article is a repost written by Jeff Nickles of My Super-Charged Life. His mission, and the focus of his blog, is to help people find success and meaning in their life. Jeff is an insightful writer and I encourage you to pay him a visit when you finish here.

Jeff compiled this great list to help us avoid the dreaded use it or lose it syndrome, and I am pleased to share it with you.

20 Ways To Train Your Brain For Peak Performance

In order to stay sharp, it is important that you exercise your brain. The less we use our minds, the duller they become. There is a lot of emphasis these days on staying physically healthy, but we should also be concerned for our mental well-being. Our brains continue to expand and adapt to the stimuli they receive throughout our lives. The more we take care of our brains, the better thinkers we become. Here are twenty ways that you can develop a training regimen for your brain!

1) Read a good book. Reading a book stimulates the imagination. Your brain can’t keep from drawing mental pictures when you read. Reading gets your mind off its butt and to work. I love to let a book carry me away. I always have a book that I’m reading and sometimes I have 3 or 4! I get most of my books from the library to avoid the cost of buying each one. This also allows me to try a wide variety of books without risk.

2) Big Brain Academy. Video games have a bad reputation for causing brain rot, but there are some that will actually help you strengthen your mind. I like Big Brain Academy for the Wii. It is a collection of brain teasers that tests your mental acuity. The tests are entertaining and addicting. You can even compete with others which makes for some great family fun.

3) Practice meditation. Don’t worry, I’m not going off the new age deep-end here. There are a lot of different forms of meditation. To me, in its most simple form, meditation is about spending a little time alone to relax and center your thoughts. It is amazingly therapeutic.

4) Get plenty of rest. A lack of sleep can interfere with your ability to assimilate new information. This means those all-nighters you pulled back in college were much less effective than you thought. Your brain needs rest to operate at its peak performance. This may be why things always seem clearer and brighter after a good night’s sleep.

5) Exercise regularly. You didn’t think you were going to get away without a little time on the treadmill did you? Cardiovascular exercise improves blood flow to the brain which improves brain functioning. One study found that physical exercise actually helped to increase the volume of the brain. So, if you want a bigger, better brain, then get to exercising!

6) Eat a good breakfast. It is not a myth. Eating a good breakfast does get you off to a better start. You should eat a breakfast high in protein and good carbohydrates. A couple of pieces of whole-grain toast with peanut butter will fit the bill. Eggs are also an excellent source of protein. Nuts, milk, and fresh fruit are also great ways to feed your brain.

7) Think positive thoughts. Encourage yourself. I am convinced that positive thinking increases the effectiveness of the brain and helps to avoid things like depression. I like to say that your brain works much like a computer, garbage-in, garbage-out. Find positive, encouraging people to hang around, read material that jazzes you up, do whatever it is that makes you feel good about yourself. These things will also help you be more mentally productive.

8) Be a continual learner. Never stop being curious about your world. Seek out new experiences, skills, and knowledge. Think of something that you’ve always wanted to learn to do and then get started. A now famous study, showed that certain areas of the brains of London cab drivers were more developed compared to the average citizen. This was due to their need to learn how to navigate the maze of downtown streets. We can use this technique of challenging our brains to improve our abilities.

9) Lay off the alcohol. Alcohol is of course a depressant. It slows down mental functions. The effects of alcohol on a person’s cognitive ability is well-documented. If you need peak mental performance, then stop drinking alcohol. In addition to its obvious effects, it also decreases the restfulness of one’s sleep which, as we have already discussed, impedes your ability to think clearly.

10) Get romantic (especially if you’re a woman). Studies have shown that there may be a link between regular sex and improved brain performance in women. Love-making increases a woman’s estrogen levels and higher estrogen levels are tied to better mental performance. Of course, the mental benefits probably do not outweigh the risks, unless you are in a faithful, monogamous relationship.

11) Break your routines. Drive a new way to work. Try writing with your less dominant hand. Mix things up a little. This perks up your brain because it requires you to think more. You aren’t just running on auto-pilot. Challenge your brain by getting out of your routines and it will respond. This is a great way to get your mental juices flowing.

12) Stop watching so much television. Researchers have found that too much television between the ages of 1 and 3 leads to attention problems later in childhood. Let’s face it, TV is mind-numbing. Get up off the couch and away from the television. Sure, there is some good educational stuff for children and adults, but the average American watches way too much TV. If you want peak mental performance, then turn off the boob tube.

13) Work with numbers. Do math problems in your head instead of on a calculator. For many of us, it is use it or lose it. We have become mentally lazy. We rely on our gadgets instead of thinking for ourselves. Working with and memorizing numbers is a great way to get your brain back in shape. This could pay off big dividends down the road!

14) Stop relying on your GPS to tell you where to go. Remember the cab drivers in #8 above? Using your brain to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B is good mental exercise. You have to use your brain’s ability to determine spatial relationships to effectively read a map and navigate a city. Traveling in an unfamiliar area is even better!

15) Recall old memories. Get out those old picture albums and start thumbing through them. This taps into your brains memory banks. Pictures will help you recall things that you thought you forgot. Dig deep to see just what all you remember. If you have other ways to stimulate your memory, like old letters or home movies, then by all means use those too.

16) Make beautiful music. Learning to play a musical instrument is a great way to super-charge your brain. It requires a number of different parts of your brain to work together to make the melodies that you desire. Of course, if you are already a musician, then learn a new piece. Push yourself to learn new techniques. Music is a great workout for the mind.

17) Speak a new tongue. Many people agree that learning to a speak a new language is a powerful way to give the mind a stretch. If you’ve ever tried to learn even a few new words, then you know this can be difficult. Of course, the harder something is for the brain, the better! You have so much more mental capacity than you might imagine. Give it a try!

18) Memorize a song. Many of us have lots of old songs stored in our heads, but why not expand your memory by learning a few new tunes? It may take awhile at first, but if you keep at it, you will find it gets easier. This is your brain getting back in shape.

19) Walk around the house blindfolded. It might seem like a strange activity, but your brain can handle it. Once you try it a few times, you will probably find it fun and challenging. Again, this one draws on your memory, motor skills, and reasoning abilities. What a workout!

20) Expand your vocabulary. Decide to learn one new word a day. There are several websites out there that can help you with this endeavor. You’ll not only be expanding your mind, but you’ll also be able to impress your friends and co-workers when you work one of your new words into a conversation.

Get started today and be smarter tomorrow!

There you have it! I have just given you 20 very practical ways to sharpen your mind. These suggestions will have your brain back in tip-top shape in no time. Why are you waiting? It is time to start exercising your mental muscles!

How do you keep your brain in perfect working order?
Do you have something to add?
The lines are open and there’s no waiting.

The Lingering Effect of Trauma

2009-03-12T14:39:00.000-07:00

The Lingering Effect of Trauma

Emotional memories of traumatic life events are stored in a particularly robust way by your brain, making effective treatment very difficult. Researchers have now successfully tracked down the molecular bases of these strong, persistent memories.
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It has long been known that emotional memories of both a positive and a negative kind make strong impressions on your brain, and consequently have a very large effect on your behavior.
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A research group has shown that the enzyme calcineurin and the gene regulation factor Zif268 decisively determine the intensity of emotional memories. For the first time, this has enabled the regulatory processes at the synapse, which are important for emotional memories, to be linked to the processes in the cell nucleus.
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Researchers found that although traumatic memories can be overcome slowly through intensive training, they are not replaced. Negative memories, they say, need to be actively replaced by positive memories.
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While the research has no clinical applications at present, it could eventually lead to an understanding of the mechanisms underlying psychological traumas or brain diseases related to memory problems.

How to End Insomnia Effortlessly

2009-03-12T14:33:00.000-07:00

End Insomnia Effortlessly

No one can function very well for very long without a good night’s sleep. Sure, you may drag yourself to work or otherwise fulfill your daily obligations, but your mind and body will suffer in the long run.
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When you aren’t getting quality sleep every night it will affect your relationships, your work and it will definitely affect your health.
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Sadly, more and more people are dealing with some form of insomnia these days. Whether it’s restless sleep or something more sever, stress is only compounded when our sleep is disturbed.
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Is a lack of quality sleep taking a toll on your life? It might be if your answer to any of these questions is yes.
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1) Do you have trouble going to sleep at night because you can’t switch off your brain?
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2) If you wake up during the night do you have trouble getting back to sleep no matter how little sleep you’ve had?
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3) Do you wake up in the morning feeling tired and exhausted?
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If you answered yes to one or more of those questions…
then I have a great resource to share it with you.
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What makes it so great?
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* It’s so simple you won’t believe it.
* You can benefit from it starting tonight.
* It won’t cost you anything, and it works.
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This free resource is based on brain wave frequencies.
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Everything you do has a dominant brain wave frequency associated with it. When you are in a state of relaxation your brain waves have a certain frequency. When you are awake and alert they have a totally different frequency.
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If you have trouble sleeping then you need to slow down your brain wave frequencies from gamma and beta (the 2 high frequencies) to alpha then theta and finally delta (the low frequencies). One very effective way to control you brain wave frequencies is a technology called Binaural Beats. Here’s how it works.
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Two tones at slightly different frequencies are presented separately, one into each of your ears, using stereo headphones. A beating tone will be perceived, as if the two tones mixed naturally, within the brain.
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These two frequencies, when mixed together, result in a different frequency, which aligns your brain waves into a different thinking pattern. This technology allows you to effortlessly coax your brain into the desired state simply by introducing the corresponding Binaural Beats.
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For example you can lower your brainwave frequency without going into a ’sleep’ state so you will feel calm and relaxed in just a few minutes. You can also mimic your natural sleep frequencies to be assured of a healthy and relaxing sleep.
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There are many other applications for this technology but this free offer deals with relaxation and sleep. I am always on the lookout for simple ways to improve the your quality of life. It doesn’t get much simpler than this.
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There are of course other exercises and programs designed to help you sleep but this one is so fast and scientifically sound that I am excited to be able to share it with you. Not to mention that it’s free.
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So, if you want to receive three 1 hour Binaural audios at zero cost and start sleeping better tonight - here’s the link for this amazing program:

How to Deal With Your Hidden Fears

2009-03-12T14:28:00.000-07:00

How to Deal With Your Hidden Fears

by jWells on February 10, 2009

Are you in touch with your fears, or have you hidden them in the dark recesses of your subconscious mind. We all harbor certain fears, and it can be an uncomfortable subject to pull out into the open.

Does it bother you to talk about your fears?

Do you ever feel like the only one with those feelings?

Everyone is afraid of something

At some point in time we have all allowed our fears to get the best of us. Lately, it seems that the economic uncertainty and it’s repercussions have become a breeding ground new feelings of fear and insecurity.

Because it is such a universal concern, I was thrilled to see this subject being addressed by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits. In his latest blog post titled: Conquer the Fears Lurking in the Dark Corners of Your Mind Leo provides some helpful insights and suggestions from his own personal experience.

Here’s an excerpt where he shines some light on the problem and offers some practical advice. This quote if under the subheading:

Bring the Fear Into the Light

“Fears have power over us not because they’re so horrible — even if some of them might be kinda bad — but because we allow them to hide in the darkness and intimidate us. We are paralyzed by these fears. As a great man once said, we have nothing to fear … but fear itself.

The solution: shine some light on the fear.

The answer to the problem of darkness has always been light. Bring the fear into the daylight, and it won’t be so powerful.

Sure, the problem will still exist, and it may be a difficult problem. You’ll still have that debt to deal with — but it will simply be a matter of cutting back on some expenses so you can make bi-weekly payments on your debts, until they’re eliminated. That’s not so terrible when you think of it that way — a series of actions that needs to be taken. More on this in the next section.

So you have to start by shining some light on your fear — and do this by sitting down and thinking about the problem. Write it out. Make a list. If it’s debt, write down all your debts and get the amounts owed. If it’s health, write down exactly what your health problems are, in detail. It may seem silly to write down problems, but this is how you shine the light on them: by taking a look at them.

If you have problems even taking a look at the problem, ask yourself this question: what’s the worst thing that could happen?

Often it’s not that bad. If it’s debt, the worst is that you’d have a large debt to pay off, and it would take a long time. Or maybe that you’d have to file for bankruptcy — which isn’t as bad as you might think. I’ve had relatives that filed for bankruptcy, and — gasp — they are living normal lives right now.

If the worst-case scenario really is bad, seek help. Talk to someone about it — a friend or family member, or someone online even. This is another good way to shine some light on the problem — share it with someone else”

Don’t Let Fear Get In Your Way

Fear comes in all shapes and sizes, when left unchecked it can put a stranglehold on our lives and relationships. Clearly, leaving fear alone does not mean that it will leave you alone. Better to deal with it.

If you have found yourself experiencing increased fear and uncertainty, I want to encourage you to read the rest Leo’s insightful article.

