Authenticity and Blogging Freedom

Steve Pavlina has a cool article on one reason blogging is more liberating than writing for a newspaper or magazine. It basically comes down to having the freedom to be authentic.

Authenticity means being real and genuine when you communicate. Let truth be your guiding principle. This is the natural style of communication we might use when talking to a best friend.

My friends that read this blog can hopefully confirm that I’m actually this abrasive in real life, if not more. I smell a lot better online though, I can promise you that.

BlogRush Update

BlogRush has their user dashboard working. So far, I’m getting a click in for every 400 impressions or so. I actually think this is a pretty good ROI so far, considering how many people are basically immune to widgets and advertising.

The cool thing is that about half of the impressions that I’ve earned have come from my pyramid scheme referral network, and I still haven’t used about 60% of the credits that I’ve earned, not counting the bonuses for early adoption.

So far, I’d grade BlogRush a B+.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Insurance!

Becky has the right idea…we need less insurance, not more.

But coverage of mundane and everyday medical care makes as much sense as having food insurance. We would go to the grocery store and show the checker our food insurance card, and the public or private carrier would take care of the tab.

I think that addresses the heart of the problem.

You don’t use your auto insurance to pay for a new battery, car washes, or breaks. These are maintenance issues–just part of owning a car. Auto insurance covers accidents–things you know are possible but hope will never happen to you.

Getting colds and minor injuries are just part of living. Health insurance should cover big things that you know are possible but hope will never happen to you–cancer, heart attacks, etc.

And just like driving sober and at a reasonable speed can reduce your chances of having an accident, making healthy lifestyle choices can greatly reduce your chances of having an unexpected illness.

We don’t subsidize auto insurance for drunks with a bunch of speeding tickets, so why should we subsidize medical insurance for smokers or people (like me) who choose to participate in injury prone sports?

IMO, Hillary needs to be more concerned with her own health (getting checked for STDs regularly?), and worry less about mine and yours.

Five Quick Tips On Evaluating Your Kids’ Teachers

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to a conversation between the missus, a former elementary school teacher and education consultant, and a couple of her teacher friends. They were talking about good teachers, bad teachers, and the differences between them. For once, I just shut up and listened–they brought up a lot of interesting observations of their peers that help them make a quick judgments about the effectiveness of the teacher. There were a few that I thought were really interesting and could help parents when they head out to open house or when visiting the school.

1. Where is the teacher’s desk located in the classroom?
If the teacher’s desk is located in the back or on the side of the classroom, this is an excellent sign. This means that your child’s teacher most likely spends most of his instructional time standing and moving around the classroom, which helps hold the kids’ interest and helps the teacher interact better with all of the kids, not just the ones up front. If the desk is located in the front of the room, check to see if it looks “lived in”. The best sign is if the teacher doesn’t have a desk at all, or if it is located in an office separated from the classroom.

2. Are the kids’ desks in rows, or are they in groups, a circle, or some other configuration?
Rows may be fine for older kids, but in the younger grades U-shaped or grouped desks help the kids better interact with the teacher and one another. If your child always has an unobstructed and close view of the teacher during instructional time, chances are better that he’ll be paying attention. These configurations also allow the teacher to more easily keep tabs on what each student is doing and pick up on important physical cues as to whether or not the kids are absorbing the lesson. The ability to interact with other students fosters cooperative learning. Kids often learn things from one another that they don’t learn from the teacher.

3. What activities does your child do for homework?
Most of us grew up copying each vocabulary and/or spelling word three times or copying the definition from the book. The latest research has shown that while wrote memorization is a valuable component to learning when used in conjunction with other activities that reinforce understanding, it is at best marginally effective when used by itself. Words need to be made meaningful to the child in order for them to internalize them. If these are the only activities your child is given for homework, her teacher may be a little “old school”. He may not be up to date on the latest research, or may just be ignoring it altogether.

4. Are the materials on the wall functional, or just pretty?
Motivational posters from Wal-Mart are nice, but the classroom walls are best used by good teachers to reinforce what is being taught in the curriculum. Another positive sign is an abundance of materials made by the teacher and/or the students themselves.

