Category Archives: blogging

What I Learned From Walking 10,000 Steps for 116 Days

blogging, learning, writing

And counting…

Photo of pedometer face with number of stepsI turned 56 years old in May. I was never a marathon runner but had always been active. Something happened in my 50s and I found myself in spring of 2018 very overweight and out of shape. A long, out-of-breath trek up the hill to the Monroe building in Richmond was my wake up call. And as often happens with those calls, I answered by going to extremes and signing up for a 10,000 step challenge that started on May 1. It was sponsored by a trainer from Canada and the rules were simple: post a picture of your pedometer every day to a private Facebook group. Last person standing (or walking, I guess) would win $100.

I don’t have records for my steps on April 30, but I can tell you that since then, I have walked at least 10,000 steps every day. I hike the farm with the dogs, walk on the treadmill, “ride” my bike on the Wii and use the bathroom that is on the second floor, furthest from my office. I park at the back of the lot, take an extra turn around Target, and, when traveling, locate public walking paths or make a stop on my way home at the Capital to Capital trail where it comes out of Charles City County along Route 295. I get up 30 minutes early at hotels and jostle for the treadmill in the exercise room, sometimes having to settle for the bike and sometimes giving up and heading outside for a walk instead. I walk almost five miles every day and have done so for 116 days. And, since I’m already at 6,000 steps today, I have no doubt it will be 117 when I go to bed tonight.

What have I learned?

  1. Exercise doesn’t necessarily help with weight loss. I lost a few pounds but now have been holding steady. Admittedly, I have not made any significant changes in my diet and it is horrible but it could use some tweaking. That’s next on the list. I will admit to feeling better in general both health-wise and self-esteem wise. I can make a resolution related to my health and follow through on it.
  2. Eventually, even things you don’t love, can become habits. I am not a convert to exercise, not planning to run a marathon or try out for American Ninja Warrior. No tough mudder races are in my future. Part of the reason I do it every day is that if I don’t, I worry that I will stop. Every day makes it a habit, and I find myself wandering to the treadmill or Wii about the same time every afternoon to get over the hump of 7,000 steps.
  3. But when routines get disrupted, habits take planning. While I am fortunate to mostly work from home so I can work in my steps easily, I have been traveling and that means thinking ahead. I don’t want to end up at home or the hotel at 8 PM with 5,000 steps to go. It may mean that early morning treadmill, or talking a walk during breaks or at lunch. I can usually find someone to go along. When we break for the afternoon, I may head out into the neighborhood or to the local chain store where they do not charge you for walking.
  4. Accountability matters. There is a small group of people still participating in the original challenge (there are 4 or 5 of us left along with the trainer), and I look forward to taking a minute each night to share my results with them and like their posts. Most of them are in Canada, and I do not anticipate ever meeting them, but I did think it would make a fun story to take a trip to Ontario and take a walk with them.

My new habit to build is blogging. I suspect all four of these lessons will apply although I’m hoping that I will learn to love the practice of writing. I like to write…but the discipline seems to elude me.

Meanwhile, my tracker just reminded me that it’s time to get 250 more steps so here I go!

Being A Learner

adult learning, blogging, learning, professional development,

At the end of July, I gathered with a group of other educators to begin the journey to ISTE Educator certification. I’m still not sure why I signed up when the invitation showed up in my inbox. Maybe it’s the same reason I became a JoyLabz certified trainer this spring,  finally opened the box for the Micro-bit this summer, and ordered a pi-top laptop after checking one out at ISTE. I want to devote some time this year to my own learning and professional growth. And, I want to share my journey publicly through this blog.

Despite a busy schedule, I have been making time to tinker. The Pi-Top is the perfect answer to easily using a Raspberry Pi: no need for setting up a monitor and keyboard in limited space, easy to connect a breadboard and components and just kind of fun. Open the lid, press the button, and you are using a pi. In addition to doing the tutorials that came with the laptop, I am practicing my Python skills using the turtle to draw pictures, following along with John Rowland’s Learn Python 3: A Beginner’s Guide Using Turtle Interactive Graphics.

Here’s my answer to the hexagon challenge in the book: (sorry for the low quality: I took a picture of the pi-top screen. Figuring out screenshots on the pi-top will come later.)

hexagonal flower

 

 

 

 

 

Reviving the Blog

I have dabbled with blogging almost since blogging began but never started a regular practice the way others have. (Tim Stahmer has always been my blogging hero…he posted almost daily for a very long time.) Blogging regularly means more than just making time to write. It also means connecting with the larger community, committing to research and writing, and being willing to write publicly for comment.

This fall, as part of the certification process in support of the ISTE Learner Educator standard, I will make the commitment of strengthening my ties to my professional learning community. I will make regular blog posts that will reflect on the course I am teaching this fall, share my work around coding and making, and explore research topics related to ed tech. The collection of blog posts will be part of my portfolio for the ISTE course, representing my work around the Learner standard and indicators.

So…the last step: what’s the commitment? Every day? Every other day? For now, I’m going all in: at least 250 words every day. I think a daily practice gets the habit going. I’ve been doing 10,000 steps every day since May 1. I’m not sure I would have achieved that if I had taken a break on May 2.