You will also benefit from these related articles:

6 Keys to Overcome Fear and Doubt
Life Skills and The Fear Factor
Release the Fear to Get Motivated

Fear can have a paralyzing effect on your life, and it can surface when you least expect it. A life of true happiness and security is only possible if we have the courage to face our fears and overcome them. I hope this information has been helpful.

7 simple steps to conquering self-doubt

2009-03-12T14:03:00.000-07:00

1) Recognize and acknowledge your doubt. You cannot overcome something until you first recognize and acknowledge its existence. If we give into the temptation to ignore or deny self-doubt, it will impose limits on our ability to act. Self-doubt can be a stealthy problem. If you suspect that it exists, you need to pull it into the light so it can be dealt with. The better you become at identifying hidden doubts, the easier it will be to overcome them.

2) Analyze your doubt. Spend some time drilling down and figure out what triggered it and why? When you analyze feelings, you make them vulnerable logic and reason. Normally, feelings override logic, but questioning the validity of feelings brings them within the reach of reason.

3) Identify the source. If you can figure out where these feelings originate, then you can hit them where they live. You don’t need to psychoanalyze yourself back to childhood or anything like that. Just try to get a handle on the area of your life that creates your sense of uncertainty so you can work on it.

4) Is there a pattern. Do you have a history of self-doubt in this area? Doubt tends to have favorite places to hang out. This raises the likelihood that we have probably experienced it in a similar situation before. Think back, have you been down this road before? Did you overcome your doubts? If so, what steps did you take? If not, what can you do differently this time around?

5) Design a plan. Sit down and plan out a strategy for defeating your doubt. Make an educated decision about what to do next. Choose a path that you think will lead to conquering your doubts. Next, put your plan down in writing.

6) Anticipate possible challenges. Now look at your plan and try to identify possible challenges along the way. Is there some area that you need help with? If so, ask someone close to you to give you some encouragement. Sometimes, some foresight and a little support is all it takes.

7) Take action. You have a plan, the next step is to put it to use by taking action. Stick to your plan and ask for help if you need it. In fact, encouragement is good even if you think you can go it alone.

For most people, self-doubt is just a temporary condition. Think of it like a speed bump on the road to success. Take the bump in stride, then put the pedal to the metal, and go for it. When your confidence is challenged, just follow these seven steps and you will get past it. In fact, I have no doubt about your ability to leave self-doubt in the dust.

Destroying doubt and unbelief - Conclusion

2009-03-12T14:02:00.001-07:00

Destroying doubt and unbelief - Conclusion

This concludes this topic. Tomorrow, we shall
start a very important topic. The topic is
titled "disgracing satan". For non-christian
readers, satan (or the devil) is the enemy of
God, man and all good.

He is at war with anything that is good on this
planet. We christians are the only people who
know his operations because God has revealed
them to us.

Tomorrow, we shall start this topic designed to
expose this animal and disgrace him. If you want
a good life, this is an animal you need to learn
about and to disgrace.

Out of Darkness

2009-03-12T14:01:00.001-07:00

Out of Darkness

God tells us "Forget satan - he's no news and
he has absolutely no power to spoil any area
of a righteous person's life!!"

But Satan is able to destroy everything good in
a sinner's life. He destroys the sinner's
health through ungodliness and intemperance.

He destroys the sinner's wealth through careless
living, lack of moderation and self control. He
destroys the sinner's relationships through
careless living and talking plus selfishness.

He destroys the sinner's peace through ungodly
practices, evil conscience, various troubles
and anguish of mind. Let us make ourselves satan's
enemies today.

The perfect life

2009-03-12T14:00:00.004-07:00

The perfect life
It is possible to have the perfect life.
Perfect health, perfect career, perfect
marriage, perfect finance, etc.

God already made provisions for this. The
moral law of God (the ten commandments)
represent the unchangeable perfections of
God's nature. The bible says God wants us
to share this nature.

To align our lives to God's moral law is to
have the perfect life more abundantly. Every
evil thing on this earth is simply the result
of man's failure to follow God's law.

Satan's main ministry is to try to get people
to compromise God's moral law so he can stop
them from reflecting God's perfect nature.
Beware of him.

BE A VICTOR

2009-03-12T14:00:00.003-07:00

BE A VICTOR

Every human being is either a victor
or a victim. A victor is one who is
a citizen of God's kingdom. A victim is
one who is a citizen of this world.

A victor is one who operates on the
level of creativity. A victim is one
who operates on the level of competition.

A victor is one who judges by TRUTH. A
victim is one who judges by appearance.

A victor is one whose choices are dictated
by DESTINY. A victim is one whose choices
are dictated by chance, environment and
speculation.

Be a victor.

A Successful Day

2009-03-12T14:00:00.001-07:00

A Successful Day

A successful day is one in which
no compromise was made with the agents
of moral disorder (satan & co).

A successful day is one in which God
was obeyed by faith, even one as little
as a mustard seed.

A successful day is one in which the tongue
was checked, tempers controlled and wrong
desires purified by holy thoughts.

A successful day is one in which we did not
allow what someone said or didn't say, what
someone did or didn't do to rob us of happiness.

Have a successful day!

What Tree?

2009-03-12T13:56:00.000-07:00

What Tree?

Did you know that Adam means soil?
That means every human being is really
a piece of field to be cultivated.

If we eat from the tree of life (Jesus
Christ himself the Branch), we sow into
the Adam (soil, field) of our lives seeds
of peace, satisfaction, security and abundant
life.

But if we eat from the other tree, the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil - pornography,
alcoholism, drugs, immorality etc (representing
satan, working through sin and resulting in
death), we sow into our lives seeds of perplexity,
complications and confusion. We allow satan to
gain firm possession of our minds and lives.

God's universe is very rational. Whatsoever one
sows into ones life, one reaps. Be wise today!

My Cool Job is back online!

2009-03-10T04:09:00.000-07:00

Happy New Year, readers! It’s taken longer than I thought to rustle up another job cool enough to made the grade here, but thanks to loyal reader Susan we’ve got one coming up in the next 24 hours!

I know I promised a video interview, and I assure you that it’s in the works, but technical difficulties with camera and software have set me back. I think I’ve got the camera, the software and the PC all playing nice together at last so you should see my video interview debut by the end of next week.

In the meantime….of course you can always stop by Carrie Like the Movie and see what subject I’ve become addicted to knowing all about lately. This week’s theme is dance in all of its many forms — go ahead and check it out (you know you want to…)!

Political Organizer

2009-03-10T04:07:00.000-07:00

Political Organizer

January 17, 2009 by jimsmuse

According to my research, the 2008 election had the highest voter turnout as a percentage of the voting age population since 1968.

132,618,580 voters arrived at the polls and one of the many, many hardworking people responsible for that historic voter turnout last November was today’s Cool Jobster, Political Organizer Mary McClelland who works for Rock the Vote.

If you’re looking to turn off your computer and go home at 5pm every night, then working in the field to organize voter registration may not be the Cool Job for you. However, if you have a passion for politics and think it is especially important to help young people become active in the voting process then you’ll not only enjoy today’s interview — you may just stop by at Rock the Vote and ask what you can do to get involved!

With a presidential inauguration just days away, the timing couldn’t have been better for a peek behind the scenes at the type of effort and dedication it took to actually “rock” the vote. Thanks for being today’s Cool Jobster, Mary!

When people ask you “what do you do?” how do you describe your job?

I work for Rock the Vote which is an organization who’s mission is to engage and build the political power of young people. We use music, pop culture and new technologies to bring (and keep) them in the process. My official title is ‘Deputy Political Director for Field Operations’ at Rock the Vote or as I lovingly refer to as the DPDFO (pronounced ‘dipped-fo’) - but rarely use that title as in my tenure here I’ve seen the organization grow from 4 people to 20 in the midst of the insanity that was the ‘08 election, so my role and responsibilities shifted constantly. In my day-to-day I oversee our field operations which means in election years I organize large scale voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts and work with our volunteer base around the country. Within that there is a lot of partnership work with other political organizations as well as implementing new technologies in our effort to organize 18-29 year olds in the political process. Now that the presidential election is over we are shifting our focus to issue advocacy to make sure the issues we care about get implemented.

What are the things about your job that you love?

I love the ability to be creative and implement new ideas - we have to break through the clutter to reach a younger audience and we can’t be boring. I love thinking about how to use new technologies to politicize people. The partnerships can be hilarious everything from WWE (yes, the wrestlers) to NFL players to actors and musicians. And of course the added bonus is I get to go to a lot of concerts for ‘work’. There are worse things than having to go to South by Southwest and having an all-access pass or having the Beastie Boys perform at your Inauguration party.

What are the things about your job that you hate?

Rock the Vote has been around for 19 years and is a name that people have usually heard of (I was actually caught off guard recently when a younger person hadn’t heard of us - a nice lesson) - with that comes some unrealistic expectations. Many people believe we are an arm of MTV but we actually have always been an independent, non-profit, non-partisan organization with a limited budget - I constantly have to say no to people who think we are flush with cash or expect some merchandise or staff to attend their event. At our peak in the election year we had 20 people to run a program that registered over 2 million people and implemented huge programs so the strain on resources is constant.

What education, training, vocation or just plain luck would someone have to have in order to get a job like yours?

For me it was luck and a passion for the issues. I have a B.A. in English Literature which does not scream political organizer but when I graduated I ended up with a position in California working for an environmental organization, when I moved to DC a few years later I stayed in the political field working for a non-profit that focused on campaign finance reform. Once you are in the DC political community it becomes quite small and through various networks you are able to work for different organizations on different issues. I ended up working for a group called Young Voter Strategies in the ‘06 election cycle and coming out of that the two organizations decided to integrate to add a political and research departments to Rock the Vote - I was in the right place at the right time and feel incredibly lucky.

For someone who would like to get into politics there are so many opportunities to get involved in campaigns if you are willing to start towards the bottom. There are many organizations that train organizers and give you entry into the political sphere - even volunteering with a campaign to learn the ropes could score a position. The type of degree you have is not as important as the type of passion and work ethic you have - these are not 9-5 positions and most likely don’t pay very well, but you can go home at the end of the day and feel like you did something.

What is the funniest story you can think of that involves your professional training or your job?

There are so many it’s hard to pick just one! There could be the time where I went to the Baltimore Raven’s training facilities to register their players to vote or the time I ended up driving around Jack Johnson through the city of Richmond talking about environmentally friendly burial processes or getting mobbed at a festival in Venice Beach doing voter registration with WWE wrestlers or being a part of ringing the opening bell at NASDAQ on Super Tuesday. A seriously crazy year.

No News

2009-03-10T04:06:00.001-07:00

No News

I have not yet heard anything of the new job as yet and for that I am somewhat relieved as I believe I have probably made up my mind to stay in my current job even if I am given an offer of employment. Unless they are offering maybe 7k more a year at least, then it is very unlikely that I will want to change jobs. And even then, the location for my current job is just ideal and I am likely to get some sort of payrise in June as well.

The long weekend has probably delayed the decision making process of the new job being Easter and all. I am not worried by this. In fact I am glad I have been able to spend Easter without thinking about the prospect of a big decision.

I had supervision on Saturday which went great and I have filled out my progress report for my psychology supervision. Over halfway now! Yay

Training

2009-03-10T04:05:00.002-07:00

Training

I found a flyer at work on a training seminar for two days learning about managing and assessing at risk Indigenous people. As an Australian prison, we have about 20% Indigenous community and their risk is significantly higher than other offenders. Due to their spirituality, they are also often misdiagnosed with mental illness.

The training sounds ideal for that part of my job and our Indigenous assessment officer is very interested also, however the training is extremely expensive and my manager said it is very unlikely they will send us along due to their budget being so low previously. However she suggested I submit a formal request for the training and see what happens.

It is unfortunate that a workplace does not spend the money to ensure staff personal development and training. They would have a better company overall.

Monday = Decision Time

2009-03-10T04:05:00.001-07:00

Monday = Decision Time

On Friday afternoon, the general manager of my work called me to discuss the training I applied for. He heard I was leaving and had no plan to give me training if I would not be sticking around. I told him I had not been given an offer and had decided I would rather stay at my current work anyway.

He told me he would approve and cover costs of this training if I agreed to sign a contract stating I would stay at my work for 12 months or repay the cost of the training. This offer is quite reasonable as it is expensive and a lot of companies do this type of thing if they put money into staff development. I told him that offer sounded good and talked to him about possiblities of pay rise.

He said there was no money left in the budget for our team because we were over by two staff members but if everyone else took on some of their workloads, then we could easily be given a pay rise with that remaining cash. I told him I would happily take on other people's workloads if it meant more money. That does not mean other people in the team will though. Pity.

I had a message to call the HR team of the other prison friday afternoon also. I had no time as it was a crazy afternoon and did not want to have to think about work stuff all weekend. From what my General manager said, he has been told I am going to the other company so it sounds like I will be getting an offer. I will call tomorrow.

