Category Archives: Parenting

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Nerve Lesson #2: Put Your Feelings Into Words

Nerve by Taylor Clark is a great read. It is an entertaining and insightful look into fear. He shares some key methods to deal with fear, anxiety, and stress. I didn’t say overcome fear because our fears are here to stay (for the most part). The hero’s of the world acknowledge the fear and move forward with it.

Lesson #2: Put your feelings into words.
“…research shows that talking or writing about an emotion like fear helps the brain to process it behind the scenes…[this process literally] changes their emotions…”

“I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.”-William Faulkner

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Rocky: Going the Distance & Believing

“Ah come on, Adrian, it’s true. I was nobody. But that don’t matter either, you know? ‘Cause I was thinkin’, it really don’t matter if I lose this fight. It really don’t matter if this guy opens my head, either. ‘Cause all I wanna do is go the distance. Nobody’s ever gone the distance with Creed, and if I can go that distance, you see, and that bell rings and I’m still standin’, I’m gonna know for the first time in my life, see, that I weren’t just another bum from the neighborhood. “-Sylvester Stallone as Rocky in “Rocky” (1976)

1. It’s not about winning or losing; its about going the distance (and experiencing every moment).
2. Anything is possible with someone in your corner (Adrian, Mickey-his trainer, etc.).

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Love Woke Me Up This Morning

“Love woke me up this morning…”-lyric from Dreamer by Bethany Dillon

Did love wake you up this morning?
When did love wake you up?
Does love wake me up every morning, but I am not aware of it?
How can we keep that love alive throughout our days?
What if love is the fabric of our everything, but we miss seeing it?

What if love was resurrected 2011 years ago?
What if love is resurrected every day?
What would it look like for us to experience this love every moment of every day?

Happy Easter!

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The Truth About Split Infinitives & Prepositions At The End of Sentences

These 2 grammar rules haunted me throughout my schooling.  And for no reason!

In today’s excerpt – certain grammatical “rules” that are widely viewed as correct come from the invalid application of grammatical rules from Classical Latin and Greek to the English language by British authors writing hundreds of years ago. Though they have been routinely violated by writers from Shakespeare to Hemingway, two such “rules” are the prohibitions against split infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition:
“The first prohibition against the split infinitive occurs in an 1834 article by an author identified only as “P.” After that, increasingly over the course of the nineteenth century, a “rule” banning split infinitives began ricocheting from grammar book to grammar book, until every self-conscious English-speaker ‘knew’ that to put a word between ‘to’ and a verb in its infinitive was barbaric.

“The split-infinitive rule may represent mindless prescriptivism’s greatest height. It was foreign. (It was almost certainty based on the inability to split infinitives in Latin and Greek, since they consist of one word only.) It had been routinely violated by the great writers in English; one 1931 study found split infinitives in English literature from every century, beginning with the fourteenth-century epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, through wrongdoers such as William Tyndale, Oliver Cromwell, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, John Donne, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and others.

“Rewording split infinitives can introduce ambiguity: ‘He failed entirely to comprehend it’ can mean he failed entirely, or he comprehended, but not entirely. Only putting ‘entirely’ between ‘to’ and ‘comprehend’ can convey clearly ‘he comprehended most, but not all.’ True, sentences can be reworded to work around the problem (‘He failed to comprehend everything’), but there is no reason to do so. While many prescriptive rules falsely claim to improve readability and clarity, this one is worse, introducing a problem that wasn’t there in the first place. Yet as split infinitives in fact became more common in nineteenth-century writing, condemnations of it grew equally strongly. The idea that ‘rules’ were more important than history, elegance, or actual practice … held writers and speakers in terror of making them. …

“Why is it ‘wrong’ to end a sentence with a preposition? … Who, upon seeing a
cake in the office break room, says, ‘For whom is this cake?’ instead of ‘Who’s the cake for?’ Where did this rule come from?

“The answer will surprise even most English teachers: John Dryden, the seventeenth-century poet less well known as an early, influential stickler. In a 1672 essay, he criticized his literary predecessor Ben Jonson for writing ‘The bodies that these souls were frightened from.’ Why the prepositional bee in Dryden’s syntactical bonnet? This pseudo-rule probably springs from the same source many others do: the classical languages. Dryden said he liked to compose in Latin and translate into English, as he valued the precision and clarity he believed Latin required of writers. The preposition-final construction is impossible in Latin. Hence: it is impossible in English. Confused by his logic? Linguists remain so to this day. But once Dryden proclaimed the rule, it made its way into the first generation of English usage books roughly a century later and thence into the minds of two hundred years of English teachers and copy editors.

