The 09/17/13 Joy Jar

17 Sep

New copper is bright and shiny, just like babies. As it ages, copper acquires a patina. American cities on the left coast don’t have the patina of age as many of the cities in Europe do. People who have aged gracefully acquire an elegant patina. Today’s deposit into the ‘Joy Jar’ is an elegant patina.

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans / the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004)
.

We don’t know exactly how they were built, presumably people who worked on site were asked to just build them. Sometimes, like in the studios, we just accepted the patina of paint that had accrued over time and just left it as a kind of found surface, which distinguishes and differentiates the rooms.
Thomas Payne

“In a global capital like New York, neither people nor buildings have the chance to accumulate the patina of age. Most residents are not born there, neither do they live in the same house for generations, and the physical fabric of the city is constantly changing around them.”
Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places

“Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.”
― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss

After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now?
(Ernst Toller)

“Patina is the value that age puts on an object”
John Yemma, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, in his “open source” column for November 22, 2009, “On Thanksgiving: the memorial that time forgot”

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Education is getting on the ‘emotional intelligence’ bandwagon

16 Sep

Moi wrote about emotional intelligence in Study: Kindness helps students become more popular and improves school culture: Whenever there is a mass murder like happened at Virginia Tech or Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, the focus turns to the killer. Often,these killers are loners with few social skills. More and more researchers are beginning to study the concept of emotional intelligence. ttp://psychology.about.com/od/personalitydevelopment/a/emotionalintell.htm

Business Balls.Com has a concise summary of emotional intelligence:

Emotional Intelligence – EQ – is a relatively recent behavioural model, rising to prominence with Daniel Goleman’s 1995 Book called ‘Emotional Intelligence’. The early Emotional Intelligence theory was originally developed during the 1970s and 80s by the work and writings of psychologists Howard Gardner (Harvard), Peter Salovey (Yale) and John ‘Jack’ Mayer (New Hampshire). Emotional Intelligence is increasingly relevant to organizational development and developing people, because the EQ principles provide a new way to understand and assess people’s behaviours, management styles, attitudes, interpersonal skills, and potential. Emotional Intelligence is an important consideration in human resources planning, job profiling, recruitment interviewing and selection, management development, customer relations and customer service, and more.
Emotional Intelligence links strongly with concepts of love and spirituality: bringing compassion and humanity to work, and also to ‘Multiple Intelligence’ theory which illustrates and measures the range of capabilities people possess, and the fact that everybody has a value.
The EQ concept argues that IQ, or conventional intelligence, is too narrow; that there are wider areas of Emotional Intelligence that dictate and enable how successful we are. Success requires more than IQ (Intelligence Quotient), which has tended to be the traditional measure of intelligence, ignoring eseential behavioural and character elements. We’ve all met people who are academically brilliant and yet are socially and inter-personally inept. And we know that despite possessing a high IQ rating, success does not automatically follow. http://www.businessballs.com/eq.htm
Researchers are studying social interactions among students and how these interactions affect the climate of a school.
Mathew Tabor wrote in the Education News article, Research: For Students, Kindness to Others Boosts Popularity, which describes a study about kindness behavior among adolescents. http://www.educationnews.org/k-12-schools/research-for-students-kindness-to-others-boosts-popularity/

Study: Kindness helps students become more popular and improves school culture

Jennifer Kahn wrote the intriguing New York Times piece, Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught?

Kahn writes about a number of schools exploring teaching emotional intelligence.

