Teachers In Space

The friend who e-mailed me this link said, "It's like a field trip, except with no kids!"

http://www.teachers-in-space.org/

Crash Another Poll

Do you think Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President of the United States?

Its not at 100% NO yet. Let's help them out...

Here it is, at PBS.

Cool T-Shirt

I Must Have Lied On Some of the Questions

How White and Nerdy Are You?

Dragon*Con This Weekend

I'll be there, mostly hanging around the Science and Skeptic Tracks. Phil Plait will be there as well as some Skepchicks and Dr. Michael Shermer. Even some of the SGU guys. If nothing else, go downtown Saturday morning at 10am and check out the always enjoyable Dragon*Con Parade. It's something to see.

(image via Dragon*Con gallery admin.)

Spell With Flickr

Spell with Flickr.

My Mind Is On Vacation

Actually it's not, but everything else is. Sarasota is lovely and my daughter is having a ball with her grandparents. I'm reading a lot, which I'll blog about soon. Finished Carl Zimmer's Evolution and a book of Robert Ingersoll speeches which knocked me out. Still poking at the novel daily, but will have to increase productivity upon my return home next week.

As for the blog, well, keep checking out the shared items to the right and making your way through the Blogroll. I'm still checking comments and the feed reader so I'm not completely out of the loop. But mostly, I'm just chillin'. (Don't have a cool hammock like that guy, though...) Even when I get back my lack of posts may continue. I'll be sweating out the novel (deadline July 31) and then transitioning back into school where I hope to get back into the more regular posting and embarking on my Media Specialist degree come August.

Thanks for sticking with me. Hope you're enjoying the summer as well!

Best Movie Teacher

Nancy Flanagan had a post about movie teachers. She said her fave was Mr. Holland's Opus. After I finished yawning, I started thinking about my own favorite movie teachers. Frank Oz as Yoda and Pat Morita as Mister Miyagi popped to mind immediately. I almost went with Burgess Meredith. Not only was he Rocky's coach, and an inspirational motivator ("You're going to eat lightening and crap thunder!"), he got to teach Perseus in Clash of the Titans ("Oh impetuous... foolish... Ah dear, the young. Why do they never listen? When will they ever learn?"). How cool is that?

But the best movie teacher has to absolutely be...

...Mr. Arnold Hand!

"What is this fascination with truancy? What is it that gets inside of your heads? There are some teachers at this school who look the other way at truants. It's a little game you both play. They pretend they don't see you, and you pretend you don't ditch! Now, in the end, who pays the price? YOU!"

He cares! (Without being wishy-washy like most movie teachers.) He doesn't take crap! (With out having to carry a stupid baseball bat.) He's awesome. Not only does he put Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli in his place on day one by tearing up his schedule card and sending him to the office, in the end he makes a house call to Spicoli's house to tutor him! Aloha, indeed! You can take your poetry-quoting Robin Williams, I'll take the Hand!

Nancy Flanagan does make the point that most of these teachers are men. And it's true that for some reason female teachers haven't done well on the screen. If I had to pick one, I'd probably go with Miss Shields from A Christmas Story. I am far from a fan of that nauseating tripe, but I like how kind and unharsh she is in the face of the student's antics. She confiscates quite an assortment of contraband and even helps Flick when he gets his tongue stuck on that pole.

Nerd Perfect

Need one! Get them here from those awesome Skepchicks.

Make Your Own News

Danny over at The Whiteboard Blog, linked to this fun newspaper-generating tool. Make your own authentic-looking newspaper clipping. Post it, print it, fool the students with it--many uses pop to mind. Let me know of any others you can imagine...

Frozen In Time

Check out this cool five-minute improv moment where roughly 200 folks froze in place for five minutes in Grand Central Station.

Then even more folks did the same thing in London.

Freaky cool.

Questionable Content

No, Questionable Content is the name of the cool internet shop that stocks this awesome T-shirt!

Perv.

Throwing Fish!

This is my (mega-ninja) friend Merlin. We went to college together. We were both goof-offs to some extent (but he was a much smarter goof-off). We'll get back to him in a moment.

During teacher planning week they showed us a motivational video about these guys at a big international fish market in a city who made their job fun by really performing for their customers and making a big show of throwing the fish and just making their "boring" job a ton of fun. It was motivating and as you watched you wanted to be one of those guys.

Then I had to sit through four (!) two-hour (!) slide-show presentations that turned my brains into tapioca pudding. I've mentioned this problem in this blog previously.

Which brings us back to Merlin. He recently gave a slide-show presentation at the Googleplex on how to deal with your email called "Inbox Zero." I've mentioned and linked to these before. Now he has written a post about how he made this presentations so darn good. Please read it if you or anyone you know needs to do a presentation and feels the need to use a slide-show (Powerpoint, etc).

Most important rule: 10-20-30. No more than ten slides. No more than twenty minutes. No font smaller than 30pt. Now go and throw some fish!

The Word Is Spreading...

My partner teacher noticed how much more organized I've been and bought David Allen's book and a label maker. Now our Assistant Principal has asked the two of us to come to her office and help her get a handle on things. Maybe I'll make a PowerPoint and do a Professional Learning thingee at our school. Nah. I don't want to shove it down anyone's throat and I hate PowerPoint. (If you have to do a PowerPoint presentation, for the love of all that is good in the world, Don't Read Your Slides.)

In other news, if you scroll down past the blog archive on the right there is a new section called "Jim's Shared Items." These are links to interesting items and will allow me to focus more on original content in the main blog. Check it periodically for tips, tricks, ideas and fun stuff.

Have a great summer, and use your ninja powers only for good!

Mo Willems T-Shirts!

Another unpaid plug. I just love this guy. He's a true children's book ninja. Knuffle Bunny, the Pigeon books, all of it. Putting a link here will remind me to buy some for my girls. Link.

Putting the Fizz Back in Physics

Here is an article on the BBC site about the Royal Society's best new science books. Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert won for adults, and it looks great. But scroll down to the DK offering for kids: Can You Feel the Force? with the above-mentioned subtitle.

Science rocks.

History Dudes Books for Kids

Anything to make ancient history more fun. Link.

p.s. I don't know why, but the time stamps on these posts are like three hours off. The server must be in Cali.

Sesame St. Monster Eating Computer

Circa 1971. Enjoy. Link.