January is almost over, which means if you made a New Year’s resolution that necessitates the implementation of a whole new organization regimen, that all needs to happen before month’s end or you will have officially failed at that resolution. As far as organizing your life, you’ve basically got four choices (see below). Don’t be a slacker. Just pick the one that will actually work for you (not the one you wish you were together enough to pull off).

(1) High-tech gadget-y bits:

Laptop
iPhone
PDA
Time Machine

My guess is if you already have one of these or are lusting after one enough to purchase it, you already have a pretty good idea what it can do for you and whether or not you’ll actually take full advantage of it’s life-perfecting applications. If you’re going with the laptop, I’ve heard good things about “Google’s suite of productivity applications,” which a large percentage of Lifehack readers will back me up on. Plus, Google’s free. The iPhone is not. And the time machine isn’t real.

(2) Find a new religion:

Getting Things Done

The be-all, end-all organizational regime/regimen that some people swear by, and other people don’t have that much effing time for. I’m a cheater and skimmed the good bits off regarding dealing with crap the moment it enters my sphere of influence so I never have to think about it again. Also, I agree with the writing everything down so you don’t spend stupid amounts of energy trying to remember details and info.

(3) Mid-range tech:

The PocketMod
Hipster PDA

The PocketMod does require a computer and the Internet, but in its final form, it’s a strictly (you have to watch the instructional video so you do it right) folded up sheet of paper that you can customize, write stuff on, and keep in your pocket for the day. It’s perfect for the light packer. And for anyone who doesn’t need their organizational tool to last more than a day. If you do need to remember any written bit, you’ll invariably end up with a pocket-roughed stack of booty-shaped PocketMods on your desk, waiting for you to sift through looking for that one word/ phrase/ assignment/ phone number.

(4) Low-tech (tubes of ink required):

Notebooks
Moleskines
Day-Timers
Post-its (bordering on time-suckage)
Random scraps of paper (evil time-suckage)

This is my level—I never claimed to be a high-tech girl. Molskinerie.com proves I’m not the only paper-using, low-tech dork out there. It’s fascinating to see how involved some people are with what is basically some bound-up blank paper. I’m not quite that intense with regards to my paper product usage. However, I do use one bound notebook for all calendars, lists, notes, etc. so I never have annoying pieces of detritus to sift through.

Random scraps of paper are a waste of time and are the way an eight-year-old would organize his life. Grow up and at the very least (read: this is the uncool and frugal option) buy a generic notebook at the grocery store for a dollar, use the first two-thirds as a calendar (one page per day) and the last third of the notebook for lists (grocery store, new phone numbers you’ve acquired, To Do, directions to your date’s house, etc.). If you ever find yourself with an errant scrap of paper with important information written on it, write the info in your notebook and ditch the scrap. Keep your notebook with you always (excepting showering or date moments) and I swear you’ll save time, money, and all kinds of mental energy.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

My world is better when all pertinent information is collected and listed. Lifehack.org just posted The Ultimate Student Resource List, thereby improving the alignment of the universe. Don’t you feel lighter, more organized, supremely in control of yourself and everything around you? I really, really, very much do.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I had the best fourth-grade teacher. He was amazing. Everyone loved him. I was in his guinea pig class—the class he had his first year teaching at our school. Before he showed up, the teacher population in the town’s only elementary school had been all female. I showed up on the first day of my fourth-grade year and searched the posted class lists outside of both of the classrooms that I knew to be fourth grade. No me on either list. My Dad was grumpy and had to get to work, so he and I started at one end of the school and read every class list outside of every classroom until my Dad spotted my name. He hollered that he’d found me. I hollered back that he was mistaken, because that was not a fourth grade classroom. He read (very) out loud: “Mr. Fridae. Fourth grade. Alexa Harrington.” Certain he was wrong, my response was loud and sarcastic as I stomped my way across the courtyard to read for my damn self just how wrong my Dad was.

When I saw that there was a new teacher in town, he was a boy, and I was in his class, I burst into tears. Total meltdown. My Dad has nary a sympathetic bone in his body, so you can imagine how far my tears and pleading for a girl teacher got me. He stood there watching me. I think he blinked a few times in an unimpressed manner. And then said, “Well. Have a good first day. See you after work.”