Wade’s approach — used schoolwide at Garfield Elementary, in Oakland, Calif. — is part of a strategy known as social-emotional learning, which is based on the idea that emotional skills are crucial to academic performance.
“Something we now know, from doing dozens of studies, is that emotions can either enhance or hinder your ability to learn,” Marc Brackett, a senior research scientist in psychology at Yale University, told a crowd of educators at a conference last June. “They affect our attention and our memory. If you’re very anxious about something, or agitated, how well can you focus on what’s being taught?”
Once a small corner of education theory, S.E.L. has gained traction in recent years, driven in part by concerns over school violence, bullying and teen suicide. But while prevention programs tend to focus on a single problem, the goal of social-emotional learning is grander: to instill a deep psychological intelligence that will help children regulate their emotions….
For children, Brackett notes, school is an emotional caldron: a constant stream of academic and social challenges that can generate feelings ranging from loneliness to euphoria. Educators and parents have long assumed that a child’s ability to cope with such stresses is either innate — a matter of temperament — or else acquired “along the way,” in the rough and tumble of ordinary interaction. But in practice, Brackett says, many children never develop those crucial skills. “It’s like saying that a child doesn’t need to study English because she talks with her parents at home,” Brackett told me last spring. “Emotional skills are the same. A teacher might say, ‘Calm down!’ — but how exactly do you calm down when you’re feeling anxious? Where do you learn the skills to manage those feelings?”
A growing number of educators and psychologists now believe that the answer to that question is in school. George Lucas’s Edutopia foundation has lobbied for the teaching of social and emotional skills for the past decade; the State of Illinois passed a bill in 2003 making “social and emotional learning” a part of school curriculums. Thousands of schools now use one of the several dozen programs, including Brackett’s own, that have been approved as “evidence-based” by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, a Chicago-based nonprofit. All told, there are now tens of thousands of emotional-literacy programs running in cities nationwide.
The theory that kids need to learn to manage their emotions in order to reach their potential grew out of the research of a pair of psychology professors — John Mayer, at the University of New Hampshire, and Peter Salovey, at Yale. In the 1980s, Mayer and Salovey became curious about the ways in which emotions communicate information, and why some people seem more able to take advantage of those messages than others. While outlining the set of skills that defined this “emotional intelligence,” Salovey realized that it might be even more influential than he had originally suspected, affecting everything from problem solving to job satisfaction: “It was like, this is predictive!” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/can-emotional-intelligence-be-taught.html?ref=education&_r=0

A 2010 Education Week article by Sarah D. Sparks examined the skills necessary to succeed in school.

In Experts Begin to Identify Nonacademic Skills Key to Success, Sparks wrote:

More and more, research shows young people need the same cognitive and social-emotional skills to complete school and progress in the workplace, and, moreover, that those skills can be taught and tested like any other subject in school.
“The problem is college eligibility was what we focused on previously, not readiness; we haven’t really defined what ‘readiness’ means,” said Elena Silva, a senior policy analyst with Education Sector, a Washington think tank, at the Building a Better Student research seminar held here Dec. 8-10. “We focused on whether they have the course credits, the time spent … and that’s important, but we haven’t figured out if they have what they need to be really college-ready,” she said. Students are “getting through high school graduation and even then, they’re not ready.”
While 43 states, Washington and the U.S. Virgin Islands have adopted the common-core academic standards as a benchmark for helping students to be considered ready for college or work, research also points to five key noncognitive indicators that a student will need to be able to complete college and become successfully employed, according to Paul R. Sackett, a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He was one of 21 researchers discussing the issue at the seminar, held by the Washington-based American Educational Research Association, the Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service, and the New York City-based College Board, which administers the SAT college-entrance exam.
Dispositions for Success
Across education and industry, research by Mr. Sackett; Neal Schmitt, a psychology professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing; and others shows the biggest predictor of success is a student’s conscientiousness, as measured by such traits as dependability, perseverance through tasks, and work ethic. Agreeableness, including teamwork, and emotional stability were the next-best predictors of college achievement, followed by variations on extroversion and openness to new experiences, Mr. Sackett found.
“If you take a close look at these commercial tests [given during job interviews], they are compound traits of the top three traits” predicting post-high school success, he said, and the top three traits are also closely associated with a student’s ability to perform well on a task and avoid bad work behavior, such as theft or absenteeism.
Each student’s personality is different, of course, Mr. Sackett said, but, “we have to differentiate between that and behavior.”
“You can learn to behave contrary to your disposition,” he added. “You can learn to behave in dependable ways. For some people, it’s second nature, for others, it’s a real struggle.” Either way, he said, schools can teach and measure noncognitive, college-readiness skills just as they do reading or mathematics—and they may be just as important.
Most schools do not teach or measure nonacademic readiness indicators directly, though they do pop up through conduct reports, attendance, team-project evaluations, and other areas. However, several groups are developing more-comprehensive assessments they hope will help school administrators predict a student’s academic and social-emotional readiness trajectory. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/12/23/15aera.h30.html?tkn=MSMF39tcQfiHMOukF6dwvGXGLdcwAX4+3++y&intc=es

K-12 education must not only prepare students by teaching basic skills, but they must prepare students for training after high school, either college or vocational. There should not only be a solid education foundation established in K-12, but there must be more accurate evaluation of whether individual students are “college ready.”