Should I Post This?

blogging, Uncategorized

I have been blogging merrily along in the new year, having fun exploring and writing about poetry and community on both this and my book blog. Part of the reason I was able to post so often was because I cut myself some slack in terms of content. Like Tim Owens, I wasn’t worried about profundity, just publishing.

Then, I started to draft of a potentially more controversial post, and I got stuck. To George Couros’s list of overthinking questions, I would add, “Should I post this at all?”

The story I want to tell may be offensive to some; even just the knowledge that what I am going to describe still exists in our country could be upsetting. But I think we need to know how others think, how their facts blur into perspectives and then become narratives so we can examine our own processes and perhaps find empathy even in what might otherwise be offensive.

So, I answered the question with a yes and you can find the post here.

 

About that Face to Face Book Group: On Reading and Writing

blogging, reading, writing

I live on the edge of a very small town in Sussex County, Virginia. It is the home of those staples: peanuts and bacon. I moved here about five years ago and have spent most of that time working rather than getting involved in community life. This year, I decided I needed more non-work interaction in my life, so I joined the book group at my local library branch. I read A LOT so getting the homework done wasn’t going to be a problem. And the group meets one hour, once a month, five minutes from my house. (It’s actually close enough that even I could ride my bike and may do so in the spring.)

We met Tuesday and talked about We Never Asked for Wings by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. It is a story told from the perspective of mother and son, complicated by poverty and hope and love. We learn about what it is like to be undocumented but integrated in America. And, even more importantly, it reminds us of the terrible tragedy of the impact of zip code on education and thus opportunity. I can recommend it and you can read my full review at my book blog.

I’m really posting this blog to celebrate the book group and some ideas about writing: SO much fun to sit around a table with thoughtful people and just talk about a book for an hour. One woman provided several interpretations that had never occurred to me and expanded the possible understandings of the book. I haven’t dug this deep into a book for awhile.

As for writing…what struck me most out of the whole book was a comment from the author in the Q & A at the end. The interviewer asked her about writing her second novel, and she talked about the fear of disappointing her readers. This fear tainted her writing:

I was so worried about writing a “good” book that I ended up writing a carefully polished book with absolutely no heart.

She owes her freeing herself from that fear to a friend in her writers’ group who reminded her that she didn’t have anything to prove:

Somehow, those word set me free. I stopped trying to be good and just started to write–and the book improved dramatically from that moment on.

Two lessons leap out here for writing teachers, or indeed teachers anywhere: let them write (read/learn/share) without worrying about meeting a rubric or impressing someone else and give them community in which to do it. In my writing workshop, students produced fascinating pieces of writing when I gave them a chance to record their lives and stories. They wrote letters and stories and poems. And they wanted to read what their classmates wrote because they were so different.

I understand the concern with impressing people. The need to be profound. I wrote about it here and discovered Tim Owens shared a similar issue on his own blog.

I’m just decided that I am going to keep writing anyway.

What Does It Mean to Succeed at Blogging?

blogging, community

Back at the desk after a holiday break that included lots of crocheting, binge watching and then a lovely visit with old friends. The snow storm sent me home a day early and we have been settled in our den for the past three days, warmed by the wood burning stove and watching football and the birds.

I browsed my RSS feed this morning and got stuck on this post from Tim Stahmer about the importance of independent blogging.  In blogging years, I’m very late in replying to his post, but that’s one of the barriers I face in my blogging practice so I’m not going to let the fact that my reply is a month late stand in my way of publishing this post.

That sense of immediacy is just one of my personal barriers to blogging. The other is the pressure to say something profound, and that’s obviously a bigger hurdle to tackle. What can I add to the conversations around me? What insights do I bring from my own experiences? I think I set the profundity bar too high. Better to just write it and send it out there sometimes. A simple share with a brief comment highlighting an important point or idea can spark a conversation as well as a long read.

For instance, I can highly recommend listening to How Silicon Valley Can Help You Get Unstuck from the Hidden Brain podcast. It focuses on applying design thinking to your own life, featuring the work of Burnett and Evans. I was fascinated with the idea of prototyping your life, particularly the idea that failure is to be expected, maybe even welcome. That isn’t the message we send our students, outside of a makerspace perhaps.

The title of this post also came out of the podcast. I have blogged on and off for a very long time in various spaces. Right now, I have two “active” blogs but do not have any schedule or plan for updating them so they are pretty sporadic. Am I failing at blogging? If not, I live at the very fringes of success. Completely failing would be to give it up and since I’m not ready to do that, I need to identify and pursue some definition of success that makes me feel less like a failure, I suppose.

I’m not ready to give it up because I agree with Tim that blogging continues to be a powerful way to share our stories and ideas. Getting beyond our personal barriers is an important first step in beginning a blogging practice. And, like any routine, it needs to become part of our schedule. Some people benefit from a good challenge: Jon Becker, for instance, is moving right along with his own Tweet of the Day blog entries.  This all help generate content.

From there, as Tim points out, the community becomes essential:

We also need to help each other build an audience and build communities around those educators who are willing to share in the open. And, on the other end, to teach our colleagues, parents, and even students why reading blogs is important, where to find the good ones, and how to easily build them into their routines (RSS still lives!).

And that is the biggest barrier of all. I wonder if a blogging challenge tied to a tweet chat would be a good start. It gets some content generated around a similar topic and as part of an already existing community.  There is always plenty more to say after a tweet chat.