I was pissed and then I was miserable. I was not the only one suffering. Everyone else who’d been unlucky enough to have their number pulled and to end up in the new guy’s class was out on the playground, being teased mercilessly by the other kids. We were the pathetic freaks who had three strikes against us: our teacher was new, he was a boy, and his name was Fridae. What kind of name was that? It wasn’t even spelled right. The bell rang and saved us from mean chants involving the days of the week.

We lined up, followed our new teacher inside, sat down and waited for him to explain himself. He was going to need to dig deep to save us all (himself included) from what could surely be the worst year of our elementary school lives. We were not going to help him; he had gotten us all into this mess and it was up to him to get us out. We were surly and glaring and gave him nothing, not even the benefit of the doubt.

I don’t think he noticed our negative attitudes. He was so damn happy to be there and to get the school year started that he mowed right over our hostile little ‘tudes and started teaching. We had never seen a teacher move that much. He was all over the place. He smiled. He laughed. He thought so far outside the box that there was nothing square left to see. He taught by doing. We always had some crazy, messy, perfect project going in our room. Kids from other classrooms would go out of their way to walk by our room so they could stare through our windows at the huge, anatomically accurate, exactly to scale papier-mache eyeball on their way to the bathroom. It took us weeks to build that thing. It was three feet in diameter and I can guarantee that none of us will ever forget that the image the retinas send to the brain is inverted.

He would keep us in after the recess bell rang if he was in the middle of an important thought. He had total control over the room and no one would move until he gave the nod. The first time it happened, all the other kids filing past our windows on their way out to play stared in at us, clearly wondering what atrocity we had committed that was resulting in the missing of recess. Out on the playground the kids grilled us for cause. We told them the truth: Mr. Fridae had still been talking so we had to wait. They laughed and said surely the jig was up, he’d seemed cool for a while there but it was looking like he really did suck (cutting into recess is death for a teacher, everyone knows that). We worried that maybe they were right. The last few months had been pretty fantastic, but if Mr. Fridae was unaware of the sanctity of recess, then maybe he was not as great as we had started to believe.

A few minutes later the bell rang. We hadn’t had nearly enough time to run around. We all lined up. The other lines were laughing at us and we were irate: we had pledged our allegiance to the wrong teacher. The teachers headed up their lines, waited for that thing teachers wait for as proof of respect, obedience and cooperation: that fraction of a second of stillness and quiet amidst the cacophony. Once we’d shown them that they were still in charge, the teachers all motioned for us to walk back inside. We lifted our feet and all lines moved but ours. Mr. Fridae had his hand up, signaling us to stop.

We lowered our feet. Mr. Fridae waited only long enough for the other lines to notice that we weren’t moving. They were all still within disbelieving earshot when he told us that in return for allowing him to finish his thought earlier, he was giving us payback of the recess loan plus interest. The other teachers were confused, the other kids were envious, and we were stoked. This was unprecedented. It was beautiful. Extra recess on an empty playground. No teacher has made me happier than I was at that exact moment.

Something as simple as the subtraction or addition of recess doesn’t seem like it should be huge to grown-up me. And it wouldn’t be if the memory didn’t come attached to the emotions I had at that moment. Turning and running out onto that pristinely empty playground while everyone else walked back inside was the end of ever questioning Mr. Fridae. From that moment on, we were utterly devoted.

I’m happy to report that his wonderfulness and over-the-top enthusiasm didn’t end after our class. He kicked ass two years later when my little brother had him and has continued to do so. What was it about Mr. Fridae that my classmates and I loved so much? That he enjoyed teaching? That he consistently went above and beyond? That being in his class was like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with textbooks and spelling tests? I think it must have been all of the above, with the important addition of his wanting to be there teaching us. He was having an adventure and he wanted us to be in on it, too. It was like being taught by a really tall, super-smart fourth-grader who had the authority to request school buses for field trips.