“The rule has no basis in clarity (‘Who’s that cake for?’ is perfectly clear); history (it was made up from whole cloth); literary tradition (Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron, Henry Adams, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, and dozens of other great writers have violated it); or purity (it isn’t native to English but probably stolen from Latin; clause-final prepositions exist in English’s cousin languages such as Danish and Icelandic). Many people know that the Dryden rule is nonsense. From the great usage-book writer Henry Fowler in the early twentieth century, usage experts began to caution readers io ignore it. The New York Times flouts it. The ‘rule’ should be put to death, but it may never be. Even those who know it is ridiculous observe it for fear of annoying others.”

Author: Robert Lane Greene
Title: You Are What You Speak
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Date: Copyright 2011 by Robert Lane Greene
Pages: 33-34, 24-25

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Robbie Tribute: Words of Wisdom

My friend and partner’s son died 2 weeks ago.  He was 14 with severe cerebal palsy.  At his funeral, it was mentioned that he only spoke 4 words.  “Good” and “I love you.”  Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all only spoke those few words?!

My friend and partner spoke at the grave site and said that he has been angry and questioning God only 2 times in his life: The first when Robbie was born, and the now the second when God took Robbie from him.  WOW! The powerful truth that so often the only way to the mountain tops is through the valleys of life.

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C.U.L.P. Initiative: Conspiracy to overcome the Upper Limit Problem

C.U.L.P. New Year’s Initiative

Conspiracy to overcome the Upper Limit Problem (concept from the book titled: The Big Leap)…

Conspiracy is from 2 latin words; and it literally means to breathe together. I think that is cool.

I definitely suffer from The Upper Limit Problem.

The Upper Limit Problem is the concept that we all live in our little box of excellence: we have acquired through experience a comfortable space of expertise.

The Upper Limit Problem is the human tendency to put the brakes on our positive “energy”/feelings when we’ve exceeded our unconscious thermostat setting for how good we can feel, how successful we can be, and how much love we can feel. The items to explore are:

1. What keeps us from going up? Getting beyond our upper limit…For me it is that I am not enough so I am not worthy, not deserving, and not willing to let go of staying in the box (ex. not truly embracing/accepting compliments/good moments that happen to me).

2. What can we do to stay above our upper limit? Or better yet, what can we do to eliminate our upper limit completely? What can we do to increase our tolerance for things going well in our lives in the now? What can we do to celebrate and embrace the space above and beyond our upper limit?

3. What does it feel like when we break through the top of our upper limit box?

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Lessons From Mom

I am not enough. This sentence echoes through the minds of most men (and many women) in our society. It is a burden we carry often from our dads (and sometimes our moms). We walk around doing all that we can to look good and feel like we are enough when in reality, we hear only a voice telling us that we are not enough.

My mom died this last summer, and a few months before she died, I was reminded once again of being enough. She was the voice that echoed to me that I was enough. I shared with her my newest adventure into becoming certified in professional coaching. She did what she did best with her kids. She looked straight into my eyes through into my soul, lightly wrapped her hand around my wrist, and said, “You will be great at that.”

I am reminded today, a day in which she would have turned 82, that she gave me the gift of being enough. She believed in me when I didn’t. This was her gift, and it is her legacy.

My youngest son is 8. He recently has gotten into learning how to throw a Frisbee. After every throw, he yells out, “Is that a good one?” The dutiful, worry wart, dad that I am thinks maybe he lacks self-esteem. As we are walking into the house after a Frisbee toss time, he looks at me and says, “Dad, do you think I am getting better?” Worried about his self-esteem, I ask him what he thinks. He immediately with a big smile says, “I think I am getting really great at throwing the Frisbee!” He is enough! And his Grandma’s legacy of being enough carries on in him and in all of us who she touched.

Are you enough? You are more enough than you could ever imagine. God said that you are His beloved. Can you feel His warm embrace? Can you hear His whisper in your ear, “You are my beloved. I adore you.” Even though my mom gave me the gift, I continue to live with the wound of feeling that I am not enough. It has only been recently that I have begun to embrace my enoughness. Don’t settle for the dial tone of not enough. Listen to the gentle voice that KNOWS that you are enough and so much more.

Mom is finally in a place where “I am not enough” doesn’t even exist. I am so grateful today, her birthday, for her gift. I am enough, Mom. I will always be enough. I am beloved, embraced, and delighted in. Thanks Mom. I miss you.

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Emotional Intelligence: Self-Awareness

I just finished a very thoughtful book titled: Emotional Intelligence 2.0.  Here are some brief notes that I learned about Self-Awareness.  The book focuses on 4 parts to E.I.-Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social-Awareness, and Social-Management.

Self-Awareness:  To know yourself as you really are & to notice and understand your emotions

1. Allow yourself to sit with an emotion and become fully aware of it especially when emotions pop up or boil to the surface

2. Know who pushes your buttons and how they do it

3. Use books, music, and books to analyze and look at your emotions

Finally, keep a journal of emotions based on these 3 key points.

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Parenting Top 10

The latest edition of Mind magazine from Scientific American had an article about parenting. Including a top 10 list of key factors in parenting that predict a strong parent-child bond and children’s happiness, health, and success. Some are obvious, but others may not be.

The one that I continue to see that many parents can’t believe and don’t follow is that a strong parental relationship is KEY to happy and successful kids. A kid centered family is NOT healthy. We must date our spouse. The love that you show your spouse in some studies has been shown to be MORE important at times than the love you show your kids. The love you show your spouse is also a key model for your kids to see relationship love, respect, and support so they will hopefully have a successful marriage…

1. Love and affection. You support and accept the child, are physi-
cally affectionate, and spend quality one-on-one time together.
2. Stress management. You take steps to reduce stress for yourself
and your child, practice relaxation techniques and promote posi-
tive interpretations of events.
3. Relationship skills. You maintain a healthy relationship with your
spouse and model effective relationship skills with other people.
4. Autonomy and independence. You treat your child with respect and
encourage him or her to become self-sufficient and self-reliant.
5. Education and learning. You promote and model learning and
provide educational opportunities for your child.
6. Life skills. You provide for your child, have a steady income and
plan for the future.
7. Behavior management. You make extensive use of positive reinforcement and punish only when other methods of managing behavior have failed.
8. Health. You model a healthy lifestyle and good habits, such as regular exercise and proper nutrition, for your child.
9. Religion. You support spiritual or religious development and participate in spiritual or religious activities.
10. Safety. You take precautions to protect your child and maintain awareness of the child’s activities and friends. —excerpt from Mind magazine

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“Constructive” Criticism

Does “constructive” criticism work?  Answer: NO!  Dale Carnegie’s #1 rule: Don’t Criticize, Condemn, or Complain is founded on the reality that we DO NOT respond to criticism.

Why? Because he writes: “ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticize themselves for anything, no matter how wrong it may be.”   He goes on to say that “criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself.  Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.”

In fact, the father of behavioral psychology, B.F. Skinner, “proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behavior.  Later studies showed that the same applies to humans.  By criticizing, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment.”

So when will we “get this”? Constructive criticism DOES NOT WORK.  We must turn to the positive.  Wouldn’t it be exciting to try it!  What if the next round of evaluations at the office were filled with all things positive?  How might the climate change?

“Consider the annual performance planning process…a process dreaded by leader and subordinate alike!…What is possible when we focus on unleashing potential by giving direction, position, and conditions to individuals rather than assessing potential as under-performance or failure to perform?…focusing on what we want rather than what we don’t want activates the inherent strengths, gifts, and creativity of each person…”-Janet Harvey, MA, MCC

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Anti-Appreciative Inquiry

I have mentioned the concept of Appreciative Inquiry, the power of appreciation, and the effectiveness of positive psychology  in prior posts with plenty of supporting scientific and empiric evidence to support their efficacy.  But the sad truth is that our world is convinced that these things either don’t work or they are too hard to impliment.  These concepts are so foreign to us that they can be very hard to break old habits.