Resources:

Creating a Culture of Respect and Kindness
http://www.growingseeds.net/respect.php

Prevent Bullying, Promote Kindness: 20 Things All Schools Can Do

Click to access 340b8b7f-e067-4231-9dd8-1eaed2a8962e.pdf

Related:

College readiness: What are ‘soft skills’

College readiness: What are ‘soft skills’

Many NOT ready for higher education

Many NOT ready for higher education

What the ACT college readiness assessment means

What the ACT college readiness assessment means

Study: What skills are needed for ’21st-century learning?’

Study: What skills are needed for ’21st-century learning?’

ACT to assess college readiness for 3rd-10th Grades

ACT to assess college readiness for 3rd-10th Grades

Where information leads to Hope. © Dr. Wilda.com

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

Blogs by Dr. Wilda:

COMMENTS FROM AN OLD FART©
http://drwildaoldfart.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda Reviews ©
http://drwildareviews.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda ©
https://drwilda.com/

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The 09/16/13 Joy Jar

16 Sep

As one is driving down I-5 in Seattle headed south, one passes the Pemco Insurance Building. It has a big-ass American flag on top of its building. The flag is so big it is truly badass. Today’s deposit into the ‘Joy jar’ is a big-ass American flag in the land of we don’t want to hurt your self-esteem and let’s just hug.

I stand fearlessly for small dogs, the American Flag, motherhood and the Bible. That’s why people love me.
Art Linkletter

The American flag represents all of us and all the values we hold sacred.
Adrian Cronauer

The American flag is the most recognized symbol of freedom and democracy in the world.
Virginia Foxx

Old Glory, standing tall and flying free over American soil for 228 years is the symbol of our beloved country. It is recognized from near and afar, and many lives have been lost defending it.
Jeff Miller

If anyone, then, asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him – it means just what Concord and Lexington meant; what Bunker Hill meant; which was, in short, the rising up of a valiant young people against an old tyranny to establish the most momentous doctrine that the world had ever known – the right of men to their own selves and to their liberties.
Henry Ward Beecher

There is not a thread in it but scorns self-indulgence, weakness and rapacity.
Charles Evans Hughes

You’re the emblem of
The land I love.
The home of the free and the brave.
George M. Cohan

I am whatever you make me, nothing more. I am your belief in yourself, your dream of what a people may become…. I am the clutch of an idea, and the reasoned purpose of resolution. I am no more than you believe me to be and I am all that you believe I can be. I am whatever you make me, nothing more.
Franklin Knight Lane

Cheers for the sailors that fought on the wave for it,
Cheers for the soldiers that always were brave for it,
Tears for the men that went down to the grave for it,
Here comes the flag!
Arthur Macy, The Flag

You’re a grand old flag,
You’re a high flying flag
And forever in peace may you wave.
George M. Cohan

We take the stars from heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity, representing our liberty.
George Washington, attributed

Oh! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Francis Scott Key, The Star-Spangled Banner

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The 09/15/13 Joy Jar

16 Sep

Sports rivalries are sometimes about the sport, but always about the egos. Today the San Francisco 49ers came to Seattle to do war with the Seattle Seahawks. There was reportedly bad blood between the coaches and Seahawk player Sherman and Jim Harbaugh. Whether true or not,who knows. Still, the fans were there during the lightning, thunder and one hour delay. Today’s deposit into the ‘Joy Jar’ is the 12th man sports fan.

Sport is where an entire life can be compressed into a few hours, where the emotions of a lifetime can be felt on an acre or two of ground, where a person can suffer and die and rise again on six miles of trails through a New York City park. Sport is a theater where sinner can turn saint and a common man become an uncommon hero, where the past and the future can fuse with the present. Sport is singularly able to give us peak experiences where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.
George A. Sheehan

If you make every game a life-and-death thing, you’re going to have problems. You’ll be dead a lot. Dean Smith

Winning is overrated. The only time it is really important is in surgery and war.
Al McGuire

I think you enjoy the game more if you don’t know the rules. Anyway you’re on the same wavelength as the referees.
Jonathan Davies, 1995

The essence of sports is that while you’re doing it, nothing else matters, but after you stop, there is a place, generally not very important, where you would put it.
Roger Bannister

Officials are the only guys who can rob you and then get a police escort out of the stadium.
Ron Bolton