Further Reading About Amazing Teachers:

*In Praise of Good Teachers
*For Physics Teacher, Experiments in Learning
*Her classroom comes alive—and so do her students’ minds
*Teacher of the Week: Karen Neukamm
*ASU teacher earns 2007 Arizona Professor of Year

Other Thoughts On What Makes A Teacher Great:

*What Makes a Great Teacher?
*How to be a Good Teacher: Three Building Blocks
*Practical Theory: What Makes a Great Teacher?
*The Myth of the Great Teacher
*Unlocking the Mysteries of Great Teaching
*Qualities of a Good Special Education Teacher
*Tips on Becoming a Teacher
*What Makes a Good Teacher? Lessons from Teaching Medical Students

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Trying to come up with something professional and politically correct to say about this has proved fruitless. There are too many sweet spots to hit and if I start I won’t be able to stop. Inside Higher Ed had this up today:

A new Web site has been created to serve as a clearinghouse for the presidential candidates’ positions on science and technology issues. The site — created by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of American Universities — features the candidates’ positions on topics such as competitiveness, science education, health care, and energy research. The information is largely a listing of candidates’ stated positions and does not focus on stances taken by some candidates that run counter to scientific thinking — Mike Huckabee’s opposition to evolution isn’t mentioned.

Related post: Hope For College Science Majors

Posted by Alexa Harrington

If you haven’t come across the OEDb (Online Education Database) site as of yet, your first perusal should be their awesome article/list: The Self-Directed Student Toolbox: 100 Web Resources for Lifelong Learners. It’s pretty cool considering they had to keep the list at a manageable one hundred. It’s neat and tidy, solid but simple. Plus, you know, lots of info for the learners (life-long, college, or otherwise). It’s a lovely website rabbit hole to fall down and explore for a while.

Here’s the article explaining why the OEDb felt compelled to compile such a helpful list:

According to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), at least a quarter of the adult population fails to reach the minimum literacy levels needed to cope adequately with the demands of everyday life and work, let alone structural economic and social change. This information was gathered from a survey conducted in 12 OECD countries, which include the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. On the other hand, many adults are turning away from the television and turning on to lifelong learning through traditional classes, online schools, and travel.

Lifelong learning means that individuals can have access to and are willing to participate in ongoing, not recurrent, education. This “learning to learn” philosophy can begin with toddlers and it can extend throughout a person’s life with branches that can extend into various experiences and careers. Since lifelong learning has become a prerogative for many organizations, it would be impossible to list them all here. Instead, we’ve chosen the best resources for adult learners in ten categories to develop a self-directed toolbox that can lead you, the lifelong learner, to other resources that you may need to meet personal goals.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I’m not sure if it’s a nostalgia twinge for my elementary school days or if it’s just my own weirdnesses with regards to these, our modern keyboard-centric times, but I’m a little sad to learn that cursive writing might soon be a thing of the past. It’s being slowly phased out in schools. I fully admit that I sound like an old-timer: devoted to horses and bitching about those new-fangled cars. I should open my eyes and embrace all that is Now.

Oof. Can’t do it. I trust pens and paper, not silicon chippy things and keyboards. Seriously: cursive writing? They’re taking away cursive writing? It’s not that I want us all to be wearing impractical clothing and writing perfect Victorian letters to each other. The half-printing, half-cursive handwriting called “italic cursive” is totally acceptable. That’s how most people write, and it’s faster than strictly printing or traditional cursive (which I admit I do not remember how to do properly).

Maybe I’m worried that in a few generations we’ll all be running around communicating only by typing and printing and text messaging. Possibly grunting. Is the end of teaching cursive backward or forward motion? Probably forward but it still makes me sad.

Read for yourself what The Christian Science Monitor had to say about it:

[Cursive writing] is an endangered species given the rise of computers, the growing proportion of class time spent preparing for standardized tests, and the increasing perception that cursive writing is a difficult and pointless exercise.

