Infographic by College Scholarships.org

My personal bugbear? “You Let Negative Feelings About Putting Off Tasks Prevent Actual Work”:

Could sending out that email really be so painful that you’ve put it off three days in a row? Likely not, but it certainly feels that way every time you try to dig in. It’s what a Psychology Today post describes as the “overwhelming wave” of negative emotions, building and seemingly towering over you when you try and address yourself to a task. Knowing that it’s really this kind of meta-misery, though, you can perhaps acknowledge it, let it go, then move on.

I guess I’m not alone, since that one tops the list at #1. Check out the full list here. Be sure to take a look at the original articles linked to each of the points for more information. As with most things “brain”, knowing a problem, bias, or predisposition exists is half the battle. Otherwise, as Purdy says (paraphrasing our new bff Socrates?), “An unexamined brain is a tricky thing to carry around.”

Guess what? Your teachers are pretty much hoping for the same thing. (Well, you’ll need to replace “good teachers” up there with “good students,” but you get my point, right?) So, if you’re inclined, you might find it enlightening to check out “Top 10 Ways for Students to Connect to Teachers,” featuring such good-student insider tips as:

#8: Don’t give us too many details. Do not hand in a paper or assignment and say, “Yeah, I just threw this together about an hour ago.” If you hadn’t said that, you might have gotten away with it. But now that you have said it, we know you didn’t take the assignment seriously and you don’t respect the work we do for you day in and day out—and that’s the mindset we grade your paper with.

Some of these are geared more for college students, but you’ll get the idea. And don’t get me wrong—I’m not trying to be preachy or anything, but in the same way that a teacher should consider themselves and their teaching, it might be helpful for a student, from time to time, to consider themselves and their, um, studenting.

Read the whole post at I Want to Teach Forever, and feel free to discuss in the comments!

I’ve cleaned up a few of the more recent posts, but older stuff may be a bit broken for the time being, if you happen to be digging around in the archives. I’m still deciding what static content I’ll move over from the old site—much of it has become outdated, at best.

So here we are, optimistic as ever. I’ll try to keep things updated more regularly, mostly with stuff relating to my classes. But now that I’m handling some English, Journalism, and Mythology, it ought to be an interesting enough mix. We’ll see if we can stay on our feet, this time.

[Post image (cc) twotoneatl/flickr]

I’ll be dumping random stuff into a Tumblelog, so you may want to follow me there. See you around!

[Post image: "The Raised Bones of Arlington National Cemetery" (cc) Stuck in Customs/flickr]

The other is the Name Voyager. Punch in your first name (or somebody else’s) and instantly see a graph of the name’s popularity over the years. Again, here’s mine:

Wow. Looks like I peaked in the ’70′s, with no comeback in sight. Oh well. Anyway, go give ‘em a try yourself!

Protagonize is kind of like that. Except on the Web. And with a choose-your-own-adventure twist. On the site, users create “addventures”— from their web site:

An addventure is a type of online interactive fiction that combines aspects of round-robin stories and Choose Your Own Adventure-style tales. Like a round-robin story, an addventure is a form of collaborative fiction in which many authors contribute to a story, each writing discrete segments. However, like a gamebook, the resulting narrative is non-linear, allowing authors to branch out in different directions after each segment of the story. The result is a continually growing work of hypertext fiction.

As a user, you can start stories, add to existing stories, keep track of favorites, and even subscribe to stories in your favorite RSS reader, if you’ve a mind to.

The few stories I browsed through seemed to veer toward the silly and ridiculous eventually (some quicker than others!), but some seemed fun, regardless. If you’ve got an idea for the beginning of a story, it might be fun to post it, and see where others take it. Or, just log on and add your 2-cents to existing stories.

Teacherial advisory: I haven’t browsed the site extensively, but I’m sure that, since the site is open to the Intarwebs, that if you spend enough time there, you’re liable to run into some sort of offensive language or content. They do have posting guidelines, a designation for “mature” stories so they’re easy to spot and avoid, if that’s your desire, and a way to report questionable content.

That said, play safe and use common sense if you decide to check them out. :-D