The typical Inquiry remains the dreaded yearly or quarterly employee evaluation.  This is the place where the boss critiques the employee.  We have all been ‘evaluated’, and we have all been found wanting.  Even if you receive a glowing evaluation, it takes only one ‘but’ to ruin it.  “You continue to do an amazing job, BUT you could improve in this or that…”  We are convinced that this negative feedback is essential and productive.  BUT if you are at all like me, I only hear the negative, and it burns into my heart.  I go sleepless for days stewing over my critique.  In fact, the negative causes me often to be counterproductive, frustrated, sad, depressed, discouraged, etc.
 
now in a parallel universe:
 
Your boss calls you into a room and gives you a list of sincere appreciation.  A list of blessings. A list of all the great things that you do.    Would your productivity go up? Would you work harder? Would you sleep well that night? Would you wake up excited to go to work the following day? Would you appreciate and encourage my co-workers and boss more? Would we all be more likely to smile, laugh, encourage, and bless those around us???

Now What?

What if we started to sincerely appreciate those around us? What if we took the time each day to choose someone to bless with words of affirmation? Can we all try this? I did.  WOW!  It almost brought the person to tears…it is THAT powerful.  If we all got into a rhythm of daily blessing those around us with words of encouragement, what might happen?? Please share with us your experience in trying this…

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Intimate, Eternal Marriage

I just heard of yet another divorce at work that unraveled by infidelity.  Marriage is tough, but the studies support that if you are in trouble, the worst thing to do is divorce.  Those couples who divorce are individually statistically doomed for loneliness, depression, anxiety, etc.  The marriages on the rocks that decide to make a run at staying together often do, and these married couples when asked 5 years down the line if they are happy usually say yes.  And they are very happy that they stuck it out.

What does an intimate, eternal, beautiful marriage look like?  How is it done?

A friend of mine’s wife wrote him a special praise message on her breast cancer blog, and it is a beautiful example of love for a lifetime and beyond.

“This entry is dedicated to my wonderful husband… In the words of my mom this past week ” Te ganaste la loteria con este hombre!” translation– ” You have won the lottery with this man” Not only did he sleep in the hospital with me both nights, waking up every hr and a half when the nurses came in to check on me, he came up with my medication schedule ( which I still don’t understand) , makes sure I’m taking them as directed, brought a little picnic table in our master bedroom so we can still eat as a family since I was bedridden for several days, he wakes the kids and gets them breakfast and ready for school everyday, drives them to school, missed his mens bible study because our daughter wanted to walk to school on “Walk to school day”, works from home because I asked him to, answers the phone for me, still works his insane hrs, helps get the kids ready for bed, took our daughter to the drs for a strange bump behind her ear, only to find out she had a fever, has been taking care of our daughter and her medication schedule for the last 3 1/2 days because I can’t risk getting whatever she has, slept in her room to get her whatever she needed throughout 2 nights and coached our son’s 3 flag football games today! Oh, and he had to bathe me twice because I couldn’t lift my arms! The guy is exhausted! I gave him 2 Tylenol pm’s, sent him to sleep alone in the office and pray he gets a full night’s sleep! He has been my knight in shining armor and I love him to death! God has blessed me with this amazing man!”

YES!

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Variety is Good for our Brains

Interesting information about study habits–overall theme: variety is good for our brains and our bodies.

In today’s excerpt – researchers have identified better ways for students to study, yet they often contradict received wisdom and have been ignored by the education system:

” ‘We have known these principles [for improved study] for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,’ said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. ‘Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.’

“Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are ‘visual learners’ and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. …

“Psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms – one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard – did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics. …

“Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting – alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language – seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills. …

“In a study recently posted online by the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, Doug Rohrer and Kelli Taylor of the University of South Florida taught a group of fourth graders four equations, each to calculate a different dimension of a prism. Half of the children learned by studying repeated examples of one equation, say, calculating the number of prism faces when given the number of sides at the base, then moving on to the next type of calculation, studying repeated examples of that. The other half studied mixed problem sets, which included examples of all four types of calculations grouped together. Both groups solved sample problems along the way, as they studied. A day later, the researchers gave all of the students a test on the material, presenting new problems of the same type. The children who had studied mixed sets did twice as well as the others, outscoring them 77 percent to 38 percent. The researchers have found the same in experiments involving adults and younger children.

“This finding undermines the common assumption that intensive immersion is the best way to really master a particular genre, or type of creative work, said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College and the lead author of the study. ‘What seems to be happening in this case is that the brain is picking up deeper patterns when seeing assortments of paintings; it’s picking up what’s similar and what’s different about them,’ often subconsciously.

“Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn – it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out. …  [In contrast] an hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now – so-called spacing – improves later recall without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.”

Author: Benedict Carey
Title: “Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits”
Publisher: The New York Times
Date: September 6, 2010

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Appreciative Inquiry

I am re-reading Dale Carnegie’s great book in which he points out that rule #1 in dealing with people is–never condemn, complain, or criticize.  Why? Because humans, no matter who they are or what they have done, believe that they are good and with equal confidence are convinced that whatever the issue is it isn’t their fault.

I also just finished Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. He points out that it is not our responsibility to change anybody (and as Carnegie has pointed out, you can’t so stop trying!).  We can, however, try and see them as God does (as a beloved son or daughter) and love them as God does (unconditionally).  By putting away our ‘judgmentalism and pride and loathing of other people’ and instead treat everybody ‘as though they were [your] best friend’, they will change for the better.

When organizations discover that they are having a problem, they get a team together to look at the problems and try to find a solution better known as problem solving.  About 10 years ago, a team of expert problem solvers were hired by a large corporation to come in to ‘fix’ their problems in hopes of increasing their production rates.  They found that after their problem solving their production rates actually went down instead of up.  Puzzled, they tried a different method.  Instead of looking at the problem and filling everyone with negative thoughts about each other and the organization, they looked at the positive.  They looked at all the things that worked well, and they focused on making them work even better.  The production rate soared.  This method is known as Appreciative Inquiry.

It has been thought that allowing and encouraging people to air their grievances about other people in the organization and list their complaints about others and the organization is the path to improvement.  This has been shown time and time again to have the opposite effects. It produces negativity, discourages others from working harder to make things better (why bother if you are only going to hear the negative from a select few?!), and it creates a work environment that is defeatist, negative, counter productive, and filled with cattiness and  pettiness.  So next time your organization decides to send out questionnaires to critique, or wants to create a work group to problem solve, I would hope we all can consider Appreciative Inquiry and the wisdom of Carnegie, Miller, and Christ.

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Life Principle #5: SMILE

I recently picked up Carnegie’s book AGAIN to reread AGAIN!  It is definitely in my top 10 books of all time.  It has amazing Christian principles.  His 5th principle is simple but powerful: Smile.  Smiling has shown to program and produce in the smiler a happier disposition through brain chemistry; smiling is also beneficial for the smilee as well…

This is principle #5 in Carnegie’s book,  How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Lowndes book,  How to Talk to Anyone also points out the importance of smiling.

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Top 10 Books: How to Win Friends and Influence People

Besides the Bible, I have read many books over the years.  A few have made it into the ‘top 10’ or well maybe the ‘top 20’.  This is one for the top 10.  A book with foundational Christian principles.  It can transform your life and relationships if you let it.

How to Win Friends and Influence People is an old book that I wish that I had memorized in high school! I have listened to it on CD several times now, and it continues to teach me key life principles that are also for the most part Biblical principles as well.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (I recommend the hardcover to allow for taking notes in the margins…yes, I am a GEEK!)

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It is NOT about IQ!

Today’s post is about IQ.  From a very early age, I was taught that all that mattered was how smart you are and how high your IQ is.  I have always struggled with such a notion because there are many happy and successful people that are not geniuses.  It is sad to have such a rigid, narrow, and ignorant perspective.  The people that I have met who claim that IQ is so important tend to be those who are mostly unhappy, lonely, and proud-living in an ivory tower of their own making. It turns out that it is NOT about IQ!

“Over the years, an enormous amount of research has been done in an attempt to determine how a person’s performance on an IQ test…translates to real-life success…The relationship between success and IQ only works up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn’t seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage.”

After listing where the last 25 Nobel Loreates in Chemistry and Medicine gradutate from college, it is clear that you don’t have to go to Harvard to be successful. “To be a Nobel Prize winner, apparently, you have to be smart enough to get into…college…That’s all….”

“In a devastating critique, the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin once showed that if Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same kinds of family backgrounds as the Termites–and dispensed with IQs altogether–he would have ended up with a group doing almost as many impressive things as his painstakingly selected group of genisues. ‘By no stretch of the imagination or of standars of genius,’ Sorokin concluded, ‘is the ‘gifted group’ as a whole ‘gifted.'” By the time Terman came out with his fourth volume of Genetic Studies of Genius, the word ‘genius’ had all but vanished. ‘We have seen,’ Terman concluded, with more than a touch of disappointment, ‘that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.”