The problem is I dont think I will be as happy in the other positon as it is far further to drive and I am quite content in my current job. But if they offer heaps more money then I will sort of be obliged to take the offer. I hoped they would not give me an offer at all but it sounds like they will. Tomorrow is going to be an incredibly stressful day for decision making. Lets hope they are only offering me another couple of thousand because then it won't be worth my while to change anyway due to the distance to travel and cost of petrol.

Investment Time

2009-03-10T04:04:00.001-07:00

Investment Time

At the moment here in Queensland, Australia, there is a bonus government incentive for first home buyers. If you build a home, you get a bonus $21k to use towards your home loan or set up costs, or if you buy an established home, you get a bonus $14k. Not only is this a massive incentive to buy a home, but our interest rates have started to drop after being at an extreme high for a long time.

So this puts me in a difficult place. It is the perfect time to buy a home, but I just got back from an overseas trip and don't have any savings behind me. I had the sudden brain waive that I might as well just buy now. The bonus ends in June so there isn't a lot of time. Since making that decision about 3 weeks ago, I have managed to save up $4000 from left over holiday spending money and savings since I've been back. I think this is a good start and at the very least I should be able to cover the set up fees for the home loan and other house costs with my partners help.

It is very exciting though. Going back a year, I owned a bomb of a car. Since then I own more than half of a brand new car and maybe will soon be a home owner too.

The Necessity of Giving Gratitude at Work

2009-03-10T03:40:00.003-07:00

The Necessity of Giving Gratitude at Work

My friend Rob told me that his co-worker complained about every little thing. It dragged him down. If someone left work early he would chime in. If someone didn’t send him the right format on a report he would grumble. No one went the extra mile for him because he would always find a way to complain about something.

Do you know anyone like this?

People complain at work because they focus on the “lack” instead of the “joy” that they get from their job. They do this for a number of reasons:

They don’t feel appreciated by their boss.
They’ve skewed their expectations of what they really want out of their job.
They don’t feel appreciated by their co-workers.
They aren’t happy with the work they are doing.

Pajama Day

2009-03-10T03:40:00.001-07:00

Pajama Day

In engineering building 40, Google has a “pajama day.” This consists of other Googlers wearing pajamas at work. How cool would it be to have a day when everyone is dressed up in pajamas? Awesome, right?

Even if you are a bank, you can take a certain angle to these events that might get your customers talking about you. “Don’t sleep on your interest rate, get a XYZ CD.”

I don’t know if that would work, but it sure would be fun for the employees and the customers that walked into the branch.

Give Employees The Freedom They Need to Succeed

2009-03-10T03:39:00.001-07:00

Give Employees The Freedom They Need to Succeed

Google gives its engineers 20% of their time to work on personal projects that have resulted in Google news, Gmail, and Google Finance. Google didn’t do this out of the goodness of their heart. They know they can’t stop their creative people from creating. So Google lets them come up with their own ideas and run with them like a drunk clutching a hot ember.

Their employees consistently reward them with fresh new concepts that have helped Google grow their market share.

A different type of fire drill

2009-03-10T03:34:00.000-07:00

A different type of fire drill
I found this picture in an old book, "Man before Metal" by Joly, and thought it would interest you. Obviously the technique was to twirl the stick (fire drill) kind of like a hand drill or brace with the hearth board resting against a tree or suitable back stop. He probably has some form of socket (in place of the hand hold) resting against his chest. I wish they had gone into further detail because I never saw this technique before. If anyone has ever seen this technique done or knows more about it please let me know.

Katrina Kaif wallpapers

2009-03-10T03:28:00.000-07:00

Katrina Kaif wallpapers

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Think Positive, Think Beautiful World!

2009-03-10T03:27:00.001-07:00

Three days and two nights in Pangkor Island and now, it was time to say goodbye. Goodbye golden beaches, goodbye dense tropical forest, goodbye swimming, kayaking and snorkeling. It was time now to go to the jetty in town which was 2 km away from Pantai Pasir Bogak to catch a ferry to Lumut. Hello again, Lumut. Sunday was such a busy day as could be seen by the crowd that had gathered and unlike the smiling faces of the visitors who had just arrived, ours were tired faces dying to get a transport home immediately. And they say parting is such sweet sorrow...

Catching a ferry to Lumut...

At the jetty in Lumut...

It's a Bread Day

2009-03-10T03:10:00.000-07:00

One Sunday morning, I woke up and my niece announced that we would just have bread for lunch. There woud be none of our staple rice and I thought, fine, why not ? since my niece makes very delicious bread and we would just have bread for half a day. Then, some days later, I got to eat bread three days in a row. It was Chinese New Year and Mau Wei, Eng Lai and I were out at Taiping Sentral. Eng Lai craved some buns and we went to Old Kopi Tiam, a coffee shop purportedly well known for bread. The next day, the three of us and Hoi Thien went for a Louis Koo Tin Lok movie, All's well ends well in Taiping Sentral and ended up in the same coffee shop again, eating what else but buns. When Eng Lai asked me to go out for our favourite local dish laksa in Pokok Assam market the next day, I was all too eager but there was a big disapointment awaiting us. The dish was sold out and we ended up eating buns again in a coffee shop in Taiping. It was really a bread day but if you believe that stones could be turned into bread, you'd probably think this a blessing!

Trail along the Chenango River takes another step

2009-03-10T03:09:00.000-07:00

Trail along the Chenango River takes another step

March 8, 2009 by newyorkoutdoors

By: Melissa deCordova, The Evening Sun, link to original article

The Chenango Greenway Conservancy recently completed a long-anticipated licensing agreement with the City of Norwich to create a trail along the Chenango River.

“This is some very exciting news. The development represents the partial fulfillment of a major dream that has been shared by many people in the Norwich community for many years,” said Conservancy Director Tom Holmes.

Over the past many years, portions of the Greenway have been developed into the Hosbach Trail, the Norwich Greenway, and the Chenango Riverwalk. By whatever name, the plan has centered around preserving and enhancing public access to land along the Chenango River and the open space that surrounds the community.

Holmes said that the agreement with the City of Norwich, together with the previous agreement with the Norwich City School District, assures access to about five miles of frontage along the Chenango River, and will “serve as a major catalyst for the completion of other similar agreements to expand the trail corridor along the river.”

Hudson Valley Kayak Rentals

2009-03-10T03:07:00.000-07:00

Rentals offered at the Kenco store in Kingston or Saturdays at the Rondout Creek
(Memorial Day-Labor Day weather permitting)

From the store (per day):
Solo Rec Kayak $55
Tandem and Touring Kayaks $65
Includes: paddle, PFD, cartop foam blocks and straps

At The Rondout Creek:
Solo Rec Kayak
One Hour $20
Three Hours $35
Full Day $55

Tandem & Touring Kayaks
One Hour $30
Three Hours $45
Full Day $65
Includes: paddle & PFD

Why I wrote the book

2009-03-09T12:25:00.002-07:00

How Not To Teach by Mr Read will be published by Continuum on September 15. The aim of this blog is to give teachers an idea of the publishing process and how to promote a book. As a first time author I’m looking for advice and help myself, too!

Why write? Reading books, newspapers and magazines on schools so few of the articles seemed to speak to me. I couldn’t relate to them, they weren’t about my reality. There’s plenty of bland, insipid, non-controversial journalism out there. Or failing that there’s pieces by worthy academics, motivational head teachers, government ministers or the great and the good, but where oh where is the voice of the ordinary teacher (no longer at the chalk face but staring into the glare of the whiteboard projector)?

In some sections of education there’s a familiar terrain that you can navigate around, a certain written tradition or record that’s been laid down. For secondary schools you have ‘Kes’, ‘Blackboard Jungle’ and most recently the TV series ‘Teachers’. For the public schools, ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’, ‘Jennings’ and ‘Harry Potter’. When it comes to primary schools all I could find was ‘Miss Read’ – a twee account of a small village school in the 1950s (that was her reality - but not just another planet, another universe away for me) and Gervaise Phinn with his whimsical accounts of schools in the Yorkshire Dales he visited as an HMI then Ofsted inspector.

Could I find anyone out there listening to teachers? The General Teaching Council is the self-styled ‘voice of teachers’. I sent in an article for their magazine that sporadically appears through our doors, only to be informed that it wasn’t their policy to print articles from teachers. Apparently they were worried they wouldn’t be ‘objective’.

Writing the blurb

2009-03-09T12:25:00.001-07:00

An important part of selling a book is ‘the blurb’ - promoting your book in a few sentences. When I read Continuum’s it just didn’t leap off the page, it was the John Major of blurbs – safe, boring and non-descript. No offence but what had the copywriter been working on before – the Horlicks account?

So I wrote my own…

Promoting the book

2009-03-09T12:24:00.001-07:00

As a columnist you have to suffer the slings and arrows of attacks from outrageous bloggers. ‘Nervously_waiting’ has accused me of being a tad obsessive about maintaining authority over my writing. I’ll be absolutely up-front, in this aspect of my life I’m a fully paid-up, 100%, anally retentive control freak. But pray dear reader consider the following mitigating circumstances that have contributed towards this horrendous affliction:

Most articles or book proposals disappear into the ether without even a cursory ‘thanks, but no thanks’
You get a standard rejection letter that prompts the reaction, ‘have they actually read it?’
They print your article as a “letter” ie, you don’t get paid for it
Some faceless editor hacks it to bits and leaves out key phrases and ideas
They take ages to pay up and only respond to a threatening letter
You get a gushing reply, “super, wonderful piece, must include it”, you wait, and wait… and wait, finally in response they admit they can’t remember the piece anyway
Then there’s the magazine that will remain nameless, that printed an excerpt, used my real name and didn’t even mention How Not To Teach…

Weblog – The proofs

2009-03-09T12:23:00.000-07:00

I’m knackered! It’s the end of term and I’ve got the proofs to read through and correct. Not that I should be complaining because this term I’ve been the floating teacher, covering all the classes from Nursery to Year 6. If ever you need to rediscover your zest for teaching try foundation stage or infants – I’ve loved it! It’s really sad that only 3% of teachers there are men and yes, I’d happily sign the adoption forms.

Zen and the Art of Playground Duty

2009-03-09T12:22:00.004-07:00

Zen and the Art of Playground Duty
The next book after How Not To Teach - any publishers out there?

Introduction
Based on the reaction to How Not To Teach, in particular letters from teachers.

Holiday in USA
Last year we went to San Francisco, travelled in an RV for a week and spent 3 days in Las Vegas (hated that bit) – it was our 25th wedding anniversary – some humorous incidents along the way.

Autumn

Closure
Welcome back - the council inform us we’re facing closure.

Literacy Training
How the training is organised by ‘consultants’, we’re marked down as an “intensive support” school. I feel like walking out.

School visitors
Some of the strange visitors we get - Mr Crabtree with his wildlife slides, Mr Cuddles who barely got out alive.

Ruth Kelly
Is she the worst Education Secretary ever? I might not have read the Da Vinci Code but something isn’t right. Why does she talk so slowly? Who is pulling the strings?

Teacher Training
Why do student teachers carry round such large files, what the hell are we trying to produce robots or teachers?

Let's Dream of Freedom

2009-03-09T12:22:00.003-07:00

Well here it is… my book has arrived in the post, after all the waiting it’s a bit like seeing your new born for the first time. My mum (bless her) has been sending the cards advertising the book to my old schools, family, friends, acquaintances, people passing in the street and even if it’s savaged by the reviews I know my mum still thinks it’s fantastic – you can always depend on your mum.

The ‘Ranting Teacher’ author of ‘Everything You Need to Know to Survive Teaching’ wasn’t impressed with my attack on survival guides and complained that, “it's hardly sensible to be negative about somebody whose book is also published by your publisher” (Continuum). I’ve got to disagree, a writer’s loyalty is to the truth, their truth. The ‘Ranting Teacher’s’ book may be one of the better written ‘survival guides’ but in my opinion if you start from the premise that teachers’ main problems are hormonally charged pupils and feckless parents then don’t write books, find a new career.

Changing Rooms

2009-03-09T12:22:00.001-07:00

Changing Rooms

The new content-lite Times Educational Supplement? For me it was akin to that moment in ‘Changing Rooms’ when that nice couple from Purley open their eyes and confront the scale of the horror – Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen has converted their bijou living room into an imitation nineteenth-century French brothel. Or that familiar old boozer you used to frequent is re-branded and acquires some ludicrous name like the ‘Slug and Parrot’ and is full of uncomfortable chairs, garish lighting and the only drinks on sale are expensive lagers in weirdly-shaped bottles.

The TES has obviously been clobbered by the ‘curse of the consultants’ and the conclusion has been drawn that there are far too many old farts like me and younger trendy hip teachers need to be recruited as readers. Yep, they’re tired of reading about early retirement, teachers moaning about pensions and trawling through all those adverts for hearing aids, stair lifts and incontinence pads.

I’ll have to concede that I liked the new lifestyle magazine, sure attract new readers, but what the hell has happened to the news section? There’s dumbing down and there’s completely losing the plot. The TES used to be a serious journal of record, comment, debate and analysis. I read it because it covered issues in the kind of detail we couldn’t get from the daily newspapers, I’m not sure this is the case any more. How much was the word content slashed? One third? One half?

The re-vamped news section was an embarrassment, like watching an old treasured maiden aunt attempting to break dance or David Cameron trying to get down ‘wiv der yoof’. Worst of all was the letters page (now re-named ‘Inbox’) with only six letters on show.

The old TES may have been a bit staid and establishment orientated with a plethora of articles from government ministers and too many pieces directed at heads and senior managers instead of the troops in the trenches, but this was a bit like waiting for your caffeine fix and getting a cup composed of vast amounts of froth instead of coffee. Or to put it another way, as the Americans say, ‘Where’s the beef?’ Will you attract a new younger audience or just lose the older dedicated readers?

This must be the most disastrous ‘makeover’ since Coca-Cola changed their recipe. If ever you wanted an example of ‘death by focus group’ this was it.

Go Independent

2009-03-09T12:21:00.002-07:00

Go Independent

'How Not To Teach' is available online from the usual suspects - Amazon, Abe Books, Waterstones and Tesco. It's also available in some branches of Waterstones. However, if you can try to buy it from an independent bookseller. Why? Because they help to influence diversity and choice. Waterstones have just gobbled up Ottakers - leaving some towns and cities with a choice of Waterstones, or... Waterstones. If you live in Merseyside, try News From Nowhere, they are an independent cooperative and stock some brilliant and unusual books.

Yulephobic

2009-03-09T12:21:00.001-07:00

It’s probably a sign of advancing years, but I’ve become more Yulephobic. It was different when my children were young; there was the excitement of Christmas Eve, leaving out a carrot for Rudolph and a mince pie for Father Christmas, trying to get them to go to sleep, the joy on their faces in the morning, opening their stockings and tearing the wrapping paper off the presents.

As you get older it’s really difficult to buy people presents, if you don’t spend enough you look like a cheapskate or if you do buy or receive an expensive present, it’s not exactly what you wanted - if any relatives are reading this blog all presents have been gratefully received, even the fridge magnets…

What I really hate about Christmas is the commercially induced mass hysteria that seems to infect people, there’s a lemming like rush towards shopping centres and malls. I steer clear of them at the best of times but the weeks before Christmas they become a ‘No-Go’ area. I’m more of an outdoors type of person, instead you’re all cooped up together in one room watching those horrendous TV ‘specials’ or those films that have been on every Christmas from time immemorial (it’s ‘Groundhog Day’ as the ‘Guns of Navarone’ is repeated on a loop).

Groucho and Me

2009-03-09T12:20:00.001-07:00

I thought it might be humble pie time because ‘Teacher’s TV’ e-mailed back to say they’d be putting my article on ‘Stress’ on their web site, they promised to “get back to me”, those fatal words, a week on and I’ve heard nothing. I don’t know anyone that actually watches ‘Teacher’s TV’ certainly not the programmes on stress, the main five programmes attracted 12 votes and 0 comments.

One thing writing my book and this blog has taught me is just how difficult it is to get your voice heard – by anyone.

Bastardstones

2009-03-09T12:17:00.002-07:00

Bastardstones

Why ‘How Not To Teach’? I couldn’t find any books written by primary teachers about the realities of life in the average, ordinary urban school, so I decided to write it myself. In the front of bookshops there were piles of the ‘Village School’ series by ‘Miss Read’ (that gave me the idea for the nom de plume) but really they are just a kind of comfort read. They play on that nostalgia for some kind of lost utopia exemplified by John Major when he managed to misquote George Orwell by eulogising about the myth of, ‘warm beer, cricket grounds and old maids cycling to communion’. It would be interesting to re-visit Miss Read’s school, if it still exists, it’s probably been closed down the children bussed to a distant town and the playing fields sold for expensive housing that few of the locals can afford.

Contemporary books tend to either the list variety, ‘101 ways to …’ or the ‘Getting the Buggers To…’ true enough it’s a catchy title, but it’s a fairly bleak appraisal on how to communicate with children.

Getting your book published is of course only the start of the assault course, after that there’s the task of getting your book reviewed and selling the darned thing. The TES reviewed the book online and I can’t complain about Gerald Haigh’s piece, although I felt he over-emphasised the humorous aspects of the book.

After months of promises the National Union of Teachers finally carried a review in their magazine ‘Teacher’ (they too have been struck by the ‘dumbing down’ blight because the new editor seems to work on the premise that teachers have the attention span of a gnat, therefore no article is over 500 words). I should have kept it to quote the review in full but I just threw it away in disgust. The reviewer concluded that the book depressed her and made her want to leave teaching! My first reaction was to think of Oliver James conclusion in his book ‘Affluenza’ that depression is a perfectly logical reaction to a sick society. Then I had to question whether the reviewer had actually read the book or just skimmed through it.

I didn’t try to write a piece of ‘misery lit’, the book does question the general background with SATs, Ofsted and ‘strategies’ but there’s also material about my school, humour and lastly examples of where I’ve walked the walk and talked the talk – the TES Newsday, the film we made and the trip to Ireland. If in doubt view the book outline.

Apart from viewing the sales on Amazon it’s hard to track the sales. As for that other monster monopolist Waterstone’s, they don’t seem interested in stocking the book, it’s currently in 16 branches. I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise because Robert Topping who ran their Manchester store for 16 years was unceremoniously sacked in 2000, he actually wanted to choose the books he stocked, he was under pressure to promote the ‘best seller’ list. There was also the infamous case of blogger, Joe Gordon, who was sacked for dubbing them ‘Bastardstones’.

Going into Waterstone’s branches is pretty depressing, all you see are the massive piles of ‘3 for 2’ offers by those great exponents of the literary form Jeremy Clarkson, Gordon Ramsey and Jeffrey Archer. Talk about ‘dumbing down’! Waterstone’s really have lost the plot, their ‘revamp’ of stores seems to have reduced the number of books by about 50%.

If you do want to buy the book online then please use ‘News from Nowhere’ they’re a cooperative and their shop in Bold Street, Liverpool is an absolute joy for the browser.

The Lack of Debate

2009-03-09T12:17:00.001-07:00

‘Some Random Thoughts’ posted,

‘It’s a real shame this site doesn't get the comments that Frank Chalk does. It would be good to see some interesting debate, from educated people, instead of the mixture of religious nut jobs, and BNP members that seem to be making up the readership over there!’

After I mentioned Frank Chalk the man himself was in touch, apparently the link didn’t work, it should have gone to the review of ‘It’s Your Time Your Wasting’. I found his book a ‘breath of fresh air’ in one way. As I wrote,

‘Teachers will identify with one of the central themes, management in denial – the generals miles away from the front line whilst the Poor Bloody Infantry suffer in the mud-filled trenches dodging the bullets and incoming artillery shells.’

However, his solutions really are the ‘Daily Mail’ rant. One thing I do admire him for though, he got out of teaching and some of his ‘supporters’ who think all children on council estates are scummy chavs should do the same thing.

In my reply to ‘Some Random Thoughts’ I mused about the lack of debate,

‘What does this say about the teaching profession? Sometimes I wonder.’

Mrs D posted,

‘It says that we like to leave our work at work and chill out when at home. There is plenty of debate when we are actually at school. However, debate rarely means action which is what people actually want.’

No problem there, most days and certainly at weekends I do just want to chill out, but there’s also days when I want to ‘rage against the dying of the light’. Ofsted, SATs, bureaucracy, consultants, targets, strategies, the list is pretty endless.

As for debates in schools I don’t really know, it varies. In my school the staff all sat there and accepted tests every six weeks, I was a lone voice of protest. I’ve boycotted the staff room ever since.

I agree about action being louder than words but where is there any prospect of action? Only in individual schools i.e., TLRs. But look at the NUT national ballot to boycott SATs only a 20% turnout, partly due to apathy, partly fear and a large factor that the NUT leadership has been asleep for twenty years.

The reason I started this blog was to stir debate and even though some of the main posts appear on the TES web site there is little discussion. The TES Staffroom (over 295,000 registered users) is the only site where teachers can participate, the unions don’t do it, nor, unsurprisingly that ‘voice of the teachers’ the General Teaching Council. The only problem is that it tends to be the trivial, trite and bizarre that attract comment, here’s a biased selection from the Opinion section -

Dogs on leads - 86 posts

Joke of the Day - 365 posts

Missing Toddler Thread – 5270 posts

Girl Power!? - 8 posts

The god delusion - 601 posts

Sports cars with old drivers! – 20 posts

Why do ordinary people look so weird? – 30 posts

Yeah’ ‘All Human Life is Here’ meanwhile our children are short changed by a sterile education system and half NQTs leave within five years.

Sorry to depress anyone who is reading this, but it is the end of term so, like most teachers, I’m a bit knackered, and it won't stop raining.

Cash for Grades

2009-03-09T12:14:00.000-07:00

Cash for GradesThe Blog Awards!

Welcome to the TES Blog Awards! I was going to book Russell Brand and organise a night of drink-fuelled excess in a classy hotel. Sadly, the budget has severely constrained any such notion.

Why blog? Our detractors on the TES Staffroom accuse of being self-opinionated, deluded, obsessives – well guilty as charged.

Of course it’s common knowledge that the average blog only lasts six months, is read by no one apart from the author and is of such poor quality that the blogger has a snowball in hell’s chance of ever cutting a book deal.

Against that there is the democracy of the Internet, your brilliant manuscript, instead of gathering dust in a musty old drawer has a potential audience of millions… if they can but find it amidst all the ephemera, junk and downright weird stuff that clutters cyberspace.

I can exclusively reveal that a new agency has been established to rigorously monitor and audit the effectiveness of teaching blogs – Ofblog. Due to my limited technical ability and low level of computer competence, I decided to appoint myself as Chief Inspector. In the best traditions of Ofsted I volunteered to stay in a five star hotel for a week whilst I was undertaking the blog inspection – sadly, the TES declined my generous offer and I’ve had to fit the inspection around writing the end of year reports, looking after my sick cat and moaning about the weather.

There are plenty of secondary teacher blogs – the infamous ‘Frank Chalk’, the slightly misnamed ‘Ranting Teacher’, the excellent ‘Life and Other Prime Numbers’ (who proves it is possible to be a young teacher and have a life, ‘Last half term I danced until I dropped’) and the slightly more political ‘Some Random Thoughts’.

Despite trawling through ‘Britblog’, ‘Sites for Teachers’ and Googling away, it’s hard to find many primary teacher blogs. There are plenty of excellent resources – Primary Teacher, Primary Resources, Primary Classroom Resources, Sparklebox, Classroom Displays, etc. But once you get beyond next week’s lesson there’s not much personal gossip or social commentary (when Unicef says we have the unhappiest children in the world some of us want to go beyond the cheapest laminates and day-glo stickers).

In the best traditions of Ofsted (once again) I’ll start by highlighting failure. Regrettably, I’ll have to single out the TES’s own Henry Walpole (last posting 17/11/06) for one of Ofblog’s infamous ‘notices to improve’. Henry, I know you’re busy writing your book and TES column but please write out 100 times, ‘I must not neglect my blog’.

‘Little Miss Teacher’ is a Year 1 teacher exiled in Bangkok, after the blog stopped in March I was going to send an e-mail, ‘please get in touch’, but thankfully she’s reappeared.

‘101 Things To Do While Teaching’ promised the ‘Definitive guide to the best things to do while teaching, if you are not so tired you could collapse in a heap in front of the whiteboard’. After seven posts (last one 12/1/07) it seems she’s done just that.

‘PGCE Blog’ again showed early promise but there was a sign of things to come in his last post (19/11/06) ‘to be honest there is just so much work to do for school I've just not got the energy in the evening!’ With all those assessments, evaluations and planning sheets I’m not surprised.

Stumbling into the limelight are this year’s survivors (a good metaphor for teaching?) and in the spirit of ‘deferred success’ I’ll leave nominating an overall winner-

‘Smoke and Mirrors’ – a.ka. ‘Aspiring Head’ is from the independent sector, but in the spirit of inclusiveness I won’t exclude him from the competition

‘Year 6 Teacher’ – plenty of advice on how to pass SATs (OK someone has to do the job, just include me out of this one)

‘Tim Rylands – the mystical adventures of a west country primary teacher and muscian’ - has some really snazzy photographs, plus he gets to visit all kinds of exotic places, the lucky so-and-so!

‘Tales from the Plain - The ramblings of a teacher living in the Cheshire Plain, hanging in there and wondering what it's all about. Frequently out of step with the rest of the world (or so it seems) I just muddle through as best I can...’ - is one of my favourites although I’m not so keen on the knitting patterns…

and… er, that’s about it. Modesty forbids me to mention too much about ‘How Not To Teach’ suffice it say that it not just the TES blogs but jokes, film reviews, walking, news and the predictable rants against Ofsted.