“You still need to be able to write a signature and a personal thank-you note as well as read cursive,” says Cathy Van Haute, a pediatric occupational consultant. And “you can’t tell me everyone has easy access to a computer.”
Robert Martin, principal of O’Donnell Elementary, agrees. “It’s a dangerous path to go down if the only way you can communicate or record information is electronically or with printed letters. Cursive teaches things like how letters connect and a different type of hand-eye coordination that’s important.”

Kate Gladstone is a “handwriting repair expert” in New York. She is not surprised to see cursive going the way of the dinosaur, with only 15 percent of adults using cursive after high school. She’s not disappointed. She disagrees with the idea that students should first learn to print and then to write in cursive.

“You don’t teach someone English by first teaching them Chinese,” Ms. Glad­stone says. “We need to decide what the best way to handwrite is and just teach that.”

Gladstone promotes italic cursive, which she says is the fastest, most natural, and most easily readable form of handwriting. It’s also the easiest and quickest to teach children, she says. She also claims it’s the fastest-growing way to teach handwriting: 7 percent of students are learning this method, compared with 1 percent ten years ago.

The Palmer and Zaner-Bloser penmanship methods ruled the day for decades. Students spent 45 minutes every day on handwriting. Penmanship was a separate grade on report cards. Today, handwriting instruction might get 10 or 15 minutes a few times a week. Keyboarding skills are taught much earlier, now.
But in this era of standardized testing, Gladstone says, teachers need to train their charges to express themselves quickly with a pen or pencil. And that means italic cursive, to her.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The Williams College Alumni Review has an article up that’s worth reading. It’s all about the Winter Study course Williams offers: “Composing a Life: Finding Success and Balance in Life After Williams.” Do I even need to explain how helpful I would have found a course like that before finishing college and heading out blindly into reality?

I’m figuring this balancing thing out. I’m handling it. You know, now, after years of effing up and resetting all dials. Like most learning processes, it’s awkward (and also painful). Getting some perspective on career and life, what your philosophy on life might be and what kind of life you’re trying to aim toward or away from is probably extremely helpful prior to lift-off.

Anyway, if you aren’t currently attending Williams College, and therefore will not be able to sign up for the “Composing a Life” course, at the very least you can read the article. I skimmed off the good parts for educational purposes:

“Composing a Life: Finding Success and Balance in Life After Williams,” a Winter Study course that since 1996 has asked students to approach their future careers from the perspective of the kind of life they seek. In the end, it’s as much about posing questions as it is about finding answers.

“All of those factors led us to say, ‘Life is short. Yes, it’s very important to have a fulfilling, satisfying professional life. But it’s also important to have a fulfilling, satisfying personal life,’” Chip says. “There has to be a balance…”

“We were educated in the ‘70s and had been taught that we could have it all,” Michele says. “All these women had wonderful careers but found out they couldn’t hack it for a host of reasons. There was a common lament that nobody had told us in college that we would have all these challenges.”

Determined to help prepare a new generation for the struggles they knew were common among well-educated, family-oriented couples, the Chandlers created a course that evolved into a “Generation Y” journey of self-discovery tailored for Williams students, who often are so focused on academic and professional achievement that they might neglect to fully consider how personal life will fit in.

“The heart of a liberal arts education is learning to lead an examined life, and that’s what this course is really about at its core,” Chip says. “You learn to be thoughtful about everything, from how you define success to what your priorities are to how you at least begin to think about making trade-offs. Once we graduate, we all make trade-offs.”

The course title, “Composing a Life,” is borrowed from anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson’s book profiling five women who improvise successful and fulfilling lives despite the endless demands placed upon them. “Composing” implies that living life is a skill honed through study, practice and refinement.

This idea is emphasized in the structure of the course. Case studies, guest lecturers and assigned readings give students the opportunity to scrutinize other people’s lives, so they might be better prepared to make life-altering decisions of their own.

One point constantly reinforced, however, is that solutions don’t necessarily come easily. “We have no aspirations to give students the answers,” Chip says. “There are no right answers, but there are right questions.”

The Chandlers also like to remind students that for most people the opportunity to change careers, cut back hours or relocate to a better place can be seen as a luxury, not a quandary. “We try to reassure them that while having all these choices might be a problem on some level, this is a high-class problem,” Chip says.