Losing streaks are funny. If you lose at the beginning, you get off to a bad start. If you lose in the middle of the season, you’re in a slump. If you lose at the end, you’re choking.
Gene Mauch

It may be that all games are silly. But then, so are humans.
Robert Lynd

All sports are games of inches.
Dick Ritger

Losers quit when they’re tired. Winners quit when they’ve won.
Unknown

It is not how big you are, it’s how big you play.
Author Unknown

The key is not the “will to win” – everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important. Bobby Knight

Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see – not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.
Lewis H. Lapham, Money and Class in America, 1988

[T]he finish line is sometimes merely the symbol of victory. All sorts of personal triumphs take place before that point, and the outcome of the race may actually be decided long before the end.
Laurence Malone

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National Center for Education Evaluation study: Teach for America teachers more successful at math teaching

14 Sep

Moi wrote in Urban teacher residencies:
One of the huge issues in educating ALL children is how to attract high quality teachers to high needs areas and to retain those teachers. One program designed to address that issue is the “Urban Teacher Residency Model.” Barnett Barry and Diana Montgomery of the Center for Teaching Quality along with Jon Snyder of Bank Street College wrote an interesting 2008 paper, Urban Teacher Residency Models and Institutions of Higher Education: Implications for Teacher Preparation:

In brief, UTRs recruit teaching talent aggressively, with the supply and demand needs of local districts in mind. They also insist on extensive preparation, whereby recruits are paid a stipend while learning to teach in a full-year residency, under the watchful eye of expert K-12 teachers. Because the Residents are not fully responsible for teaching children, they have more quality time to take relevant pedagogical coursework ―wrapped around‖ their intense student teaching experience. While both AUSL and BTR are relatively new programs, early studies on their graduates’ effectiveness and their high retention rates of 90 to 95 percent suggest these models hold great promise for preparing and supporting teachers in high-needs urban schools.
We believe the time is now for the teacher education community to embrace UTRs —supporting the development of them while also using them to improve their current programs. The struggles of both traditional and alternative pathways to certification are well known. For example, many traditional university-based programs are challenged by:
 Difficulty in attracting high academic achievers and teacher candidates of color;
 Too few opportunities for prospective teachers to be taught by exemplary classroom teachers;
 Failure to meet shortage area needs in subjects such as math, science, and special education, as well as the need for English Language Learners teachers;
 Limited resources and structures to provide induction support for their graduates in a systematic way once they begin teaching; and
 Lack of accountability for the effectiveness of their graduates.
On the other hand, alternate pathways, which often are touted for their ability to recruit high academic achieving candidates and to prepare teachers for specific districts, face challenges as well…. http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED503644

Urban teacher residencies

Schools must be allowed to match available resources to students.

Julia Ryan reported in The Atlantic article, Study: Students Learn More Math With Teach for America Teachers:

The results of a two-year, 4,573-student study by the U.S. Department of Education
How effective are Teach for America teachers? It’s a question that the organization’s critics and fans alike have been trying to answer for years. The Teach for America website points to studies of school districts in Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee, which all found that “corps members often help their students achieve academic gains at rates equal to or larger than those for students of more veteran teachers.” (Emphasis mine.) TFA skeptics cite a range of other studies that show students with traditionally certified teachers achieving higher gains.
A new study by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (a part of the United States Department of Education) will encourage TFA supporters. The first large-scale random assignment study of TFA secondary math teachers, it found that the TFA teachers were more effective than other instructors at their schools.
“By providing rigorous evidence on the effectiveness of secondary math teachers from TFA and the Teaching Fellows programs, the study can shed light on potential approaches for improving teacher effectiveness in hard-to-staff schools and subjects,” the authors wrote.
The study included 4,573 students at middle and high schools across the country. In the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 school years, researchers randomly assigned the students in each school to similar math courses–some were taught by TFA teachers, and others or by teachers who entered teaching through traditional or other, less selective alternative programs. The students with TFA teachers performed better on end-of-year exams than their peers in similar courses taught by other teachers. The bump in their test scores is equivalent to an additional 2.6 months of school for the average student nationwide.
The study also seemed to disprove the common criticism that, because TFA teachers only sign on for two years of teaching, they do not gain the experience necessary to become effective teachers. The study found that TFA teachers were more effective than both novice and experienced teachers from other certification programs. Students of TFA teachers in their first three years of teaching scored 0.08 standard deviations higher than students of other teachers in their first three years of teaching and 0.07 standard deviations higher than students of other teachers with more than three years of experience teaching.
However, the study pointed out that the results do not necessarily reflect the effectiveness of the TFA training itself, as the organization attracts a different applicant pool than traditional or other, less selective certification programs. The authors point out that both TFA and Teaching Fellows, another competitive teaching program, have “unique procedures for recruiting and selecting individuals” and look for characteristics they believe are “associated with effectiveness in the classroom.”
Only 23 percent of teachers from traditional or less-selective certification programs graduated from a selective college or university, while 81 percent of TFA teachers did. And although the TFA teachers were less likely to have majored or minored in math, they scored significantly higher on a test of math knowledge than their teacher counterparts. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/study-students-learn-more-math-with-teach-for-america-teachers/279527/

