Awesome story for Dog Lovers

Homeless dog joins ultra-marathon

We’ve all heard some truly incredible stories about a dog’s unconditional love and loyalty for his master. For instance, there’s Hachiko, the dog who stayed by his owner’s grave till his dying day. Then there’s a story of a dog who ran away from his home to stay by its master’s side for nine years. Another dog saved a French pet-owner from committing suicide. Then there’s Bobbie the ‘Wonder dog’ who crossed over 4000 km to return to his family home. And we all know about the rescue missions in the Alpine regions led by St. Bernards and Mastiffs. Throughout history, human beings have found faithful friends in those little furry creatures who can be your perfect playmate or even the best night guard.

Read the story in the link above.  No doubt Man’s best friend…

Solitude vivifies; isolation kills.

Joseph Roux

http://youtu.be/Z7dLU6fk9QY

I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.

Paul Theroux

Just don’t spread cancer

Two items from 10½ Things No Commencement Speaker Has Ever Said, by Charles Wheelan.  He was a former speechwriter for the Governor of Maine, Jock McKiernan (husband of Olympia Snowe).

3. Don't make the world worse. I know that I'm supposed to tell you to aspire to great things. But I'm going to lower the bar here: Just don't use your prodigious talents to mess things up. Too many smart people are doing that already. And if you really want to cause social mayhem, it helps to have an Ivy League degree. You are smart and motivated and creative. Everyone will tell you that you can change the world. They are right, but remember that "changing the world" also can include things like skirting financial regulations and selling unhealthy foods to increasingly obese children. I am not asking you to cure cancer. I am just asking you not to spread it.

9. It's all borrowed time. You shouldn't take anything for granted, not even tomorrow. I offer you the "hit by a bus" rule. Would I regret spending my life this way if I were to get hit by a bus next week or next year? And the important corollary: Does this path lead to a life I will be happy with and proud of in 10 or 20 years if I don't get hit by a bus.

Read the rest: WSJ - 10 1/2 Things

The mind is an excellent servant but a terrible master - a great and terrible truth.

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

David Foster Wallace

Adapted from a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College

…Pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

David Foster Wallace

Change you life by reading the excellent speech at the WSJ

The first thing you have to do is wake up

If you want to make your dreams come true, the first thing you have to do is wake up. 

J.M. Power

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

Follow your inner moonlight. 

A. Ginsberg

Just what is greatness?

What Makes a Great Teacher?

By Paul Greenberg

10/17/2011

I have no idea what kind of job Andrea McKenna does as a teacher at her middle school in Springdale, Ark.

I do know she's just been picked as the only teacher in the state of Arkansas to receive a prized Milken Educator Award this year.

The award includes a cash stipend ($25,000) and is a big deal in American education, which needs all the attention it can get.

I also know that Ms. McKenna must be a great teacher if she conducts her classes as eloquently and from-the-heart as she spoke when presented with about the highest honor an American teacher can receive.

It was quite an occasion at -- and for -- the J.O. Kelly Middle School when the surprise announcement was made. And I mean surprise. You could tell from her reaction. And everybody else's.

The only thing the kids and teachers knew was that they were to attend a school assembly that morning to hear from some bigwigs -- like the governor and the state's commissioner of education. Supposedly in observance of the Month of the Young Adolescent. (Everybody and everything's got a month these days.)

v Then, out of the blue, the president of the National Institute for Excellence in Education headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif., got up and explained why he was there. It seems a man named Lowell Milkin with a family foundation thought the best educators in the country deserved recognition. Much the way actors get Oscars and Olympic athletes win gold medals.

And so Mr. Milken established an institute to present the Milken Awards to the best teachers in the country. They're chosen after an extensive search and then an exhaustive winnowing process. Here in Arkansas, there were 16 nominations for the honor this year. The field was then narrowed to five finalists, and the people at the Milken Foundation settled on just one winner:

Andrea Morales McKenna.