If there are any more primary blogs out there let me know and I’ll link to them on my blog, remembering that essential piece of blogging etiquette, ‘If I link to yours, you’ll link to mine.’

Bastardstone's – an update

2009-03-09T12:11:00.000-07:00

Bastardstone's – an update

‘How Not To Teach’ is currently available in ten branches of Waterstone’s. The publishers tell me they have tried to get it into more but they have found it ‘difficult’.

It’s sad to see the way Waterstone’s have gone, they used to stock a wide range of books and encouraged diversity. In response to the supermarkets attempting to muscle in on their market, by selling the top 100 books, Waterstone’s have gone down the 3 for 2 route, featuring massive discounts for Jeremy Clarkson, Jeffrey Archer and Jamie Oliver.

The idea is that by using loss leaders they will attract people in to buy other books, faint chance of that. In the new ‘revamped’ stores (Liverpool is one example) the number of books has been slashed. Why go in? There is no point in browsing, cut the trouble go to the Internet.

If you do have a problem buying ‘How Not To Teach’ use News From Nowhere, they are a cooperative based in Bold St Liverpool.

Long live the independent booksellers!

Knotty Ash Blue

2009-03-09T12:10:00.002-07:00

Knotty Ash Blue

I started writing in the Everton fanzine ‘When Skies Are Grey’ in 2004. So this is an introduction to my other alter-ego ‘Knotty Ash Blue’. It’s not just a one-club blog, I’ve widened out to write about issues like racism, ticket prices, drugs, LFC and England.

Here’s a selection of my articles-

Frontal Lobotomy – March 2004 - Coming back to football after a few years

My national pride – May 2004 – Why I’m not the greatest England fan…

Ooh the ‘ell are you? – August 2004 – Season’s end and it’s not looking good

Team game – December 2004 – Football Pundits (er… including me) are proved wrong Everton make a fantastic start to the season

Careering – March 2005 – How fans get ripped off with ticket prices

The Red Side a plea for tolerance – April 2005 – The first scarf laid at Anfield in remembrance of Hillsborough was a blue one…

Kick them Out! – May 2005 – Why the club shouldn’t tolerate racism

The pink medicine – October 2005 – Club takeovers

The Fat, Little, Badly Guy – December 2005 – Footballers should retire gracefully

The boring, boring Premiership – February 2006 – Is it any good if Man U and Chelsea have got it all sown up?

The ‘Magic’ of the FA Cup – April 2006 – Not

The Main Enemy is at Home – June 2006 – Will I be cheering Wayne Rooney in the World Cup?

Legends and Cults – August 2006 – Why Duncan Ferguson isn’t a legend but is a cult player

Bad Breath and Shrinking Testicles – October 2006 – The impact of drug taking

You Could Have Been a God… - November 2006 – A retrospective on Wayne Rooney

MOYES MUST GO! – February 2007 – Well… not just yet

You Goin? Tara then – April 2007 – Liverpool City Council aren’t busting a gut to keep Everton in the city

Do You and Rose Have a ‘your song’? – May 2007 – The LFC takeover

Dawn of the Dead – June 2007 – Your guide to diving

Google Books

2009-03-09T12:10:00.001-07:00

Google Books
‘How Not To Teach’ is now on Google Books, so you can read some sections of it. There’s divided opinion amongst authors about the service, does it breach copyright and how much do authors earn? Based on royalties received so far I wont be retiring to that villa in the south of France just yet.

Stuck for a Christmas present? Try ‘How Not To Teach’ by ‘Mr Read’

2009-03-09T12:09:00.001-07:00

Stuck for a Christmas present? Try ‘How Not To Teach’ by ‘Mr Read’

I can heartily recommend this book…

‘If you thought reading Gervaise Phinn was like drinking a warm cup of tea, this book will knock you over with the force of a vodka slammer. Mr Read survives the nightmare of planning, Ofsted and an incompetent head...He also takes the class to Ireland, the House of Commons and wins a film award. We guarantee "Christmas Lights", "The School Trip" and "Stressbusters" will make you laugh out loud. A searing indictment of our joyless, exam ridden primary curriculum...'it will take a bareknuckle fight to save its soul.' Down-to-earth and outrageously funny, this guide will prove essential reading for all teachers everywhere.’

Telling the Inconvenient Truth

2009-03-09T12:04:00.000-07:00

Cynic or sceptic? I’ve come under attack in the TES Staffroom as the former. For the record I’ve never had any time for teachers who just whinge, in my time as a teacher I’ve always tried to ‘walk the walk and talk the talk’. If you want to judge my record – read the book.

It’s just that I don’t think I have to justify myself with reams of planning and to me testing children to death is a waste of time and effort. I didn’t come into teaching to ‘fill the pail’ but to ‘light the fire’.

As ever the TES Staffroom is the home for tedious pedants, one of them picked holes in my writing. Well I don’t profess to be the greatest writer and by its nature blogging doesn’t always give you the time to reflect, revise and edit. Strange though, they never offer any pearls of wisdom themselves.

If people want to correct me on factual errors that’s fine (thanks for the correction – it’s Higher Level not Higher Learning Teaching Assistants) and challenge me on ideas any time, that’s part of the process of genuine debate.

And while I’m on genuine debate, thanks to the Teaching Assistants Forum posters for their constructive comments. To mention the TES Staffroom again, most of the longer threads involve two people exchanging insults – haven’t they got anything better to do with their time, like marking tests?

Thanks for a great comment from Beckton Boy about my post on CPD, he’s written a tremendous piece on ‘training’, more please.

This is all coming round to this announcement - I’m suspending the blog for a few months, I’m involved in another project that will take all of my time, no it isn’t illegal and I haven’t been sacked… well, not yet anyway.

So let’s hope more primary teacher bloggers will pick up their pens and tell the ‘Inconvenient Truth’.

Titanic

2009-03-09T12:03:00.000-07:00

Titanic
Those handbooks, teachers’ aids and pedagogical crutches from Ginn and Letts dominate literacy teaching in primary schools. Whenever I see ‘100 Literacy Hours’ I blanch, they’re like those no-preparation boil-in-the-bag meals for people who live on their own, everything’s done for you, all you need to do is re-heat it. The problem is they are bland, tasteless and stodgy.

There’s a week’s lessons on the sinking of the Titanic, but it is indescribably dull, chock full of facts, no photographs, one sketchy drawing and some wordy and unreadable newspaper accounts. I’m sure the same people could describe the creation of the Universe and turn it into a dull, boring exercise replete with tick boxes, levelled writing and key skills for assessment – REALLY BORING.

Departing from the script I decided to use the services of that Hollywood blockbuster starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslett. Yes, it’s a schmaltzy film with a completely improbable romance – boy from steerage meets fiancé of mega rich tycoon and they fall in love. The characters are either ‘goodies’ or ‘baddies’ without an anti-hero to lend any credibility and the film takes whopping liberties with the truth, but like the children I soon got hooked.

I’ll not give a series of detailed Lesson Plans (11.36 a.m. raise right hand and ask the following question…) with exhaustive learning objectives and bullet points, because after years of the Literacy Strategy one sight of them and my eyes glaze over, the brain goes into neutral and I know an advanced state of narcolepsy is imminent. The Literacy Strategy designed by robots, delivered by robots.

There’s so many teaching and learning opportunities from the film – question and answer sessions, newspaper accounts, drama and story writing. We watched the film in half hour blocks. The film has got four strong story lines-

1) Rose as a young girl and as the old woman returning when the wreck is searched (the film uses flashbacks very effectively).
2) The Titanic and the society that it represented – Third Class tickets $32, the most expensive First Class tickets $4,500.
3) The Heart of the Ocean diamond and its fate.
4) Rose and Jack, why did she try to commit suicide? “For some people it was a ship of dreams, for me it was a slave ship… inside I was screaming.”

We discussed why the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic sank; it was designed to stay afloat if four compartments were flooded, the iceberg pierced five; the watch didn’t have binoculars; the rudder was too small. A catalogue of disasters all eminently avoidable.

The BBC web site has some excellent information about the most controversial aspect of the film, was the chairman of the White Star Line, J Bruce Ismay a villain? In the film Ismay climbs into one of the lifeboats just as people begin to panic. The inquiry held shortly after the sinking completely exonerated Ismay, he helped to supervise the evacuation of the ship and no passengers were left in that part of the ship, some passengers said he was ordered into the lifeboat. The newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst had a personal dislike of Ismay and those passengers trying to claim insurance payments tried to heap all of the blame onto Ismay.

In the film Captain Edward Smith is portrayed as a hero, pressurised to make the fastest crossing. The reality was that the Titanic could never break any speed records because its top speed was 23 knots against 26 knots for the fastest passenger ships. Smith chose to ignore warnings about icebergs, didn’t slow the ship or heave to as other boats in the area did. He panicked under pressure and didn’t organise the evacuation of the ship with the result that some of the first lifeboats launched were only half full. This was compounded by the fact that there weren’t enough lifeboats. 94% of women and children from first class survived, but only 47% from steerage. They didn’t realise how stark the situation was and it took time to get to the upper decks where the lifeboats were stored.

The closest ship to the Titanic was the California but it had shut its radio system down for the night and mistook the distress flares for fireworks. The Carpathia was 58 miles away and picked up the survivors hours later.

We viewed again the sinking of the Titanic and wrote a recount of the sinking – the bow tilting at an angle; the band playing on; people jumping into the freezing ocean; the funnel collapsing; the roar as all the furniture, plates and cutlery slid down the ship; the lights going out; the ship breaking in two and the interval between the bow and stern sinking. I got the children to imagine themselves as a child on one of the lifeboats, what would they see, how would they feel?

Rose reminisces and says, “He saved me in every way,” from that I got the children to recall the scenes from the film, one in particular when she watches a young girl in her starched dress, with a lace napkin on her knee being instructed by the mother on the finer points of etiquette. At the end of the film Rose climbs on to the railings on the stern and takes out the Heart of the Ocean, what are her options? Give it to the crew, keep it or drop it into the sea. We had a really wide-ranging discussion.

The children were absolutely engrossed by it, even the ones who never do homework researched information themselves. It’s that old lesson; Depart From The Script – Teach What You’re Interested In. Extra resources – ensure a steady supply of tissues.

Titanic Trip

2009-03-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

The children were all hyper about the trip to the Maritime Museum’s Titanic Exhibition. Just before the train arrived at the station I got them to line up with partners.

The train was full of senior citizens who gazed beneficently at our horde. Peter went into overdrive and began chattering like Graham Norton on speed, “Is that signal down sir, sir? Is another train coming? Did you see on the news about that train crash with all those people killed sir, SIR? I’m watching Saints next week, they’re world champions.”

The old gentleman sitting next to him is also a Saints fan; he tries and fails to get a word in edgeways.

“Sir look at that house it’s MASSIVE, they must be posh! Look at that sign sir, 58 steps from the station to the road, sir, sir.”

“Peter, do you get out much?”

The woman next to me smiles.

We count everyone off the train and head for the underground, down the steep escalators, into the darkness of the echoing station. Keith’s mum was concerned about the short trip into Liverpool and whether he would return unscathed and intact. Keith chooses this moment to collapse into the arms of a teaching assistant, he sits there whimpering on the train seat.

Blinking into the sunlight we walk to the Maritime Museum. The Titanic exhibition has changed to include the sinking of the Empress (it collided with another ship in thick fog in May 1914 in the St Lawrence Seaway, Canada, over 1,000 people died) and the Lusitania (torpedoed by a German submarine in May 1915 with 1,201 dying).

The children rush round without even reading anything, I herd them back to watch a film about the search for the wreck of the Titanic. There’s an apron from a servant who survived the sinking and artefacts like rivets and uniforms. They race through the ‘Battle of the Atlantic 1940’ and the ships’ models. The ‘Shipwrecked’ exhibition is excellent, they dress up as animals and have to answer clues to win a badge and certificate. This keeps them occupied for ages.

All morning I’m trying to stave off, “I’m hungry”. By 11 o’clock it’s changed to, “We’re starving” and half an hour later signs of serious malnutrition are evident. We’ve booked a room to eat our packed lunches at 12.30, but it’s a beautiful day and instead we sit on the benches on the riverfront. I warn them not to feed the pigeons and then give the command – ‘EAT’.

After polishing off enough food to… sink a ship, they clamber over statues, imitate Billy Fury (we all thought it was Elvis at first). Later on we race round the Customs exhibition, Slavery and Emigration. By the end of all this they are beginning to wilt and I’m marvelling at how many times they can visit the toilet.

We walk back to the underground and even Keith isn’t fazed by the lifts and escalators. Thinking on I should have been better prepared, split them into mixed ability groups with clues to search for, the museum’s worksheet was too difficult.

As we get back to school we can see Keith’s mother waiting anxiously, I’m worried he’ll collapse in a heap, but he’s quite matter of fact. Luckily even Peter is shattered and has stopped talking – at last.