“You can have lots of analytical intelligence and very little practical intelligence, or lots of practical intelligence and not much analytical intelligence…so where does something like practical intelligence come from? We know where analytical intelligence comes from. It’s something, at least in part, that’s in your genes…But social savvy is knowledge. It’s a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families.”

“What was the difference between the As and the Cs? Terman ran through every conceivable explanation. He looked at their physical and mental health…he compared…what their precise IQ scores were in elementary and high school. In the end, only one thing mattered: family background. The As overwhelmingly came from…homes filled with books…etc…the Cs lacked…a community around them that prepared them properly for the world.”

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

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Unnoticed Wonders

A poem written by my daughter-

Unnoticed Wonders

Dedicated to the small things we love, but never pay attention to

A brand new box of sharp, colorful crayons

The way the ocean feels on bare feet

A leaf’s delicate design

The taste of fresh, red apples

A puppy’s velvety ears

The smell of a new book

The wind blowing in your face

Splashing in puddles

The birds’ chirping

Roasting marshmallows

A sense of accomplishment

Laughter

Dessert

The way your hair floats around you when you’re underwater

Riding a roller coaster

Being told that you’re good at something

Catching your first fish

Swinging on a swing

Being with your friends

Dressing up

Getting a present

Doing a fun craft

Sitting by the fire

Watching lightning flash across the sky

Drinking cool lemonade on a hot July day

Imagining what it would feel like to fly

Playing an exciting game

 Staying up late

Watching a movie while eating popcorn

Jumping on the trampoline

Playing tag

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Mom’s Euology

My Mom died last week: December 16, 1929-July 12, 2010

I was asked to give her Euology:

believe, love, live

believe.

My Mom was proud of her English degree from Berkley. She would always tell me of the time that she got spit on while she was riding on the San Francisco trolly with her African American girlfriend, and the special privileges she got as an English major. Only the English majors were allowed to read the books in the locked cabinet in the library–catcher In the Rye and Chaucer books.

When it came time for me to decide between Berkley and Stanford the decision was made easy by Mom. “You are going to Stanford!” much to her surprise I came back a changeling as she sometimes would call me.

I believe-I remember exactly where I was standing in our house when I first broached the subject of faith with Mom. She said, “You didn’t become born again did you!” I simply told her that I discovered that there is a God who loves us and is all perfect and all loving who wants to be in relationship with us. It is like taking a test and I have taken a lot of tests. If God is perfect, then He gets 100% on the moral test of life, mother theresa gets on her best day 90%, and well I might get to 50%. The only way to be in an intimate relationship with a perfect, all Holy Being is to ace the moral test which no one can accept God. Solution: God came down in human form as Jesus to take the test for us. All we have to do is accept His gift and say I believe. The following day Mom said, “well, I prayed to accept Jesus into my heart, but nothing happened.” She didn’t like to talk about her faith much or mine for that matter. It was 15 years later when she showed up and sat in the back of the auditorium while I was teaching about the evidence of God from science and philosophy that we spoke again of faith. She said afterwards, “of course I have always known Christianity to be true and I wish that all the kids were here.” she ended a lot of her sentences that way.

She believed in Christ and she believed in all of us. When we were discouraged she would always be there to lift us up. When I had no friends and felt like the world was ending in 7th grade she said, “you have always been a good swimmer. Why don’t you join a swim team.” her belief in me and many of us changed the course of our lives.

She was an avid reader and she loved Langston Hughes poetry. She shared her favorite one with each of her kids….a poem of inspiration and of believing in us…

Well…I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So…don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps.
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

love.

Prodigal son-there is an ancient story modernized by Brennan Manning…there was a bright young man….this is the love of God…unconditional, outrageous, crazy

Mom didn’t speak of her faith but she showed it through her unconditional love of me and my kids…an amazing and rare gift to give to all of our kids and those around us…

live on.

Grandma is so lucky! The night mom died I was trying to think of something to say when I tucked my oldest son in for bed…but before I could say anything..he said, “Grandma is SO lucky!”   We have been so lucky, so blessed to love her. But we must remember that she is the lucky one.

