Quotes and other stray Sunday thoughts

A few stray thoughts this finally warm Sunday morning...
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My virtual friend and fellow quote-lover, Paul Cornies has compiled his Quote Quest blog entries into a book. (Remember books - those long things people once read before there were snippits?)
Over the past year, I've enjoyed seeing Paul's daily carefully selected quotation with its follow-up questions pop up in my feed reader. Quotation sites are a dime a dozen (as are cliches), but by asking the reader to relate the quote to his/her own experience, Paul makes Quote Quest a gem.
This is a labor of love for Paul, not a profit-making endeavour. Buy the book for your quote-loving friends and you will give the impression of being more thoughtful and sensitive than your probably really are. It works for me.
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Joyce Valenza is a brave woman, subjecting an article that she and I co-authored to new writing analysis site. PaperRater gave us a B. I suspect this is about right since Joyce, I'm sure, has never received less than an A on any paper she's written and I've never received a grade higher than C. It all averages out!
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This past week the district's technology advisory committee met. On the agenda were next year's budget, an online learning plan and the next state-required long-range tech plan. For the second half of the meeting, we used COSN's activity toolkit to the Horizon Report K-12 as a discussion guide. The conversation was both constructive and spirited.
As frustrating and challenging as dealing with technology, technology support staff and technology users can be on a day-to-day basis, meetings like the one last Thursday remind me how lucky I am to be in the most interesting, most dynamic, most potential-filled area of education today.
Do third grade teachers, curriculum directors, business managers or social study department chairs ever get to be this excited about their jobs? I hope so - but I doubt it.
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As long as I'm in a Pollyanna-ish mood...
Last weekend someone broke a back window out of our car and stole a cheap digital camera and old pair of binoculars. After a little grousing and filing a police report, I actually felt grateful. Between us, the LWW and I could only come up with about three or four similar experiences in our combined 100+ years of existence: instances when personal property or our physical selves had been the target of criminal activity.
Do people ever appreciate how wonderful it is to live where it is safe, crime and violence free? And do we ever ask ourselves how we help to ensure that such our grandchildren will enjoy a similar environment?
Reader Comments (2)
This looks like a good read. I love quotes.
Doug, you are most kind and this post may eclipse when you introduced me for a guest post in September of 2009
http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/2009/9/10/10-students-who-taught-me-guest-post-by-paul-cornies.html