See, TFA Teachers Shown to Boost Secondary Math http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/09/11/04alternatives.h33.html?tkn=MWLFZkqS35ySzRJT3SsDjWlS1lm%2BJyt5VscZ&cmp=clp-edweek&intc=es

Citation:

The Effectiveness of Secondary Math Teachers from Teach For America and the Teaching Fellows Programs
Teach For America (TFA) and the Teaching Fellows programs are important and growing sources of teachers of hard-to-staff subjects in high-poverty schools, but comprehensive evidence of their effectiveness has been limited. A large-scale random assignment study examines the effectiveness of secondary math teachers from two highly selective alternative certification route programs: Teach for America (TFA) and Teaching Fellows.
The study separately compares the effectiveness of teachers from each program with the effectiveness of other teachers teaching the same subjects in the same schools. On average, students assigned to TFA teachers had higher math scores at the end of the school year than students assigned to comparison teachers. Students of Teaching Fellows and comparison teachers had similar math scores, on average. However, students with Teaching Fellows teachers did outperform students whose teachers entered the classroom through less selective alternative routes.
View, download, and print the report as a PDF file (1.9 MB)

Click to access 20134015.pdf

View, download, and print the executive summary as a PDF file (386 KB)
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20134015/pdf/20134016.pdf

Here is a portion of the Executive Summary:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Teach For America (TFA) and the Teaching Fellows programs are an important and growing source of teachers of hard-to-staff subjects in high-poverty schools, but comprehensive evidence of their effectiveness has been limited. This report presents findings from the first large-scale random assignment study of secondary math teachers from these programs. The study separately examined the effectiveness of TFA and Teaching Fellows teachers, comparing secondary math teachers from each program with other secondary math teachers teaching the same math courses in the same schools. The study focused on secondary math because this is a subject in which schools face particular staffing difficulties.
The study had two main findings, one for each program studied:
1. TFA teachers were more effective than the teachers with whom they were compared. On average, students assigned to TFA teachers scored 0.07 standard deviations higher on end-of-year math assessments than students assigned to comparison teachers, a statistically significant difference. This impact is equivalent to an additional 2.6 months of school for the average student nationwide.
2. Teaching Fellows were neither more nor less effective than the teachers with whom they were compared. On average, students of Teaching Fellows and students of comparison teachers had similar scores on end-of-year math assessments.

By providing rigorous evidence on the effectiveness of secondary math teachers from TFA and the Teaching Fellows programs, the study can shed light on potential approaches for improving teacher effectiveness in hard-to-staff schools and subjects. The study findings can provide guidance to school principals faced with the choice of hiring teachers who have entered the profession via different routes to certification. The findings can also aid policymakers and funders of teacher preparation programs by providing information on the effectiveness of teachers from various routes….

There will continue to be battles between those who favor a more traditional education and those who are open to the latest education fad. These battles will be fought out in school board meetings, PTSAs, and the courts. There is one way to, as Susan Powder says, “Stop the Insanity.” Genuine school choice allows parents or guardians to select the best educational setting for their child. Many policy wonks would like to believe that only one type of family seeks genuine school choice, the right wing wacko who makes regular visits on the “tea party” circuit. That is not true. Many parents favor a back-to-the basics traditional approach to education.

A one-size-fits-all approach does not work in education.

Related:

Study: Early mastery of fractions is a predictor of math success https://drwilda.com/2012/06/26/study-early-mastery-of-fractions-is-a-predictor-of-math-success/

Where information leads to Hope. © Dr. Wilda.com

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

Blogs by Dr. Wilda:

COMMENTS FROM AN OLD FART©
http://drwildaoldfart.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda Reviews ©
http://drwildareviews.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda ©
https://drwilda.com/

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The 09/14/13 Joy Jar

14 Sep

Moi only eats soup in the fall and winter. There is something in the air which says the fall will be here. Today, moi stopped by Macy’s Taste Restaurant and had turkey lentil soup and salad for lunch. It tasted good, it tasted like fall. Today’s deposit into the ‘Joy Jar’ is really good soup.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
H. L. Mencken

My greatest strength is common sense. I’m really a standard brand – like Campbell’s tomato soup or Baker’s chocolate.
Katharine Hepburn

Anyone who tells a lie has not a pure heart, and cannot make a good soup.
Ludwig van Beethoven

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
Abraham Maslow

I live on good soup, not on fine words.
Moliere

“Writing is a lot like making soup. My subconscious cooks the idea, but I have to sit down at the computer to pour it out.”
Robin Wells

“A spoon does not know the taste of soup, nor a learned fool the taste of wisdom.”
Proverbs

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The 09/13/13 Joy Jar

14 Sep

The summer of 2013 in Seattle has just been grand. So, even though everyone knows that seasons change, the weather report of cooler and rainier weather next week means that Autumn is just around the corner. Today’s deposit into the ‘Joy Jar’ is the approach of Autumn.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
Albert Camus

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.”
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
Henry David Thoreau

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”
George Eliot

“Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.”
Lauren DeStefano, Wither

“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.”
John Donne

“Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.”
Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

“Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.”
Nora Ephron

“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

“Autumn…the year’s last, loveliest smile.”
William Cullen Bryant

“I loved autumn, the one season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it.”
Lee Maynard

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The 09/12/13 Joy Jar

14 Sep

While on a walk, moi noticed a beautiful stain glass window. Windows can be fairly utilitarian and you really don’t notice them if they are clean or until they are missing. Windows in unusual shapes make a statement about either the architect, the owner, or they just say look at me. Stain glass windows are another matter, they draw you in. Today’s deposit into the ‘Joy Jar’ is the beautiful windows of the world.

People are like stained – glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
Dale Carnegie

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.
Robert Louis Stevenson

If you believe in God, He will open the windows of heaven and pour blessings upon you.
Mahalia Jackson

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
Sydney J. Harris

Because forgiveness is like this: a room can be dank because you have closed the windows, you’ve closed the curtains. But the sun is shining outside, and the air is fresh outside. In order to get that fresh air, you have to get up and open the window and draw the curtains apart.
Desmond Tutu

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them.
Horace Mann

“This life’s dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye.”
William Blake

“Clay is molded to form a cup, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the cup depends. Doors and windows are cut out to make a room, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the room depends. Therefore turn being into advantage, and turn non-being into utility.”
Lao Tzu

“Let there be many windows to your soul, that all the glory of the world may beautify it.”
Ella Wheeler

There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.
Bernard Malamud

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Dr. Wilda Reviews book: Super Baby Foods

11 Sep

Moi received a complimentary signed copy of Super Baby Food by Ruth Yaron. Here are the book details:

Product Details

Author: Ruth Yaron

ISBN-13: 9780965260329

Publisher: F. J. Roberts Publishing

Publication date: 9/9/2013

Edition description: Updated

Edition number: 3

Here is a bit about Ruth Yaron from WebMD:

Ruth Yaron

Ruth Yaron is married with three children and lives near the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. When her twins were born 18 years ago, they were ten weeks premature and very sick. This is what prompted years of research on pediatric nutrition. When her third son was born in 1994, she was able to quit her job as a professor at a local university and become a stay-at-home mom. During the next two years, she wrote the Super Baby Food Book, which became a best seller and is still the best-selling book on the subject of feeding babies solid foods.

http://www.webmd.com/ruth-yaron

So, why would anyone need to buy Super Baby Food?

Let’s start with demographics. Infoplease provides the following statistics about mothers in the U.S.:

Mothers by the Numbers

Info about mothers from the Census Bureau

How Many Mothers
4.1 million
Number of women between the ages of 15 and 50 who gave birth in the past 12 months.

53%
Percentage of 15- to 44-year-old women who were mothers in 2010.

81%
Percentage of women who had become mothers by age 40 to 44 as of 2010. In 1976, 90 percent of women in that age group had given birth.

