A New Blog for Catholic School Teachers

Today marks the launch of Catholic School Chronicles, a new blog for Catholic school teachers. If you're a Catholic school teacher, please visit the site and subscribe to the RSS feed, and if you know any Catholic school teachers, please let them know about the site. Thanks.

2 Videos Against Cyberbullying

The Ad Council always creates the most startling commercials. Here are two of their recent efforts against cyber-bullying:

Announcing Teen Literacy Tips

I am very pleased to announce the launch of my major web project, Teen Literacy Tips. If you are a junior or senior high teacher or administrator, a homeschooling parent, or a parent who wants to enrich your teen's classroom education, Teen Literacy Tips is designed for you. Please tell as many people as you can about it. Here's an excerpt from the introductory page: This site will help you turn each of your students into the elusive Literate Teenager -- spontaneous yet intelligent, energetic yet thoughtful, the despair of nutritionists and the hope of the world. If you're a junior or senior high teacher, a concerned parent, or a school administrator, the materials you find here will help you teach teens to be more human, to be more intelligent, and to be more analytical. Using the skills and resources on this site, you'll become the reading mentor students need: the Gandalf to their Frodo, the Good Witch to their Dorothy, the Socrates to their Plato. The heart of this site is Teen Literacy Tips, an educational blog that provides you with teaching techniques and advice several times a week. You can subscribe to the feed using a blog reader, or you can simply bookmark the page and visit it each day. The discussion forums give you a chance to connect with other teachers and parents who face the same challenges you do when it comes to teaching teens to improve their reading habits and skills. And one of the most exciting areas is the resources section, where you will find lessons, book lists, articles, and much more, including audio and video files that you can download. This area will be expanding greatly during the coming months, so be sure to visit it frequently. I've even partnered with Simply Hired to provide job listings for those of you that might be fresh out of college and looking for work, or for those of you looking for a change of scene. Please drop by and leave a comment, and if you like what you see, spread the word. You can find it at www.TeenLiteracy.com or www.NickSenger.com.

Introducing Free Daily Learning

Because things at Literary Compass are not all books and no play, I'd like to tell you about the newest addition to my blog family, Free Daily Learning. At Free Daily Learning you will learn something new every day on a variety of topics: Want to learn how to cook Cheesy Soul-Food Meatballs N Baked Potato Casserole? You know you do! Have you ever wondered how to submit a podcast to iTunes? Wonder no more! Maybe you've got kids that play basketball and you want to teach them the correct way to dribble. Let an experienced coach teach you! Future tutorials will include piano and guitar lessons, financial advice, blogging tips and much more! Subscribe to the feed and get a new tutorial each and every day. Increase your knowledge. Impress your family at the dinner table. Visit Free Daily Learning.

Made to Stick Will Stick with You

I began Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood a few weeks ago, but I got sidetracked by a few nonfiction titles that grabbed my interest. That happens to me every so often. I'll make up my mind to start a book, and then another one will grab me by the shirt and say, "NO! Pick ME!" That's what happened with the Heath brothers' Made to Stick, a fantastic exploration of what makes ideas memorable. I started reading it in the bookstore and couldn't put it down. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I never buy new hardcovers, but this one was just proving to be too fascinating--I had to take it home. And was it worth it. Teachers, writers, public speakers, anyone with an interest in spreading ideas should read Made to Stick. It's absolutely brilliant. Chip is a professor of organizational behavior and Dan is a consultant and former business researcher. Together they have put together a fascinating history of some of the ideas that have "stuck" with us, from urban legends about Elvis' motorcycle to memorable ad campaigns like "Where's the Beef?" But Made to Stick is really about how to make your ideas memorable, and this is really the heart of the book. Using the simple mnemonic device SUCCESs, the Heath brothers have identied the essential elements of a sticky idea: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotion, and Story. Sure, these elements have been talked about before, but not with such clarity and insight. One of the great features of the book is what they call the "Clinic." At the end of each chapter Chip and Dan take a situation and show how applying one or more of the six elements can make the idea more "sticky." I'm a teacher, writer and speaker, and Made to Stick has already had an impact on my work. It's one of the most practical and insightful books I've read in a long time, and I highly recommend it.

Will Free IQ Change the Way We Learn and Earn?

Any learner, writer, expert or entrepreneur should visit FreeIQ for three reasons: Free educational video, audio and document files: Whether you want to know about writing, parenting, coaching basketball, or making money with Google's Adsense, FreeIQ is increasing in educational content daily. Unlike other video sites, it's not interested in bloopers or college pranks. FreeIQ is where anyone who wants to learn can go for free video, audio or written content. And if you join the FreeIQ community you can review and rate the content that you find. Add your own content: If you are a teacher, writer or other kind of expert, FreeIQ makes it easy to add your own content so that you can share your expertise with others. It's just a matter of uploading and tagging, just as you would with Flickr, Youtube, or any similar site--and it's all free! Get paid: You can also add content for sale. If you've written an ebook or created an instructional video, FreeIQ will host the files, sell the files, and manage all your customers--again, all for free. They also have a great affiliate program. By making educational content free and easy to obtain, FreeIQ is helping to teach the world. Much of the content is business oriented right now, but as educators and other experts discover FreeIQ, I think it's going to revolutionize learning. As you may have read yesterday, I already added some content of my own, a free reading list for junior high students. It's not much, but it's a beginning. Visit FreeIQ

Books to Be Tasted - A Reading List for Junior High Students

I just posted my eighth grade reading list at FreeIQ for those of you who are teachers or who might have teenagers. The list contains over 300 titles of various levels that have been compiled during my last sixteen years as a teacher. I hope you find it helpful.

The Intellectual Devotional

I never buy new hardcovers because they're too expensive, but I made an exception yesterday and bought two: The Intellectual Devotional and Made to Stick. At first I was a bit worried when I saw the title for The Intellectual Devotional, thinking it was going to be a kind of anti-prayer book for atheists, pitting faith against reason or science against religion. As I thumbed through the pages, though, it doesn't appear to be any such thing. Like a devotional, it consists of daily readings, but rather than meditations, these are readings in different intellectual areas: History on Mondays, Literature on Tuesdays, Visual Arts on Wednesdays, Science on Thursdays, Music on Fridays, Philosophy on Saturdays, and Religion on Sundays. I like these "daily reading"-type books, and I had some money burning a hole in my pocket (a rare thing), so I decided to pick it up and give it a try. Today's reading was all about cloning, and it doesn't take any kind of moral stance on the issue, it simply recounts what cloning is and focuses on the story of Dolly the sheep. As I peek at this Sunday's topic, I see that the subject is the Torah. A quick browse through the rest of book reveals readings on Dickens, the Last Supper, Chemical Bonds, Real Numbers, the Manhatten Project, Rainbows, Verdi, the Battle of Midway, and Confucianism. It does bother me a bit to see the word "devotional" in the title, since it implies religious enthusiasm towards something non-religious, but the book doesn't appear to be anti-religious. In fact, the Sunday readings in religion appear to be respectful and informative, more like a survey of world religions. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it, and if my opinion changes I'll let you know. As for the other book, Made to Stick, I'll talk about that another day.

Dickens' Hard Times

For this week's First Line Friday here is the opening to Charles Dickens' Hard Times: "Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!" What an effective introduction to Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, the educational theorist of Coketown. Gradgrind believes that things like poetry and fairytales are "destructive nonsense." Unfortunately, judging from ongoing news about budget cuts to music and other arts programs, it appears Thomas Gradgrind is still alive and well in the 21st century.