Whatever the next stage of life holds for them, be it event planning or backpacking or investment banking, the bigger questions of life and how to live it remain essentially the same.

“What they learn is that they have to come face to face with their values,” Michele says. “Your life, hopefully, is yours to do with what you wish. We know you can’t plan everything, but you can be thoughtful about the choices you’re making and make them with conviction. These are lessons that are timeless.”

Posted by Alexa Harrington

This is how damn lucky I am: my biggest complaint with regards to my daughter’s elementary school is that the parents are so excited about their kids’ education that the overall vibe among the parents seems to be: “If you have time to breathe, you’re not doing enough.” They want every at-home parent to funnel all energy which had previously been focused on careers to now be directed at volunteering in the classrooms, chaperoning field trips, being an art or a music docent, raising money for the school, giving money to the school, or just generally spending every waking minute making our kids’ public elementary school experience more and better and amazing.

Poor me. I have the sheer dumb luck to end up renting a house in a neighborhood with a great public school. The landlord got a divorce and my husband and I ended up buying the house. No research was done regarding where to purchase real estate based on the schools in the area because we’d just gotten married and weren’t yet thinking in kid terms. Now we have a house, two kids, and an ass-kicking public school within walking distance. The school kicks ass because the teachers and the staff and all the hyper parents are obsessed with making it the be-all, end-all school.

The other parents are a little tough to take at times, but their hearts are in the right place so who cares? I’m more than willing to suck it up and be in a state of happy disbelief as to where I’ve landed. My kid is happy and hasn’t one iota of school-related tension or unhappiness.

So that’s my charmed life. And if I ever bitch and moan again about bake sales and field trip fees and having to adopt the classroom science unit goldfish (two of them) and snails (three) then please won’t someone remind me that I have it really, really good and a lot of people don’t. A good education and a happy day at school aren’t to be taken for granted.

Filmmaker Jill Freidberg has made two amazing documentaries about the teachers, students and parents fighting for, among other things, the teachers’ union and a decent education system in Mexico: Grain of Sand (Granito de Arena), and A Little Bit of So Much Truth (Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad).

I tend to avoid documentaries as a general rule (except Dog Town and Z Boys), but for Freidberg I’ve made an exception. Her films are neither preachy nor boring. But it’s not a happy documentary about daffodils, so in exchange for intelligently-filmed reality, you end up learning things that piss you off and break your heart. And there’s no place to wedge yourself to be safe from the story she’s telling you. You can’t chalk it all up to the contrived, Hollywood version of the story because she shoots in such a way that there’s no forced drama, nothing fake.

If you don’t trust the critique of a non-documentary-film-watcher, then trust all the artsy and brainy film festival acclaim and attention she’s received. The smart film folks like her just as much as I do.

Granito de Arena (Grain of Sand):

Completed in 2005, Granito de Arena provides context and background to the unprecedented popular uprising that exploded in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2006. It serves as an excellent prequel to Corrugated Films’ latest release, Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad.

Award-winning Seattle filmmaker, Jill Freidberg (This is What Democracy Looks Like, 2000), spent two years in southern Mexico documenting the efforts of over 100,000 teachers, parents, and students fighting to defend the country’s public education system from the devastating impacts of economic globalization.

Freidberg combines footage of strikes and direct actions with 25 years worth of never-before-seen archival images to deliver a compelling and unsettling story of resistance, repression, commitment, and solidarity.

Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad (A Little Bit of So Much Truth):

In the summer of 2006, a broad-based, non-violent, popular uprising exploded in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Some compared it to the Paris Commune, while others called it the first Latin American revolution of the 21st century.

But it was the people’s use of the media that truly made history in Oaxaca.

A 90-minute documentary, A Little Bit of So Much Truth captures the unprecedented media phenomenon that emerged when tens of thousands of school teachers, housewives, indigenous communities, health workers, farmers and students took 14 radio stations and one TV station into their own hands, using them to organize, mobilize, and ultimately defend their grassroots struggle for social, cultural and economic justice.

Posted by Alexa Harrington