2,449
The total fertility rate or estimated number of total births per 1,000 women in Utah in 2010 (based on current birth rates by age), which led the nation. At the other end of the spectrum is Rhode Island, with a total fertility rate of 1,630.5 births per 1,000 women.

20%
Percentage of all women age 15 to 44 who have had two children. About 47 percent had no children, 17 percent had one, 10 percent had three and about 5 percent had four or more.

89.7%
Percentage of all children who lived with their biological mothers in 2012. About 1.2 percent of all children lived with a stepmother.

Recent Births
3.954 million
Number of births registered in the United States in 2011. Of this number, 329,797 were to teens 15 to 19 and 7,651 to women age 45 to 49.

25.4
Average age of women in 2010 when they gave birth for the first time, up from 25.2 years in 2009. The increase in the mean age from 2009 to 2010 reflects, in part, the relatively large decline in births to women under age 25.

29.2%
The percentage of mothers who had given birth in the past 12 months who had a bachelor’s degree or higher and 84 percent of mothers have at least a high school diploma.

Jacob and Sophia
The most popular baby names for boys and girls, respectively, in 2011.

Stay-at-Home Moms
5 million
Number of stay-at-home moms in 2012 — statistically unchanged from 2009, 2010 and 2011– down from 5.3 million in 2008. In 2012, 24 percent of married-couple family groups with children under 15 had a stay-at-home mother, up from 21 percent in 2000. In 2007, before the recession, stay-at-home mothers were found in 24 percent of married-couple family groups with children under 15, not statistically different from the percentage in 2012.

$236,500; 321,200; and 93,600
Median home value of owner-occupied units in Currituck, Dare and Hyde counties, respectively.

Compared with other moms, stay-at-home moms in 2007 were more likely:

Younger (44 percent were under age 35, compared with 38 percent of mothers in the labor force).
Hispanic (27 percent, compared with 16 percent of mothers in the labor force).
Foreign-born (34 percent, compared with 19 percent of mothers in the labor force).
Living with a child under age 5 (57 percent, compared with 43 percent of mothers in the labor force).
Without a high school diploma (19 percent versus 8 percent of mothers in the labor force).
Employed Moms
827,907
Number of child care centers across the country in 2010. These included 75,695 child day care services employing 859,416 workers and another 752,212 self-employed people or other businesses without paid employees. Many mothers turn to these centers to help juggle motherhood and careers.

62.1%
Percentage of women age 16 to 50 who had a birth in the past 12 months who were in the labor force.

Single Moms
10.3 million
The number of single mothers living with children younger than 18 in 2012, up from 3.4 million in 1970.

5.9 million
Number of custodial mothers who were owed child support in 2009.

36%
Percentage of births in the past 12 months that were to women age 15 to 50 who were unmarried (including divorced, widowed and never married women).

In 2011, 407,873 mothers who had a birth in the past 12 months were living with a cohabiting partner.

Mothers by the Numbers | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/spot/momcensus1.html#.UjC465J3Q5o.email#ixzz2ecJAMeon

Moi is not slighting dads, but mothers are the primary caretakers. We should all support dads, grandparents and those who are caretakers and have custody of children. One way of giving support is by sharing knowledge about what is healthy for children.

This is what Yaron says about Super Baby Food at her site:

Completely revised and updated edition: Coming September 2013!
Discover why Super Baby Food, with over half a million copies sold is the most complete and thoroughly researched infant nutrition resource available for feeding your baby the healthy, organic and money-saving way. Author Ruth Yaron, nationally recognized authority and media veteran shares her sound meticulous research to bring parents:

The most up-to-date, medically, nutritionally sound information on what to feed babies and toddlers at specific ages and how to prepare and store it safely.
Handy, alphabetical lists of fruits and vegetables with cooking instructions plus easy baby food storage and freezer tips.
Money-saving, easy recipes to enhance baby’s development through toddlerhood and beyond! See a sample of baby puree recipes and baby food recipes excerpted from the book right here!
Ideas for simply adding nutrition to an everyday meal by adding Healthy Extras like kelp, tahini, and nutritional yeast (among others) so that every bites counts.
Complete list of resources and tips to find organic foods and connect with others online in the Super Baby Food Community.
Excited to get started making your own nutritious baby food with a complete baby food system that is easy to use? Join parents around the world who have used Super Baby Food to feed their Super Baby. Sneak a peek preview inside the pages of the of Super Baby Food.

