savageinfidel

I have mentioned several times on this blog that I would strongly urge anyone who wants to become a better teacher to keep a blog. There are always two reasons for that piece of advice. First, I just feel that working out your thoughts on paper is very helpful in establishing what you really think and believe. Until I see it on paper, I’m never sure how I feel. Thus, I was delighted to read the following in Time magazine last week from the renowned historian David McCullough. “The loss of people writing—writing a composition, a letter or a report—is not just the loss for the record. It’s the loss of the process of working your thoughts out on paper, of having an idea that you would never had had if you weren’t (writing). And that’s a handicap People (I research) were writing letters every day. That was calisthenics for the brain.” Second, keeping a blog gives you a chance to share your ideas with folks around the world. The Internet is a marvel in that way. I can s...

A few years ago a dear friend of mine died at the age of 95. When he was a young man, he worked in the Massachusetts area in construction. He once told me that on many days they would finish their work and step back and someone would speak out in pride “Look at what we accomplished today.” That has to be a great feeling. You put in a hard and full day of work and at the end of the day you see that you have created something tangible from your labors, something you can be proud of right then. The world is different because of what you did. I have always thought that was one of the most difficult parts of being a teacher. At the end of the day, it is hard to see what (if anything) we have accomplished. Oh, sure, we all know that we are changing lives. We all know that we are making a difference. Is that enough to keep us moving forward? At the end of the day, whether we did a great job or a lousy one, things look about the same. If you are a baker, at the end of the ...

Here's a classic role reversal story - a couple foreclosed on a bank! It started about five months ago when Bank of America attempted to foreclose on a Florida couple for non-payment of their mortgage. The problem was, they'd paid cash for the house. So they went to court, and eventually won (they showed that they'd never had a mortgage with BOA). The judge awarded them legal fees, but after five months, BOA somehow never got around to paying the judgement. So, the couple's attorney got the sheriff, seized their assets and padlocked the bank branch building. The attorney gave instructions to remove assets like computers, desks, copiers, and any cash in the tellers' drawers. After about an hour of being locked out of the bank, the bank manager handed the attorney a check for the legal fees. Talk about turnaround. Read the article here . update: It wasn't technically a "foreclosure" on the bank - it was actually a default judgment for unpaid lega...

Here's an interesting chart from Lifehacker. It shows the median salaries (along with the 25th and 75th percentiles for various majors. It's taken from a report created by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce called " What’s it Worth? The Economic Value of College Majors" Here's an interesting part from the press release Georgetown put out: The top 10 majors with the highest median earnings are: Petroleum Engineer ($120,000); Pharmacy/pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration ($105,000); Mathematics and Computer Sciences ($98,000); Aerospace Engineering ($87,000); Chemical Engineering ($86,000); Electrical Engineering ($85,000); Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering ($82,000); Mechanical Engineering, Metallurgical Engineering and Mining and Mineral Engineering (each with median earnings of $80,000). The 10 majors with the lowest median earnings are: Counseling/Psychology ($29,000); Early Childhood Education ($36,000); Theology an...