Teachers' Page:
We start each week with a Monday Morning Meeting for staff. It's a time for information sharing, celebrating staff and children's achievements, laughter, building and strengthening the kaupapa foundations for our school, and a few tips on teaching, techie skills and even life. This page will be the place teachers can come back to if they want to revisit anything we covered in our Monday Morning Meetings.
It's really a page for teachers, but if you find anything worthwhile here for yourself, great.
Web Sites:
www.youtube.com/@veritasium
Open Library is a digital treasure trove, brimming with millions of books just waiting to be explored. It’s like your own library, where you can keep track of the books you’re currently reading, those that you’re eager to delve into in the future, and even read many of them on the site.
Open Library presents a wealth of opportunities for book enthusiasts of all ages to expand their reading horizons and access top-notch literature. Whether you’re in the mood for classic works, insightful nonfiction, or captivating young adult fiction, you’ll find titles that cater to your every interest and skill level.
And, with the Open Library’s BookMarks feature, you have the ability to save the books you adore for later or even receive recommendations based on your preferences. If you’re searching for a new author or genre, the platform boasts a diverse selection that you can filter by popularity, relevancy, or even Goodreads reviews.
Finally, the Open Library also offers a rich collection of audiobooks in various genres and languages, making it a valuable resource for all book lovers seeking to expand their reading experiences and access quality literature.
Techie Tips:
Work-Life Advice from Different Professionals:
Someone on Reddit asked, “What’s your best advice from your profession?”.
Below is a summary of the most upvoted answers.
Doctor:
Never be afraid to get a second opinion. If your doctor is offended, that's another reason to get one.
Teacher:
Read to your kids from infancy, make books commonplace, and highlight things in the pictures. This helps them develop literacy skills from an early age.
Plumber:
Check your basement and/or under basins weekly for leaks or signs of damage, and change your air filter regularly.
Auto insurance adjuster:
Get a dashcam to protect yourself in case of accidents or disputes.
Librarian:
Ditch Audible and get a library card to listen to free audiobooks. Many libraries offer apps where you can download audiobooks straight to your phone.
Civil Service worker:
Find life satisfaction outside of the workplace.
Sales:
Never celebrate until the money is in your account, regardless of how often the client said yes or if there were signed documents.
HR:
Underpromise, overdeliver, and keep your mouth shut to maintain a good reputation at work.
Sketchplanations
Design by committee
A camel is a horse designed by a committee, so the saying goes.
It's not fair on camels, which are remarkable animals, but the idea that meeting everyone's requirements leads to a weaker product without a strong vision has a lot of truth to it.
Like a remote control with 50 buttons or a policy so watered-down by different requirements that it has no effect, design by committee can be the death of an initiative.
Part of strong product leadership and creating designs that wow is having an opinion, saying no, and not trying to please everybody. Much easier said than done.
To bring it home, the movie Pentagon Wars has an entertaining satirical scene about the evolution of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle (11 mins). The clip shows how the plan for an infantry transport vehicle became "a troop transport that can't carry troops, a reconnaissance vehicle that's too conspicuous to do reconnaissance. And a quasi-tank that has less armour than a snow-blower but has enough ammo to take out half of D.C." Perhaps most informative is the effect on the motivation and morale of the designers—"Can you make it amphibious?"
Also see: groupthink, the tyranny of small decisions, the Abilene paradox, the bandwagon effect.
Or Jeff Bezos' guidance: Be stubborn on vision. Be flexible on details.
Geography
Our globes are misleading.