Primary MFL

2009-03-09T11:58:00.000-07:00

A few summers ago I stood in the queue at a Belgian Tourist Information Office listening in awe, the callow youth behind the counter effortlessly switched between Flemish, French, German, Dutch and English. He wasn’t unusual and when we got to Holland everyone seemed to speak English.

You can always tell the English abroad, they speak VERY LOUDLY, use a mixture of English and ‘foreign’ words and gesticulate.

The proposal to make foreign language teaching part of the primary curriculum is to be welcomed. My only doubt is whether this will be another “initiative” that withers on the vine due to lack of funding and inadequate training – who is going to teach it?

Foreign language teaching in primary schools began to appear during the 1960s. However, a paper from the National Foundation for Educational Research in 1974 delivered a crucial set back. It claimed that achievement in foreign languages in secondary schools bore no relation to learning at primary level. When the National Curriculum was introduced in 1988 there was no provision for foreign languages.

The advantages of teaching languages to primary children are now undisputed -

· They are more flexible in their use of language and are not as frightened of making mistakes as older children, they are willing to experiment with the sounds and pronunciation.
· They may be more motivated to learn a language, where the emphasis is not so much on the written language and there is a greater ‘fun’ element.
· The longer children learn a language the greater chance they have of absorbing vocabulary and pronunciation.
· Primary teachers can embed the language into the curriculum and can use commands and instructions in another language.
· Children have an entitlement to learn other languages and to experience other cultures.
· There is a strong socio-economic advantage for people who are fluent in another language.

Successful teaching strategies have involved use of games and songs. Lessons are also based on speaking and only introduce writing when children are secure in their oral understanding.

During the ‘Dark Ages’ for Primary MFL in the 1980s Kent was almost unique in developing a county-wide scheme of excellence in language teaching, they pioneered extensive use of audio-visual resources to assist teachers; regular courses to train teachers; integrating foreign languages into the rest of the curriculum; embedding foreign languages in the daily life of the school, and use of specialist teachers and assistants to supplement the work of classroom teachers.

In Scotland primary teachers were trained to deliver effective language teaching based on a 27-day course. The advantage of using primary teachers rather than specialists was their expertise in primary pedagogy, their relationships and knowledge of their pupils and their ability to integrate and imbed languages in to the life of the school.

In 2004 changes to Key Stage 3 teaching allowed secondary schools to offer one instead of two foreign languages and children could stop taking lessons at 14. As a result from 2004 when 80% of children took a GCSE it has now fallen to only half. There’s also a clear class divide, only 25% of pupils on Free School Meals took a GCSE in foreign languages compared to 80% in independent schools. Schools have concentrated on French and Spanish so other languages like German have lost out.

At ‘A’ Level there are only 30,000 studying and just 3% of degrees are in foreign languages. Therefore there are a small number of potential teachers. Most European countries teach a baccalaureate type of exam where entrance to University is dependent on knowledge of foreign languages.

Teaching languages in all primary schools will help the transfer to secondary schools where most lessons start from scratch, which bores to death those children who have a good grasp of a particular language.

The government proposals will only work if teachers are given enough training and have the confidence to teach a foreign language. Last year I went to a training day in Lancashire. First up was a secondary specialist with an all-singing, all-dancing lesson and she had a perfect French accent. Faced with that you often feel, ‘I am not worthy. I couldn’t do that.’ Later on I went to a workshop by primary teachers, they were really nervous, they’d only been teaching French for a few months, the resources were a bit 'Blue Peterish' (Here’s something I prepared earlier) and their accents were part Coronation Street. However, they’d all supported each other and weren’t frightened of making mistakes. I left the workshop feeling; ‘I could have a go at that’.

When you visit Europe the cultural impact of English is everywhere – in music, films and television. That is the most problematic issue – how do we get a cultural shift in attitudes where children respect other cultures and want to learn another language? How not to do it? See ‘The Sun’ and ‘The Daily Mail’.

The End of Primary History?

2009-03-09T11:57:00.002-07:00

There’s an interesting post in the TES Community Staffroom (just about the only place teachers can write and share views – every other channel has been closed down) questioning the health of history teaching in primary schools. Some replies have focused on their own schools, ‘we do it well’, but there is always a danger of extrapolating an isolated example of good practise and generalising, this seems to be the case with ICT as well.

I’ve always loved doing local history projects, because the children relate to them so well and you can involve the community. Some schools are beginning to use topic work again so that isolated units of history, art and music aren’t being taught.

One thing should be absolutely clear though and that is the absolute desert that is Year 6, why the hell do we inflict it on our children? Year 6 has become a virtual year of testing, with foundation subjects almost completely sidelined and ignored. Before secondary teachers begin to get all self-righteous there was a report in the TES last year which examined data from 88 of the 104 most improved secondary schools 2001-4. Through judicious use of GNVQs they had climbed the league tables, but only 15% of pupils achieved a C or better in a GCSE language, seven schools had not a single pupil taking history.

I’m quite pessimistic about primary history, here’s why-

1) The narrowing of the primary curriculum

Research last year from Manchester University showed that eleven year olds spent more than half of their time in school learning maths and English. At key stage 2 pupils spent 26.7% on English and 21.9% on maths. Subjects like history and geography accounted for only 5% of teaching time.

Doctor Bill Boyle said, “If you can’t test it, teachers have practically been told ‘What’s the point?’ They are made to believe that it is the first week in May that is the most important.”

2) Teacher Training Institutions

My evidence here is mainly anecdotal but every student teacher I speak to complains about the lack of breadth, foundation subjects are left out of their training along with education theory and child development. One three-year BEd student had only six weeks of history lectures during her training, that isn’t unusual. I always look out for adverts for history lecturer posts in primary, they must be as rare as an apology from Sir Alex Ferguson.

3) The decline and fall of the LEA

In the recent past even small LEAs would have advisers for primary history. In our LEA they were all sacked and replaced by School Improvement Officers who prowled round the schools ‘boosting’ SATs results. There are always posts advertised for Literacy and Numeracy “Consultants” but primary history jobs have become extinct.

There used to be training and regular meetings held for history co-ordinators. The only training now is the dull boring DfES-inspired sessions on maths and English (if you want a laugh just watch the ‘teaching’ videos– where do they get those classes from?).

There’s the stereotype that history is dusty, greying professors in corduroy jackets with elbow patches arguing over obscure points. Against that TV programmes like Time Team, Restoration and documentaries by Simon Schama are incredibly popular.

How do we restore primary history to its rightful place? Free up the curriculum allow teachers to innovate and above all scrap the tests and league tables, they really are the cancer that is destroying education.

That Overwhelming Aroma of Aftershave

2009-03-09T11:57:00.001-07:00

Some jobs or occupations you really have to question their worth to society – traffic wardens, estate agents and second-hand car salesmen would be high on my list. If a strange kind of neutron bomb or weird selective plague finished them all off somehow the wheels of industry would still turn, their loss would not be mourned. As a teacher I’d also have to add to the list those Stasi of the Literacy Strategy – the “consultants”, ‘our informants are everywhere’.

For years our school was deemed to be in need of “intensive support” our poor results were obviously the result of inadequate planning and crap teaching, therefore teams of “consultants” went through our planning with a fine toothcomb and observed our lessons.

Enthusing children? Inspiring teachers? This was some kind of incomprehensible foreign language to them. Naturally they never taught any lessons themselves. They did produce a literacy magazine that was posted out to every school. There weren’t any book reviews, in fact books weren’t mentioned at all, nor were there any examples of children’s work. Just those scary, ‘how I got my children to Level 4 by using connectives, punctuation and adverbs’, articles. As a result of popular indifference the magazine only had a short life span.

There was an award winning children’s author in a nearby school, who could have inspired other teachers, but as he was a loud and prominent critic of the Literacy Strategy he was kept strictly under quarantine in his own school, lest he infect other teachers with his dangerous ideas.

One day I was working away in the ICT suite on our community newspaper when I was introduced to the new writing consultant. I shook hands with Billy and immediately noticed something different. Most consultants keep their distance as though ‘fraternising with the enemy’ is a punishable offence. Billy maintained eye contact, asked questions about me, my family and interests, he listened intently to the replies. There was also that million-dollar smile when we parted company.

Next week we had a quick chat and he’d remembered my name, what my children were called, where I’d been on holiday and what football team I supported. These days I keep a low profile in school, one of the governors mistook me for the caretaker recently, so it’s nice to get recognised.

Billy didn’t exude charisma it positively flowed out of him. Now when it comes to male primary teachers, you’d have to say that some of us look a little care-worn – the shiny trousers, frayed cuffs and stained tie. Not Billy, he was as crisp as a newly printed £5 note, he looked as though he’d just concluded a business deal at the local golf club – the gold cuff links, that overwhelming aroma of aftershave, the keys to his sports car dangled around his fingers. The Year 6 girls instantly fell in love with him, there were chocolates for the staff and a frisson of excitement not seen since the secondary PE teacher taught a lesson in shorts. Young maaaaaan!

However… not all members of staff were won over, there was the way he gave all the children nicknames and that habit of calling the girls, ‘darlin’ or ‘sweetheart’. Maybe there was a tinge of jealousy that someone relatively new to the teaching profession had landed this high-powered well-paid job.

For me Billy was a blast of fresh air, too often the school-to-teacher training college-to-school circuit produces dullards without experience of real life. People from other careers, disc jockey, the SAS, all in wrestling, lion tamer, all bring with them transferable skills.

A few weeks after Billy had been teaching I saw our Year 6 teacher who is normally a good judge of character. There had been rumours about the class being out of control, inappropriate remarks and questionable language. I enquired how Billy was getting on, no reply, her eyes just averted towards the heavens. She showed me the children’s work that was meant for the community newspaper, even the more able students hadn’t produced anything of worth.

I showed it to Jean the teaching assistant who takes the Year 6 SEN group. She rifled around in a folder and produced some of their work on ‘Our Town’. They weren’t literary master pieces, Jean had helped them with spelling and punctuation, they’d slaved away on the computer, editing and checking spellings, but it was infinitely better than anything Billy had fashioned (there was also the knowledge that Jean’s salary was an eighth or a tenth of Billy’s).

Later on in the term I was on a course and got talking with other teachers, they’d had the same experience with Billy – he’d charmed them all to death but the children’s work had been terrible. One of them had discovered Billy’s previous occupation – second-hand car salesman.

VAKUOUS

2009-03-09T11:56:00.000-07:00

I’m all for experimenting and trying out new ideas, the problem is when you get a ‘magic bullet initiative’, that everyone is expected to implement. In many cases they haven’t been subject to peer review or tested in schools.

Howard Gardner’s theory of ‘Multiple Intelligence’ is based on the idea that everyone has different styles of learning – principally Visual, Auditory or Kinaesthetic (VAK).

This theory was embraced by the proponents of ‘Accelerated Learning’. All the teachers in our borough went to a lecture by the guru of the movement, Alistair Smith. It was an interesting day, he had a teacher-friendly approach with lots of school-based jokes and digs at Ofsted. Just… at the end of the day apart from knowing that we had to give children lots of water to drink, some teachers went away asking, ‘Where’s the Beef?’ Not that we were allowed to ask any questions during the day of lectures and films.

Some schools adopted ‘Accelerated Learning’ whole-heartedly, children had labels on their desks with ‘Visual’, ‘Auditory’ or ‘Kinaesthetic’, planning had to include provision for the different learning styles and posters were situated to stimulate a certain side of the brain.

A report this week, ‘Neuroscience and Education’ from the Teaching and Learning Research Programme says that dividing pupils according to learning styles could be detrimental to their education and that scientific evidence for visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning is limited.

Andrew Pollard, director of the programme, spoke to an eight-year-old boy who told him, ‘I’m not good at writing. I’m a kinaesthetic learner.’

That’s the danger, take a theory, simplify it, change it into a rigid code or dogma and then enforce it onto other people. As they used to say the problem wasn’t Marx but the Marxists.

‘The adverb is not your friend’

2009-03-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

The Primary Review researchers have indicated that reading standards have barely risen over the last fifty years and that children are bored with reading. Could this be anything to do with the dull, prescriptive and grammar-laden curriculum?

Last week, as PPA cover teacher, the script was a lesson on adverbs from ‘Jolly Grammar’. Yes, a whole lesson on adverbs. For the introduction I was instructed to,

‘Revise proper and common nouns, pronouns, adjectives, possessive adjectives and verbs.’

This for a Year 3 class. I’ll be honest and you can summon Ofsted and institute the fast-track capability procedure, but I’m a bit hazy on at least two of them.

There aren’t many books on the process of writing but one of the best is Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’. He has some fairly blunt advice on grammar, in one section he writes that,

‘The adverb is not your friend… Adverbs like the passive voice seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind… With adverbs, the writer usually tells us that he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.’

