Sleep More.

You need to get more sleep:

The surprise is how much sleep affects academic performance and emotional stability, as well as phenomena that we assumed to be entirely unrelated, such as the international obesity epidemic and the rise of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. A few scientists theorize that sleep problems during formative years can cause permanent changes in a child’s brain structure: damage that one can’t sleep off like a hangover. It’s even possible that many of the hallmark characteristics of being a tweener and teen—moodiness, depression, and even binge eating—are actually symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation. 

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Thoreau’s Blogging

You can't keep a good man down. Simplify, simplify, simplify !

A great post from September 25 (1851):

Some men are excited by the smell of burning powder, but I thought in my dream last night how much saner to be excited by the smell of new bread. 

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Interesting Article About High School Rigor

The New York Times has an interesting article about high school rigor today:

Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, another Washington-based group that advocates standard-setting, said that as she traveled around the country, she found many schools not offering challenging work.

“When you look at the assignments these kids get, it is just appalling,” she said. “A course may be labeled college-preparatory English. But if the kids get more than three-paragraph-long assignments, it is unusual. Or they’ll be asked to color a poster. We say ‘How about doing analysis?’ and they look at us like we are demented.”

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Deep Thought of the Day

“It's easy not to rebel. It's easy not to protest. The middling lives are so rich in comforts; the poorer lives so abundant in hardships. It's easier not to sing out. Yet history is littered with radicals of thought and deed; swimmers against the currents of their day, trying to keep their heads above the water; not drowning, but waving to others, if not to follow, then at least take notice of their struggle."—Warwick McFayden

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An Appropriate Article About Poetry

Robert Pinsky, former US Poet Laureate, argues that it's a good thing that poetry is challenging :

Difficulty, after all, is one of life's essential pleasures: music, athletics, dance thrill us partly because they engage great difficulties. Epics and tragedies, no less than action movies and mysteries, portray an individual's struggle with some great difficulty. In his difficult and entertaining work Ulysses, James Joyce recounts the challenges engaged by the persistent, thwarted hero Leopold and the ambitious, narcissistic hero Stephen. Golf and video games, for certain demographic categories, provide inexhaustible, readily available sources of difficulty.

 

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