Motivation has been on my mind a lot over the past month.
I’ve been wrestling with my own motivation, watching my to-do lists fail to get shorter because I couldn’t find the heart to do anything. It’s not that I don’t like the tasks on my to-do lists. I actually like the vast majority of them. Each and every one of them is a step toward accomplishing some goal, and I love setting and achieving goals.
This lack of motivation has spilled over into other areas of my life, causing me to be sluggish in my editing, my blogging, my jewelry. It makes me feel guilty.
I’m definitely looking for some way to jump start my motivation so May won’t go by as passively as April seems to have.
As I sit here grappling with my motivation, definitely more intrinsic than extrinsic, I’ve also had to deal with a friend’s motivation, more extrinsic than intrinsic. I think it’s been her pursuit of gaining motivators that has actually pushed me to write. While I understand that she is more driven by extrinsic motivators, I have found myself utterly repulsed at her methods of gaining or expressing those recently.
It makes me wonder how often she feels similarly when confronted with my intrinsic motivation. Does she look at my actions and get annoyed with what appears to be me taking a lot of grief that, in her opinion, I shouldn’t have to? (A lot of people watch me work and think that, actually.)
Regardless of whether it intrinsic or extrinsic, motivation is one of those things that is very personal, and changes from person to person. Somehow, it just doesn’t seem to be one of those things so easily judged.
Perhaps it’s just me being so upset for being so unmotivated lately.
I’m still working my way through my writing files, and discovered one I wrote while I was in Amtgard on court ballet.
Essentially, court ballet is the precursor to what we understand as ballet. It looked something like a line dance, and depended more on the man than the woman. In fact, the woman was expected to just go through a series of poses designed to show off her shoes and dress while the man did the actual dancing.
I don’t why, but for some reason, reading over the essay made me giggle. Today, we tend to think of dancing as a woman’s activity. Men who enjoy dancing often have unkind words hurled their way. It just strikes me as funny because it was originally the men who were supposed to dance, while women were about as welcome in dancing as they were in acting.
Shifting opinions are just amusing sometimes, I suppose.
I don’t know if I shared it here, but I have become known as “Dead Bunny” by a writing student in my center.
It all began with a lesson on prepositions. I was using the bunny and the box to demonstrate what a preposition is. I used my hands to form said bunny and box. For the most part, the student got it, despite the fact the teacher was afraid she wouldn’t.
Recently, the same student was presented with an activity on compound predicates. She called me over and told me she didn’t know what to do. I started by asking her what a predicate was, and she looked at me blankly.
So, I gave her the brief explanation of what a subject and predicate are. She still seemed lost, so I reminded her of our dear dead bunny. The sentence, “The bunny fell off the box,” quickly became the means by which she understood subject and predicate. Since she seemed to have that concept well in hand, I changed the sentence to, “The bunny fell off the box and died,” bringing compound predicates into the conversation.
Amazingly, she got it immediately, and the teacher and I just looked at each other. We couldn’t believe how much grammar could be taught from a dead bunny.
I’ve been tagging a number of pages for inclusion in the online portfolio I’m trying to build. Many of them are lesson plans written over the course of my teaching career.
The way I write my lesson plans, they are often lists and lists within lists, so I’m using a lot of tags to make everything display correctly.
However, I discovered early in the process that if I’m tired or have been working too long, I often get sloppy about closing my tags correctly. (I rarely forget to close a tag any more. I just close it in interesting ways.)
The best solution I found to check myself hit me the other day! I now use the Find function with the correct version of the tag I’m checking in the “find” field. My most common mistake is forgetting the / in the closing tag, so this works great! I can quickly spot an out-of-place open tag and get it closed before it causes trouble!
I’m sure plenty of people have figured this out before me, but I really feel somewhat clever for discovering it on my own!
I spend quite a bit of my time editing. Doesn’t matter if I’m at work, running my business, or relaxing. I must spend ten to fifteen hours out of my week editing.
I’m noticing something in my work, though, and I think it’s because I now have an editor for some of my projects. Technical editing is emotionless, and I do that much well.