Enjoy this video of Ruth Yaron on the Martha Stewart Show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s89EJO2dQNM

http://www.superbabyfood.com/

Moi gets approached to do reviews on all types of products. Although, she will review adult themed products, her focus is family friendly. Super Baby Foods is a system of support for families, especially during those crucial first years. The U.S. has a child obesity problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control, Child Obesity facts;

Childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and tripled in adolescents in the past 30 years.1, 2

The percentage of children aged 6–11 years in the United States who were obese increased from 7% in 1980 to nearly 18% in 2010. Similarly, the percentage of adolescents aged 12–19 years who were obese increased from 5% to 18% over the same period.1, 2

In 2010, more than one third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese.1

Overweight is defined as having excess body weight for a particular height from fat, muscle, bone, water, or a combination of these factors.3 Obesity is defined as having excess body fat.4

Overweight and obesity are the result of “caloric imbalance”—too few calories expended for the amount of calories consumed—and are affected by various genetic, behavioral, and environmental factors.5,6

http://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/obesity/facts.htm

Super Baby Foods is a complete system to help parents make healthy choices for their children.

Yaron does not want to substitute her advice for the advice of your pediatrician regarding the needs a specific child and she makes this clear in the Disclaimer. Still, she states that her goal is “This book is designed to provide information on the care and feeding of babies and toddlers.” The book not only meets that goal but provides great recipes, a check list for the tools needed to prepare, store, and choose healthy foods for your child. The foundation of the book is “The Super Baby Food System” which she describes at pp. 5 – 10. Yaron makes the argument that home prepared organic food is better for children in the section where she answers myths about commercial baby food at page four:

The food that you make at home from fresh whole vegetables and fruits is nutritionally superior to any jarred commercial variety on your grocer’s shelf.

The book is well organized and easy to understand. The intended audience is anyone who has responsibility for caring for a baby or toddler. The recipes are clear and the “Super Baby Food System” is clearly explained along with the reasons why the system is a healthier choice for your child. This book can be classified as either an owner’s manual or toolkit for feeding your child.

This is a highly recommend from Dr. Wilda. If you are going to a baby shower or know parents with young children, you should give them this book. It is never too early to make healthy choices.

Where information leads to Hope. © Dr. Wilda.com

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The 09/11/13 Joy Jar

11 Sep

On one of the sacred days in the history of America, moi reflects about what it is she loves about this country, there are many things. BUT, what she loves most is the incredible spirit and resilience of Americans. WE MUST NEVER FORGET 9/11, but we can never lose our spirit.

“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.”

George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

We must NEVER FORGET.

In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
Albert Schweitzer

Life, Time, Thankful Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.
Calvin Coolidge

Peace, Time, Christmas My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
Albert Einstein

Religion, Mind, Humble I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.
Khalil Gibran

Love, Religion, Church Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hate, Him, Violence If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Death, Free, Pay Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.
Abraham Lincoln

Men, Liberty, Destroy Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.
Mahatma Gandhi

True, Violence, Growth O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil.
William Shakespeare

Wine, Devil, Call Man can never be a woman’s equal in the spirit of selfless service with which nature has endowed her.
Mahatma Gandhi

Nature, Woman, Service The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
Oscar Wilde

Critical, Creates, Imitates The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
Thomas Jefferson

Government, Wish, Alive A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.
Thomas Jefferson

Coward, Quarrels, Exposed The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires change of heart.
Mahatma Gandhi

Change, Heart, Democracy Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
C. S. Lewis

Time, Half, Animal I have worshipped woman as the living embodiment of the spirit of service and sacrifice.
Mahatma Gandhi

Woman, Sacrifice, Living The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force.
Thomas Jefferson

Country, Military, Force Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy.
Mahatma Gandhi

Joy, Service, Nor No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.
Helen Keller

Human, Stars, Secret There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.
Ronald Reagan

Mind, Human, Progress Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.
Khalil Gibran

Friendship, Purpose, Save There are four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love.
Lord Byron

Life, Love, Living Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.
Khalil Gibran

Life, Liberty, Body I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
John Steinbeck

Great, Teacher, Mind A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Good, Friends, Writer Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature, Colors, Wears Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Give, Makes, House It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Against, Few, Says Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.
Friedrich Nietzsche

God, Once, Becoming Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.
Plato

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/spirit.html#fBQr5mDAUZEi9dDp.99

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