Google, Time Magazine, Facebook, Napster, FedEx, Microsoft, and Dell. All businesses that were started by college kids. Think you have what it takes? Then let’s dig in.

I had to escape the digital media world for awhile. I’m back. I’ve been conjuring up a lot of new ideas. I have new perspectives on life. Get excited.

Nobody listens anymore. How rare it is to find someone that will sit down with you and hear what you have to say without some sort of alternative motives. I’m sure there’s articles out there that have technical details about this. These are just simple techniques that I use when I want people to know [...]

In 2008, I was a newly minted English teacher, fresh out of college, and ready to take the secondary school world by storm. I read way too many short stories, essays, and poems. I conversed with my old teachers about topics to discuss and methods to communicate those topics. I planned unique lessons that incorporated other disciplines and attempted to reach across a relatively small generation gap. Little did I know the content of the class was the easy part: dealing with 14- and 15- year olds (“classroom management” is the trendy buzz phrase for the moment) was the hard part. That’s the part that you can’t prepare for until you’re in front of the classroom and forced to improvise, spontaneously generating new policies or rules from thin air.

As a recovering materialist, I know how much clutter can screw up your life. Having too much stuff complicated everything I did and stressed me out. Trust me, when you clear out the physical clutter, it clears up your head.

If you’ve spent much time in education, either as a teacher or student, you’ve seen how cluttered classrooms can become. Teachers have a habit of accumulating supplies and never letting go.

And I don’t blame them! Let’s look at a few of the reasons educators accumulate so much stuff. Then I’ll offer a few ways to overcome the clutter and reduce the stress that accompanies it.

It all started with video games. Do you think games like Pacman and Frogger are really THAT fun? If there were no scores, nobody would have ever kept playing them. As much as I liked navigating a strange, yellow, half-circle safely around a maze while being chased by glowing hairballs, I wouldn’t have ever played more than two or three times without a score attached. This principle even applies to more modern games such as World of Warcraft. Without the ability to keep score, the game would have died out a long time ago.

There’s something strange that goes on in a classroom with most teachers. Because of curriculum requirements and institutional restrictions, teaching becomes stale. Teachers repeat the same pattern over and over. Anything that takes the class away from the curriculum or the pattern almost seems taboo. When changes need to be made, they are rarely made until the next year or sometimes even further down the road.

I want to give a few suggestions. Not all of them are feasible in every situation. However, keep in mind that the purpose of getting feedback is two-fold: finding ways to improve and showing that you care.

Nobody reads your mass emails? Read this post. And then read this one. I wish that everyone would read this. We’d all be happier people. Want a great example of a recent graduate who has boosted her marketability with her online presence? Check out Kristin Dziadul’s blog. While you’re there, check out my guest post [...]

I watch roughly 15-20 Powerpoints a week. This translates into an average of 10-15 hours every week. I am willing to wager that the average college student would have similar numbers to show. Sure, I can understand that putting together slides for a class is a lot of extra work in the first place. Why not just put in that extra 10% and make them a little bit better?