Content editing…for whatever reason, when I’m asked to edit content, I seem to slip into this cold mode that doles out few compliments and asks a lot of questions. For the most part, this seems to be well-received (which is impressive, given that much of my editing time is spent with students and younger friends), but it occurs to me I don’t have to be quite so grumpy.
This occurred to me last week as I was grading some papers for a local high school. I had to put my pencil on the other side of the room because all I wanted to do was snark all over this poor fifteen year old’s paper. I’m certain I wasn’t a stellar writer when I was fifteen, so I’m guessing I probably had no right to feel so mean-spirited.
I’m going to try to be more….open-minded, forgiving…no…those really sound arrogant. I’m going to try to edit more from the point of view of who I was when I was their age. What would I have wanted to hear, and how would I have wanted to hear it?
The other day, I decided to treat myself to a trip to a bookstore. In all honesty, I just really needed to get out and away from things going on in my house, and I had a couple of topics I wanted to check out.
To my great delight, I found part of what I was looking for: a PSP 8 book from the Barnes and Noble line. I can hardly wait to bust it out! What’s funny, though, is how hard the book was to find. I had to comb through a rather large Photoshop section, running across two books I acquired a couple of years ago when I was trying to figure out Photoshop 7. One of them, oddly enough, is another one from the Barnes and Noble line. I remember when I bought it. Photoshop was causing me no end of grief, and I wasn’t entirely certain a book was going to help me, especially since none of the online tutorials I’d been reading had helped me at all.
To my great surprise, the book quickly became a favorite. I was thumbing through it for everything. I imagine this PSP 8 book will become about as used. It’s amazing how the simplest books can be the most useful.
It’s also amazing exactly how much of my learning has come from random books I’ve decided to seek out for no other reason than I want to know how to do something!
We’re slowly starting to find out that we need to be teaching more than just critical thinking. We need to be teaching the more empathic skills as well. The article suggests activities for incorporating these skills into various subjects.
I guess this puts those of us who are whole-brained in a great position as we move ahead in this shifting time, provided we’re making good use of our whole-brained tendencies.
Found via elearnspace.
It’s no real secret that I have had a fascination with both the stars and mythology since I was a little girl. Mythological stories that involved the stars were my favorite! Favorites have included the story of Orion, which ends with the mighty hunter and the scorpion being hung in the sky, stuck in an endless pursuit; and the story of poor Callisto and her son, both changed into long-tailed bears and thrown into the sky to protect them from a goddess’ jealous rage!
Recently, I stumbled across this article that covers some spring time constellations, including Bootes, Leo, and Ursa Major. I realize you’re probably sitting there trying to figure out why this is at all important to me, a writer, and why I would want to show such a thing here, but really, I think studying mythology is interesting from just about every disciplinary point of view.
In the case of writing, studying mythology is a great reminder that we write to entertain and to educate. They also serve as an interesting reminder that what was true from one point of view may not work in another setting. The stories that amazed me as a child because I could understand that it was an ancient people trying to understand their world now amuse me as an adult because they have helped prove scientific theories. Through them, we can witness changes in the world around us, and in the sensibilities of a period.
Writing allows us to record our thoughts and understandings relevant to our own time, but time will change things to make what we write less relelvant.
I have been giving interviews for the past year concerning the use of blogs in my jewelry business. On the one hand, it’s kind of nice because I know it’s bringing exposure to my jewelry. On the other hand, it’s something of a nightmare. I’ve never been good at talking about myself, especially in “important” situations.
Phone interviews are nice because when they ask me to come up with specifics, I can pull up the site and quickly scan it for something useful, but it just seems that I should be able to talk more easily about things that come from me. Chalk it up to my inherent shyness, my great desire to avoid the spotlight.
After I hung up the phone this morning, I started wondering if perhaps it might be in my best interests to create an interview prep file in my notes. Interviews are not going to stop coming my way, which is a good thing, but I should take them very seriously, and I’m not sure that I’m doing that at the moment. The notes file could contain responses to questions that have come up in each interview, and then a few out-there responses that might serve me well if someone throws an unusual question at me.
What do you think? How do you prepare for “guru” interviews?