5. What does the class look like when walking down the halls
Is the teacher a “mama duck”–heading up the line down the hallway while a chaotic mass follows her? Is he a “shusher”–constantly having to remind the kids to be quiet while they walk? Both of these are strong indicators of teachers who may lack discipline and control in the classroom. If the teacher really has control and respect in the classroom, that will carry over with her kids outside the classroom. The best teachers walk in the middle, beside the line. At corners, they stand at the apex so that they can view both the front and back of the line.

These tips are just a few starting points to help you get a feel for your child’s teacher, but just because your child’s teacher doesn’t meet every point outlined here doesn’t mean she is a bad teacher. Of course, you will learn much more by meeting with the teacher face to face and asking specific questions about your concerns for your child. Hopefully the tips covered here will give you some ideas about what questions you may need to ask.

Constitution Day — Creating Solid C Students Nationwide

The KNS says that a study reports

51 percent of high school students questioned had not heard of the day when they are required by law to learn about the Constitution.

The occasion, created by Congress in 2004, usually is observed on or around Sept. 17, the day the document was adopted in 1787.

There’s some irony for you. Congress makes a federal law regarding public education (which by the way is covered nowhere in the Constitution) that students must learn about the Constitution. Doing what it does best, our public education system then strikes right at the meaty part of the bell curve and makes sure that a healthy 49% of students actually receive the education as mandated.

Sounds about right.

Personally, my favorite part of the Constitution is “Congress shall make no law”. Ever wonder if we’d be better off if they’d just stopped there?

A Reg’lar Ol’ Nashvillian

GingerSnaps has a pretty interesting post over at MCB about the way famous people are treated in Nashville–basically just like everybody else. I grew up there, and I have to say it’s pretty true. Most people in Nashville just don’t care that much about seeing someone famous. It happens often enough that you become a little desensitized.

I think the only time I ever even acknowledged a famous person was the time I was waiting tables and Grandpa Jones came in. I’m a big Hee Haw fan, so I couldn’t resist saying, “Hey Grandpa, what’s for supper?!”

He didn’t get biscuits and gravy, just a Killian’s Red and some pizza.

The Sunny Side of O.J. Simpson

As ridiculous as it is that this robbery case is considered newsworthy by anyone, let’s look on the bright side. At least we didn’t have to suffer though the original O.J. case being covered by the blogosphere. It’s bad enough that so many ridiculous news analysis shows were launched by this case.

Seriously, would anybody care about this guy if he weren’t being crammed down their throats by “news” channels with nothing better to report? I haven’t cared about him since the last Naked Gun movie.

Violence Isn’t Cost Effective Anymore

This TED talk by Steven Pinker is pretty interesting. I’ll let all of his side comments, such as crediting Bill Clinton with the decline of violent crime in the 1990s, go. The most interesting aspect of this talk is not that violence is decreasing over time, but why violence is decreasing.

It seems pretty simple to me–violence has a very low return on investment.

Because of mass media, no act of violence seems isolated anymore. Therefore, committing an act of violence is a PR nightmare. Maybe not for individuals, but for states most definitely (Iraq). And states themselves have decreased the profitability of violence by individuals. It is virtually impossible for an individual to successfully take any significant amount of property from someone else by force (without penalty).

That’s why people rob banks without weapons. The rewards of successfully robbing the bank without a gun are equal to those of robbing a bank with a gun, but the risk of being unsuccessful is much less because the penalty for using a weapon in such a crime is greater.

It is sort of interesting to consider cultures that believe violence will be rewarded in the afterlife. There seems to be a definite perceived benefit to violence there.

BlogRush — Marketing and Syndication Mixed

There is a pretty cool widget I just installed called BlogRush. I saw some stuff about it over on Digg, where it has taken off and is starting to look spammy. I did a little investigating–it’s not. On top of that, BlogRush already looks to be uber-viral, so you’re going to be seeing a lot more of it. If not on your blog, everywhere else.

BlogRush is basically a free widget that syndicates its feeds based on subject to blogs all over the web. The marketing side comes in with pageviews. Every impression you register gets your post included on the syndication somewhere else on the network. Basically tit for tat syndication.

I’m not really expecting to get a rush of traffic, like the name would imply, but picking up a reader here and there isn’t a bad thing. The cool part is that BlogRush isn’t click dependent, so all of your impressions count. This can’t be said for most other marketing/social networking stuff.

You can pick up extra credits by using their referral program, sorta like MLM, but no investment required.

Check it out. At $0, BlogRush is at least priced right!