I drew the immediate conclusion, after scanning the lesson plan, that there is dry tedium, absolute boredom, the vast vacuum in space that lies beyond the reach of the most distant quasars at the edge of the known universe and then there is ‘Jolly Grammar’. I’ve got to admit that I did stray from the lesson objective a smidgeon. I read to the class ‘Grandfather’s Pencil and the Room of Stories’ by Michael Foreman.

He imagines a pencil writing about its time on the shelves in a shop, as part of a tall tree; there’s the story of the table and how it tumbled down a surging river; the floorboards were once part of a great ship ‘with cream sails and a black flag’. The boy in the story grows into an old man and his grandson discovers the pencil underneath the floorboards, his companions have been,

‘a bent pin, an old gold coin and a whale bone button. Oh, the tales they told! The whale button remembered when it was part of a great whale and…’

I got the children to write their own story about the pencil. I wrote one about a magic pencil that was held prisoner by an evil wizard. I don’t want to spoil the ending but he did escape with help from his friend the sharpener.

In Michael Forman’s story there’s whole sections of beautiful prose, ah, imagination, creativity, the joy of language and hardly an adverb in sight!

Buy a shelf for our bathroom

2009-03-09T11:31:00.000-07:00

We had a very rainy weekend. We stayed inside unless we absolutely had to go out. Doug had to go to work on Saturday morning, I ran down to the grocery store to pick a rotisserie chicken for a recipie, and we went to church on Sunday.

Other than that we were at home. Eating real meals for the first time in a while. I made two new things this weekend. \ and . They were both really easy and really yummy.

We also decided to watch movies that were made in the ninety's that were free on our on demand. The Problem Child was the best. Have you seen this movie?

Linux Blog

2009-03-09T10:58:00.000-07:00

It has been once more proved to me that blogs are, most of the time, not really
worth reading. Especially if they do not cover any technical or scientific details
(such as this posting :). Even more weird, a blog about family stuff and dogs
which is interesting like a XSS-attack inside cat. Really worth announcing it at heise news.
Apparently even more worth for people to reply with 100's of comments for such postings.

Corporate Citizenship

2009-03-07T10:12:00.002-08:00

For years many organizations believed that acting responsibly meant turning a profit and paying employees on time.

Now that’s no longer enough.

Corporate social responsibility means more than properly discarding plastic bottles or turning off lights in the evening. It has grown to encompass behaviors such as donating unused products or contributing in kind services or charity work.

The initiative forces organizations to think before they act, something they were less inclined to do in years past whether it meant donating goods or monitoring the practices of their suppliers. As large clothing and shoe manufacturers discovered in the 1990s, the behavior of your business partners reflects back on the parent company.

The potential advantages to mature initiatives are numerous. Organizations can contribute at little cost, preserve valuable resources for later generations and present an image that is favorable to future generations in the workforce.

As recent research indicates, more and more graduates are seeking employment with organizations that demonstrate some kind of regular social commitment. They are even willing to take a pay cut if it means working for a socially responsible employer.

Learning professionals are players in this arena. Beyond sending staff to a soup kitchen annually, a successful initiative should occur regularly and include the entire staff. Organizations should select an initiative that is linked to its expertise. When an activity is completed, participants should meet with their beneficiaries, a great opportunity to witness how their efforts are benefitting the community.

In the end organizations should not adopt socially responsible practices because it reflects well along the bottom line or improves retention. They should do so because it’s the right thing to do.

Female Leaders in Short Supply

2009-03-07T10:12:00.001-08:00

Despite its heritage as a progressive state, California's corporations resemble the rest of the country when one looks at a board of directors photograph. It’s predominantly male.
A recent study undertaken by the University of California Davis revealed that inside large public organizations, gender equality is as far from reality as life on another planet. One half of California’s largest organizations have no women in executive positions and nearly one-half do not have a single female board member.
It’s not as if corporate boards are unchanging dinosaurs. As researchers found, between the summers of 2007 and 2008, 313 new directors were added to 173 companies, but only 15 percent were women.
Organizations need to make a concerted effort to locate female employees within the organization and foster their development. Leaders, especially female colleagues, need to act as mentors and discard the defensive, “let the fittest survive” mentality. Leadership consultants often remark how when discussions about potential women leaders occurs, the analysis becomes heated with excess scrutiny placed upon any candidate. Possibly this is a result of the inherent competition among females for the few spots at the senior level. Few women make it to the executive level, so the margin for error is small.
Aspiring female leaders need to manage their careers in a way that facilitates an eventual transition into management. That means specializing in strategic fields such as law, finance or IT that are essential for managing a business. Executives are rarely tapped from human resources, administration or other soft fields often dominated by women.
Obviously, women who want to raise children are asked to forgo their careers at least temporarily more than men who want the same. There really is no advice about this one as it is an entirely personal decision.
Again, prescriptions are easy. Enough experts have spoken and written about the problem that workable solutions already exist. But until a greater number of organizations take the next step, another decade will pass with little progress.

Success in Succession Planning?

2009-03-07T10:11:00.002-08:00

Do you have a succession plan in place at your organization?
While there are many books and articles out there about how to create a succession plan, many corporations have yet to implement a plan for filling open positions within their offices. Why?
In a recent survey, organizations that didn't have plans in place noted time and money as key reasons why a plan had never been created. But that doesn't make a lot of sense to me--what kind of time and money will be spent finding a replacement for a key employee? I would think that the time to find and hire a new worker is going to be exponentially higher than putting a plan in place to develop employees who are already dedicated to your organization.
And think of the morale benefits it would bring if employees knew that filling positions with employees already there was a possibility. They would see your commitment to them and they would work to achieve high performance.
Start out small.
Put tiny steps in place and then work to full implementation. We are in a very precarious position in the economy and now, more than ever, human capital is a company's greatest asset. Don't lose your competitive edge by not being prepared to fill critical talent needs within your organization

Bad CEOs

2009-03-07T10:11:00.001-08:00

Given the state of collapse in the financial and auto sectors, the lack of leadership song is one of the most overplayed singles this holiday season.
If you can’t get enough lists or gloom and doom stories, here’s another one. The Free Enterprise Action Fund identified the five worst chief executives who are not at the helm of a financial collapse. The group makes no attempt to hide its conservative political orientation and takes executives to task for what it perceives to be a pursuit of liberal causes.
The winners of this year’s dubious award are Jeff Immelt of General Electric, Bob Iger of the Walt Disney Company, Jim Rogers of Duke Energy, Jim Mulva of ConocoPhillips and Andrew Liveris of Dow Chemical.
Leading a company that is not mired in financial freefall is a huge caveat as the news offers a daily diet of stories about short-sighted decisions made by leaders of institutions who only looked toward the next quarterly report while chasing every dollar.
Immelt is criticized for failing to live up to the expectations of shareholders (which got the economy into such a mess) and for GE’s contracts with Iran, which are not being renewed and are winding down, according to the Washington Post. As if GE’s suspension of $50 million in revenue generated from contracts in Iran will change the calculus in the Middle East. More importantly, the U.S. Government is heading toward a 30 year anniversary of no diplomatic relations with Iran, another sign of absentee leadership.
Iger is faulted for not selling a DVD of his company’s supposedly controversial series on the events that preceded the attacks of 2001 which, when compared with billions in shareholder losses suffered in other companies, is trivial. The remaining three are slammed for backing cap and trade pollution control policy which permits companies that exceed pollution standards to sell credits to companies that fail to meet environmental standards.
What’s missing is an inclusion of decisions that damaged the company or hurt employees, a real casualty of failed leadership. A decision about whether to sell a product on the open market is simply a question of strategy, not poor judgment.
So the list is flawed, a case of partisan politics overshadowing the real issue. Nonetheless, let’s hope the institute or some other watchdog keeps the spotlight on poor executives hot. You can always learn more from the mistakes of poor CEOs than from shareholder reports touting their successes. As the world learned all too late, examples of bad leadership are abundant.

Attract New Employees, but Retain the Old

2009-03-07T10:10:00.002-08:00

With the recent woes surrounding the economy, it may come as a surprise to most that business leaders’ top worries still fall under the umbrella of talent management. They are retention and attraction, or more specifically, keeping great employees and bringing in new potential high-achievers.
The survey, conducted by Robert Half International, found that 39 percent of senior executives noted retention as their greatest staffing concern. The hidden embedded costs of this issue can easily affect the bottom line of an organization.
“Companies that lose top performers may not only experience declines in productivity but also incur significant costs in replacing those professionals,” says Max Messmer, chairman and CEO of Robert Half International.
Additional staffing concerns ranked as the following—recruitment (22 percent), productivity (17 percent), staff morale (17 percent), other (3 percent), and do not know (2 percent). The data was based on interviews with 150 senior executives from 1,000 of the nation’s largest companies.
In terms of recruitment, Messmer notes that there are still shortages of job candidates for positions such as credit and collections staff and specialists, and senior accountants, and it’s hard to offer enticing job perks in the current financial climate in order to attract new hires.

Prove Training's Worth

2009-03-07T10:10:00.001-08:00

As workplace learning and performance professionals, you know the value of learning to your organization, but now's the time to communicate that value to company executives. If you are not already doing it, you should be proving training's worth by strategically linking all training programs to the company's business goals and showing how learning directly affects a company's bottom line.
Make sure you have the metrics to prove employee performance and how it aligns to all company goals. During these tough economic times, it is important that you show return-on-investment for all programs

Defining Corporate Culture

2009-03-07T10:09:00.004-08:00

From the moment you are hired, there's no escape from discussions about corporate culture.In many ways the term is one of those overused, painfully vague business terms that can refer to so many different concepts that it means very little. Whatever one might think about the use of the word, it’s the new method for an organization to define itself before its current workers and potential new hires.For executives culture might signify an expression of pride, a way to promote ideals. The concept offers a chance for leaders to inform people inside the organization what it values most. An organization might be one that embraces diversity, promotes from within, provides lifelong learning or all of the above.In the eyes of the disgruntled, culture could be interpreted as a way to camouflage some of the flaws inside an organization. If there is a huge disparity in terms of salary among employees, a lack of inadequate resources to complete the job, or unpopular managers, that could also make up part of the definition.The AMA and the Institute for Corporate Productivity released a study on the subject recently, highlighting how long organizations have maintained their current culture. As the research report indicates, some elements are coming to define a company’s culture more now than in the past, specifically corporate social responsibility. Expectations from incoming workers are forcing organizations to adopt new strategies, notably in terms of expanded decision making authority, greening initiatives, charitable efforts, or work at home options.Arriving at a single definition is difficult, even among employees in the same organization. Like a mysterious portrait on a museum wall, corporate culture differs based on the perspective of the beholder

Failing High Potentials

2009-03-07T10:09:00.003-08:00

Nobody should be surprised that identifying and developing high potential leaders is falling by the wayside when companies are trying to cut.
Even as the economy dictates the priorities inside many organizations, the need to develop and retain the high performers remains unchanged. Organizations worry about not having capable leaders in place yet according to a recent study, they do little to change the equation.
Delta Organization & Leadership completed a survey and only 13 percent reported holding the executive team accountable for development and retention of high potential leaders. In every category organizations say they are committed to grooming the next generation of leaders, but when it comes time for an executive to meet regularly with one or a group of promising leaders, the executive hangs the out to lunch sign on his door.
The study found that only a small percentage of companies are placing the high potentials in assignments that are critical to the business. It seems that leadership consultants will have plenty of work to do in the coming decades.

Inadequate Training Can Be Fatal

2009-03-07T10:09:00.001-08:00

The importance of workplace training was never more evident than in the recent report released by NASA on the Columbia shuttle disaster.
According to the report, the astronauts didn't have some of the training and equipment necessary to survive the disaster. While the crew was wearing pressurized suits, one did not have a helmet on and three were not wearing gloves. Their parachutes must be activated manually, so they are useless if the crew is unconscious. The crew knew for 41 seconds that they had lost control of the spacecraft.
The report notes that the crew was trained to solve flight problems, NOT to SURVIVE them. The report includes recommendations for the design of future spacecrafts and that astronauts of future missions should have automatically deploying parachutes.
Almost six years after the fatal flight, these are hard admissions to swallow and just reinforce the importance of workplace training--where ever that

Friend or Foe?: Performance-Enhancing Drugs for the Mind

2009-03-07T10:08:00.001-08:00

“Mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs,” argues a controversial new essay published in Nature magazine this past month.
Charting evidence for the necessity to understand these drugs better and integrate them into everyday life, the researchers noted one study which found that 25 percent of students at some colleges admitted to using ADHD drugs for nonmedical reasons.
As the generation used to employing drugs as study aids (with purchase readily available over the Internet or on campus) enters employment, the future could hold a significantly more medicated society. In addition, this trend could very well encompass everyone, including baby boomers.
Workplaces could shift toward encouraging employees to take, for example, Provigil— a drug typically used to aid narcoleptics—to maintain concentration and, on a bigger scale, a business’s overall competitiveness.
One of the interesting discussion points in the piece, in terms of how the issue relates to the field of training and development, was the recommendation that human resource professionals, in addition to physicians, be one of the groups to help manage “the ethics of the appropriate prescribing of cognitive enhancers.” Another group that should influence enhancement policy would be the labor and professional organizations of the individuals who are candidates for cognitive on-the-job enhancement.
The authors feel strongly about their stance but do encourage caution, arguing that “From assembly line workers to surgeons, many different kinds of employee may benefit from enhancement and want access to it, yet they may also need protection from the pressure to enhance.”
The researchers for this report were Henry Greely (Stanford Law School), Barbara Sahakian (University of Cambridge, psychiatry), John Harris (University of Manchester, Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation), Ronald C. Kessler (Harvard Medical School, Department of Health Care Policy), Michael Gazzaniga (University of California – Santa Barbara, Sage Center for the Study of the Mind), Philip Campbell (London, Nature), and Martha J. Farah (University of Pennsylvania, cognitive neuroscience).