We think we live in disneyland let me tell u this is not disneyland…a friend of mine has told me the story of his sons first trip to Disneyland. They went through the gate and he saw all the flowers and just knew that he had made it into Disneyland, and when his dad tried to tell him that this wasn’t Disneyland he refused to budge. We think we r in Disneyland when in reality we r only at the entrance.

“follow the balloons”-when my sister was visiting with Mom in the hospital, and she told Mom that she was going to go down stairs to the cafeteria to get something to drink. Mom said, “just follow the balloons..” This is a time to celebrate because Grandma, Mom has followed the balloons pass the entrance and through the gates to the real Disneyland and she lives on…and she is SO lucky…and we will see her again…it is not good bye but see u later…release the balloon to know that mom is now finally at Disneyland…

Let us release these balloons, and remember the lessons she taught all of us…to believe and to love….

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Teaching ‘Right’

In today’s excerpt – teaching. Through many years of systematic observation of some of the very best teachers, teacher Doug Lemov has identified forty-nine key techniques that separate the very best teachers from merely good ones. One of these forty-nine techniques he has labeled “Right is Right”:

” ‘Right Is Right’ is about the difference between partially right and all-the-way
right – between pretty good and 100 percent. The job of the teacher is to set a
high standard for correctness: 100 percent. The likelihood is strong that students will stop striving when they hear the word right (or yes or some other proxy), so there’s a real risk to naming as right that which is not truly and completely right. When you sign off and tell a student she is right, she must not be betrayed into thinking she can do something that she cannot.

“Many teachers respond to almost-correct answers their students give in class
by rounding up. That is they’ll affirm the student’s answer and repeat it, adding some detail of their own to make it fully correct even though the student didn’t provide (and may not recognize) the differentiating factor. Imagine a student who’s asked at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet how the Capulets and Montagues get along. ‘They don’t like each other,’ the student might say, in an answer that most teachers would, I hope, want some elaboration on before they called it fully correct. ‘Right,’ the teacher might reply. ‘They don’t like each other, and they have been feuding for generations.’ But of course the student hadn’t included the additional detail. That’s the ’rounding up.’ Sometimes the teacher will even give the student credit for the rounding up as if the student said what he did not and what she merely wished he’d said, as in, ‘Right, what Kiley said was that they don’t like each other and have been feuding. Good work, Kiley.’ Either way, the teacher has set a low standard for correctness and explicitly told the class that they can be right even when they are not. Just as important, she has crowded out students’ own thinking, doing cognitive work that students could do themselves (e.g., ‘So, is this a recent thing? A temporary thing? Who can build on Kiley’s answer?’).

“When answers are almost correct, it’s important to tell students that they’re
almost there, that you like what they’ve done so far, that they’re closing in on
the right answer, that they’ve done some good work or made a great start. You
can repeat a student’s answer back to him so he can listen for what’s missing
and further correct – for example, ‘You said the Capulets and the Montagues
didn’t get along.’ Or you can wait or prod or encourage or cajole in other ways
to tell students what still needs doing, ask who can help get the class all the
way there until you get students all the way to a version of right that’s rigorous
enough to be college prep: ‘Kiley, you said the Capulets and the Montagues
didn’t get along. Does that really capture their relationship? Does that sound like what they’d say about each other?’

“In holding out for right, you set the expectation that the questions you ask and their answers truly matter. You show that you believe your students are capable of getting answers as right as students anywhere else. You show the difference between the facile and the scholarly. This faith in the quality of a right answersends a powerful message to your students that will guide them long after they have left your classroom.

“Over the years I’ve witnessed teachers struggle to defend right answers.
In one visit to a fifth-grade classroom, a teacher asked her students to define
peninsula. One student raised his hand and offered this definition: ‘It’s like, where the water indents into the land.’ ‘Right,’ his teacher replied, trying to reinforce participation since so few hands had gone up. Then she added, ‘Well, except that a peninsula is where land indents into water, which is a little different.’ Her reward to the student for his effort was to provide him with misinformation. A peninsula, he heard, is pretty much ‘where the water indents into the land’ but different on some arcane point he need not really recall. Meanwhile, it’s a safe bet that the students with whom he will compete for a seat in college are not learning to conflate bays and peninsulas.”

Author: Doug Lemov
Title: Teach Like a Champion
Publisher: Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint
Date: Copyright 2010 by John Wiley & Sons
Page: 35-37