When her name was announced, the school assembly erupted in cheers and tears for one of its own. No one seemed more stunned and tearful than the lady who teaches English as a second language to sixth and seventh graders at J.O. Kelly.

If courage is grace under pressure, sincerity may be grace when you're suddenly hauled up before an assembly of your friends, fellow teachers, the press, leading public officials and your principal. And presented with the highest honor in your profession. Here is what Ms. McKenna said through her tears:

God is good.

Dreams come true.

I wasn't the (most gifted and talented) student in my school.

I wasn't the best athlete of the year.

I wasn't asked to prom.

I want to tell you that this is such an awesome experience to just be a teacher and to love you and to let you know that dreams come true.

Who wouldn't want to have such a teacher? Or, even better, to have her teach your child? For all of us want our children to be better than we are. And to be the best they can be, they need the best of teachers.

But a great award does not a great teacher make.

What then does make a great teacher?

Years ago I asked somebody who ought to be know -- an economist turned educational analyst who'd spent years studying how to improve American education.

Eric Hanushek is a professor of education at Stanford and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution there. If anybody ought to know the answer to that question, he's the one. When I asked him, his response was direct, concise, honest and just about the best I've ever heard on the topic. It's stayed with me ever since.

What makes a great teacher?

"We don't know," said the professor.

But you know what a great teacher is when you've been lucky enough to have had one.

. .

Great teachers may have different backgrounds, approaches and specialties. Each may be one of a kind. But they all share that common quality we have no better word for than -- greatness.

What makes a great teacher? You might as well ask what makes a great artist.

Maybe they're just born. If so, they have to be born again by dint of effort, dedication and/or genius.

Everybody's got a favorite theory about teaching, especially if he's never taught a day in his life. Theories about teaching abound; those who excel at it are rare.

Most of us know that the teacher is all-important in education -- and the great ones are unique. What they supply can't be delivered by an impersonal system you work out on a spreadsheet. It's got to be a product of the chemistry between teacher and taught.

Maybe the secret ingredient is love. Martin Luther King Jr. said you couldn't teach anybody anything if you didn't love 'em first.

Sure, you can teach somebody a superficial technique or mechanical calculation without any great involvement with the student, but without that indefinable something, you can't make it part of their core, their inner being, the way they think and feel and act and go through life. For that, you need a great teacher.

. .

Give schools great teachers and they will be great schools. It's a simple as that -- and as complicated.

Want to fix American education? Give us more unique Andrea McKennas, not fill-in-the-blank, one-size-fits-all systems. How many fads have we seen come and go in education, from self-esteem to Cultural Literacy to multiculturalism to . . . well, who can keep count? But personnel is performance -- good, bad or great.

. .

Great people make a great difference. And that truth applies to more than education:

Want to fix the American economy? Give us more Steve Jobses and Thomas Edisons, not quick fixes like Quantitative Easing or Short-Term Stimulus, another Jobs Bill or 9-9-9, or whatever the next economic panacea will be.

Want to spur American finance and philanthropy? Give us more George Peabodys and J.P. Morgans.

Want to fix American politics? Give us great politicians. Give us more Franklin D. Roosevelts and Ronald Reagans with their wholly different programs but same idealism. Maybe that's why both spoke the same language: hope.

Want to fix American business? Give us another Sam Walton.

Want to fix our cities? Find us another Daniel Burnham to plan them, and the City Beautiful will take shape.

Want to make baseball the National Pastime once again? Give us another Joe Dimaggio or Satchel Paige. They were wholly different on and off the field, but each was distinctive.

Want to fix American statecraft, banking, public finance? Just give us another Alexander Hamilton.

..

Yes, it's a romantic notion, the idea that greatness cannot be just be rolled off some assembly line, that it's more a matter of individual genius and talent and character than the product of any system.

Just what is greatness? How does it come about? It's a mystery. Call it an act of grace. Unlikely as it may seem to doubters, God is good, and dreams come true.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/greenberg101811.php3

HT to Bruce.