New Year, New State of Mind

2009-03-07T10:07:00.004-08:00

The new year is almost upon us! What are your learning and training resolutions for the year ahead?
With the state of the current economy, it's every business's inclination to cut costs, but there are plenty of ways to maintain an environment where learning is encouraged, and growth is celebrated without even thinking about money.
Recently, here at ASTD, author and speaker Marilee Adams came in to talk about the power of QuestionThinking(TM), and how changing the questions one asks oneself from a judging nature to that of a learning nature can make all the difference.
For example, instead of asking questions like "Whose fault is it?" or "What's wrong with me?", try "What do I want?" and "What can I learn?"
It's a simple lesson that can go a long way.
New Year's Resolutions don't have to be big and intimidating. Sometimes they can be the slightest tweaks in an otherwise well-run system

Performance Matters

2009-03-07T10:07:00.003-08:00

It is no secret that the economy is wreaking havoc on workplaces. Layoffs and money matter reign supreme in today's business environment. But this isn't a time to back off from the things that have kept your organization running smoothly: your employees.
It is more important than ever to concentrate on employee performance during this tough economic climate. Do your employees have the relevant skills to perform effectively on the job? Are they prepared to take on new tasks?
Training should not be forgotten during this economic slow down. The economy will turn around--will you and your employees be prepared to thrive or will you just be putting into place the training needed to move ahead? Don't be left out in the cold. Now's the time to be concentrating on employee development and performance.

Skimping on Training

2009-03-07T10:07:00.001-08:00

Workplace deaths rose in North Carolina in 2008, and the Department of Labor is worried that the economy is forcing companies to cut safety training.
That is the worst place that employers can cut costs, especially in the construction and manual labor jobs. If just one employee is not trained properly, than all employees on the jobsite are in danger.
Safety training should be mandatory. There should be no ifs, ands, or buts about taking the time to ensure that proper safety procedures are followed because dropping safety training to save a few bucks puts your employees' lives in danger and will end up costing the company millions in penalties.

The Positive on Conflict

2009-03-07T10:06:00.001-08:00

Beware of conflict. Is that how you approach conflict in your workplace? Conflict can be negative and make you feel uneasy, but conflict can also be a great opportunity to debate and discuss processes that can strengthen relationships among co-workers and team players.
The only way you can turn conflict into a postive learning experience is to embrace it, not avoid it. Don't let your emotions get in the way of meaningful discussions and debates.

Detoxing Your Inbox

2009-03-07T10:05:00.000-08:00

Along with many others, the first item on my agenda when I get to work is checking my email. Not surprisingly, it’s rarely something I look forward to. Clearing out sneaky junk mail, sifting through automatic messages and weekly blasts, and finally, not overlooking a note of importance all add up to quite a task first thing in the morning.
Robert Scoble, tech guru for Fast Company, insists it doesn’t have to be that tedious. In his column this month, he writes about ways to rekindle your friendship with your email using programs that organize and manage your message flow.
He lauds the perks of ClearContext, a program that’s free for personal use and costs $90/head for project management. The add-on to Outlook prioritizes messages based on who you’re writing to and how often, as well as graying out mass emails.
Another suggestion is ActiveWords, which at $30/year per person (though it offers a free trial option), lets you create boilerplates for typical customer answers.
Two other programs, Gist and Xobni (another Outlook plug-in), are both free and provide Web-based handy information about the contacts that you email, such as a phone number if you ever received it. Gist also searches news feeds and blogs for any information on contacts.
Looks like email is good to go for a few more years, at least until the brain telecommunication microchips go into beta mode.

Engaged Employees Make the Difference

2009-03-07T10:03:00.002-08:00

A recent article in the Gallup Management Journal examines employee engagement and the critical role it plays it plays in the workplace. As James K. Harter, Gallup's chief scientist of workplace management and well-being said in the article, "In good times, employee engagement is the difference between being good and being great. In bad times, it's the difference between surviving and not."
Low engagement leads to low morale and ineffective performance, and in today's tough economic times, performance is key when employees are being asked to do more with less. Have you taken the temperature of your workplace lately? Do you know the percentage of employees who are disengaged or sitting on the edge?
Although unemployment is at an all-time high, you should not assume that employees "should be just happy to have a job." They need a purpose, a reason to work and they need to feel like the work that they are doing is meaningful and valuable to the company.

Stimulus Package: Training the Workforce

2009-03-07T10:03:00.001-08:00

Stimulus Package: Training the WorkforceIt is evident by the $5 billion worth of training earmarked for Federal agencies that even President Obama understands the importance of workplace training and the lift it can give to the world economy.
The bill will invest heavily in new technologies, infrastructure projects, and health care. It also calls for investments to help laid off workers get back to work. An important part of the legislation allocates $3.9 billion to the Department of Labor, of which $2.95 billion will be used for training and employment services through FY09.
A significant portion of training funding – $750 million – is being devoted to competitive grants for high growth industries, and $500 million of these funds will invest in projects as part of the new Green Jobs Act.
The majority of the training funds will be allocated through the publicly-funded workforce system. You can access information about how much of these resources are coming to your states and communities by reaching out to the executive director of your local Workforce Investment Board (WIB) or to the manager the local One-Stop Career Center in your community. Information about how to contact your local WIB or One-Stop Career Center may be found at www.servicelocator.org/wibcontacts/.

Money Isn't Everything, RESPECT Is

2009-03-07T10:01:00.000-08:00

A new AchieveGlobal study finds that employees value respect in the workplace, even more than money and learning and development. And that finding cuts across all generations.
The study aimed to measure the role that generational diversity plays with regard to job performance, work team interaction, and perceived skill sets. What it found was most people want to be respected for the work they do more than rewarded.
This goes back to the whole idea of engagement. Engaged employees are those who feel that the work they are doing is important and strategic. It's all about valuing the work they do and being respected for the work they do.

Free Leadership Skills Training Radio Programs

2009-03-07T09:58:00.000-08:00

Listen to our free leadership skills training programs on our Awesome Leaders Win! talk radio channel using your web browser or mp3 format player.In a recent show, we provided tips and strategies to help you learn how to energize your messages, empower your leadership position and engage your people through the meanings expressed by all your leadership communications.This episode of our "Exploring Leadership Landscapes" program also described how your leadership competencies, personal growth and development along with your business professional skills all work together to establish and strengthen your leadership position...Specifically, you will learn answers to such questions as, Are you searching for more effective ways to strengthen, clarify and enhance your leadership position? Do you use goal-oriented leadership strategies that improve, enrich and increase value (value = growth, prosperity/profits, creativity) throughout your organization? Every Tuesday, you can join us in our quest to go beyond ordinary executive leadership skills training and discover another organizational leadership strategy that will help you practice and master the traits, styles and skills of competent, strategic and innovative leadership.You don't want to miss a single one of these shows, so join our mailing list today, and you'll receive free leadership articles, ebooks, papers and special discount offers as well as news about each and every radio show program - when you do listen to and learn from our programs, we are sure you will become that visionary leader, you were always meant to be...

3 Keys to Realizing Your Dreams and Goals

2009-02-05T04:50:00.000-08:00

When it comes to manifesting our dreams and accomplishing our goals, there are three vital components that deserve our attention. Before we get into that, ask yourself the following question:

Am I actively moving in the direction of my goals and dreams each and every day?

Everybody has dreams and most people have goals. If you want your goals and dreams to become reality, you must move toward them consistently and purposefully. By nature, we always begin with distance between where we are and where we want to be. Our job is to narrow that distance until it no longer exists. To accomplish that, we need to draw our goals and dreams closer to us, while simultaneously moving toward them.

Some people attempt to attract their goals without taking much action. Others choose to act on their goals, but without the added advantage of also drawing those goals to them. Action alone can bring positive results, but it is much faster to combine the two techniques.

For the sake of clarity, let’s differentiate between dreams and wishful thinking. In some conversations, the two might be interchangeable. Not so in this case. When I talk about dreams, I am really talking about highly desirable goals. Future realities that we fully intend to realize. For our purposes, a dream is something that we are willing to work toward, and are determined to manifest, just like a goal.

What kind of life do you dream of?

When you project your thoughts into the future, how do you see things? Do you see a variety of positive changes across the full spectrum of your life? Do you see yourself healthier, wealthier, and wiser? Are you willing to move toward that vision in order to realize it?

If so, then this is really a highly desirable goal, and that is exactly the kind of dream we are talking about today.

Let’s consider 3 important ways that we can move toward the realization of our dreams.

1) Clarity. Before we do anything else, we need to clearly defined exactly what our dream or goal is. This is not the time to deal in generalities, we need to be very specific. One of the best ways for you to get really clear, is to write down a detailed description of exactly what you want to accomplish.

Writing things down requires that we get a well defined mental image first. The very process of putting our thoughts into words creates clarity. This clarity will help you to form a vivid mental image that you can carry around with you 24 hours a day. Most of the time your personal reference to your new goal will be that mental image, but you will also be able to refer back to the written description to help you maintain clarity.

One of the most powerful things you can include when writing down your goals and dreams is how they make you feel. The feelings you attach to the things you intend to accomplish are your greatest source of motivation and energy. So, be sure to include your feelings in your written description. Think carefully about each aspect of this future reality, how does it make you feel? What emotional anchors resonate with each detail? Write them down.

As you read back through your written description, allow yourself to experience those feelings, get emotionally involved in the picture. When you conjure up this mental image of how your life is going to be, fully experience it on an emotional level. This is the true power of having clearly defined goals, and identifying your emotional attachments to them.

2) Action. Now that you can see and feel your goal with clarity, it’s time to begin moving toward it. What steps do you need to take to move you closer to realizing this dream? What sequence do those steps need to be in to produce your intended result? What action can you take each and every day to keep you moving in the right direction? Once again, writing these things down will produce clarity. It is much easier to take action when you know what actions need to be taken.

Reaching your goals means that you need to take the proper actions at the right time. There is a natural sequence that will produce your intended result. Following the right sequence allows events to unfold in a very productive way. Always take time to create an action plan. Not only will it keep you moving in the right direction, but it will also allow you to anticipate what comes next.

Of course, we can’t anticipate everything, and we need to be willing to make adjustments along the way. That’s the beauty of having an action plan, it allows us to be flexible without getting too far off course. So, even though we will need to make minor adjustments, a plan keeps us heading in the right direction until we reach our goal.

3) Attract. Now that you know exactly where you are going, how you feel about it, and how you are going to get there, what’s next? When we started out there was distance between you and the goal you are working to manifest. You have been actively closing that distance by moving toward your vision for the future. Now, it’s time to draw to your dream toward you.

How can you do that? It’s really just a matter of perspective. Up until now you have been projecting yourself into this vision that exists in the future, let’s reverse that. Instead of projecting yourself into a future reality, allow yourself to receive that reality in the present tense.

See yourself as stationary, and your goal as something that moves toward you, and then surrounds and engulfs you. Wrap yourself up in it like a giant blanket. Feel the joy of receiving that vision. Imagine how wonderful it feels to have the reality of that vision totally permeate every aspect of your present reality. Feel it in the here and now.

Here are a couple of examples:

* If part of your dream was a beautiful new home, don’t see it from the outside, see yourself in the middle of that beautiful dream house. See yourself living there, going about your daily activities, feeling completely at home and comfortable. See yourself as a full participant, not a spectator.

* If you have been actively moving toward a new career, visualize yourself actually performing the duties of that career. Again, don’t see it from the outside as a spectator would. If your new career involves a desk, a computer, and a telephone, put yourself there. Look at the screen, answer the phone, leaned back in that amazingly comfortable leather chair – participate.

Always harness the power of a 3 dimensional approach!

By employing all three of these techniques your dreams will become your realities much faster than you may have thought possible. Nothing in life is one-dimensional. The quicker we shorten the distance between where we are and where we want to be, the more empowered we become. This approach allows us to override the perceived limitations of time and space, and to more fully comprehend your own ability to manifest your dreams and goals.

What do you think about this approach?
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