Wry insight into bureaucratic teaching

Here is the first of six categories of help that this teacher wants an assistant to do:

Must be willing to make and receive numerous phone calls on a daily basis. Subject of phone calls can be, but is not limited to:

• scheduling parent conferences with 100% success rate
  
• scheduling parent conferences with 100% of the parents
  
• scheduling parent conferences with 100% of the parents to be completed within a 10-day window
  
• scheduling parent conferences for parents that can't actually come on parent conference night
  
• scheduling alternative times for parent conferences during teacher's planning period, before school, or after school (when even the teacher doesn't even know what days he/she will actually HAVE a planning period, or when the teacher only has 1-day lead time as to whether or not they will have morning duty the following week, or when the teacher doesn't know when a last minute after school frivolous meeting will be scheduled)
  
• tracking down missing paperwork/documentation for records
  
• communicating information to parents about missing/incomplete student work
  
• communicating information to parents about their child's negative behaviors in school

Illusions or Reality

Here is a TED Talk by Beau Lotto that makes an important point about how we are embodied minds embedded in reality, not disembodied minds apprehending reality:



Here's the first ten minutes of a longer presentation via Fora.tv that goes into more detail and explores more of his sense of the consequences of these ideas, click Watch Full Program to see the whole thing:

Evidence to Support Nature Deficit Disorder Social Effects

Here's a video that I found via The Situationist Blog on the findings of a recent study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin on the effects of communing with nature: