I use Twitter threads as a way of getting my thoughts down in a way that I didn’t think quite worked for my blog. That meant that over time the amount I posted to the blog went down a lot. I decided it might be a nice thing to move some of them over here to the blog, especially as I’ve moved the blog off the front page.
So, I’ll be setting that up over the next weeks, expect to see occasional things you’ve heard me say on twitter, but now redone as a post here.
Good Morning! I said I’d write a twitter thread about inbox zero, but it was kinda too long for one, so instead it’s a blog post. Here we go, I wrote this mostly as I worked on getting back to inbox zero yesterday.
I just got back from 4 days of vacation, and I had let everyone know I would be on vacation, so I didn’t get as many emails as normal (and outlook tells other people in your org that you’re on vacation before they send you an email). Thankfully I only had around 200 emails to go through.
I did hit inbox zero before I left for vacation, that lasted about 5 minutes. But I didn’t want to be checking my email constantly. I did checked it twice to make sure nothing urgent came in, and I responded to the one super urgent email I had.
So, here’s how I got back to inbox zero.
So I’m giving the new Gutenberg editor a shot. I do a lot of text heavy research posts on my other blog, even though this one is basically shut down for now. I just haven’t had much to say on it.
(more…)So I figured I’d use this blog to test the editor before trying to use it on my main blog.
Citation needed?
I thought I’d take a look at the countries who are hosting the most Syrian Refugees. So with a quick skim of news reports and Wikipedia I have this.
These are the countries that have brought in the most Syrian refugees by percentage of their population:
Lebanon (22%)
Jordan (10%)
Macedonia (10%)
Serbia (4%)
Greece (4%)
Turkey (4%)
Kuwait (2%)
Qatar (2%)
Croatia (1.5%)
Sweden (1%)
UAE (1%)
The honorable mentions are:
Germany (almost 500,000)
Egypt (130,000)
and surprisingly
Saudi Arabia (75,000)
Remember that the next time someone says that the middle eastern countries aren’t pulling their weight. Saudi Arabia has even brought in more than three times more refugees than Canada’s 25,000 (four times if you’re determining it as a percentage of population).
And the US? 3000 refugees. That’s lower than any other developed country except for Japan (refusing to take any), Israel (refusing to take any), China (refusing to take any), India (they’ve taken in about 50) Czech Republic (holding the few they have in prisons and under investigation for human rights violations), & Finland (though they’ve accepted 20 times more refugees by percentage of population than the US).
Think about that a bit.
April 4th 2007 Suzanne Klerks passed away. I met her in 2002 when she taught my first year writing course at UCFV. Near the end of the semester I asked for a one day extension on a paper. She responded by giving me a copy of the Little Brown Handbook and telling me I could have a week as long as there wasn’t a single comma splice in the entire paper, a problem I’d been having all semester. I point to that as the pivotal moment in my University experience.
Her guidance over the next few years was key to my progression. It was her who planted the idea of me working in Higher Education, though she originally was encouraging me to look into teaching in Higher Ed. It was her influence that led me to consider my career not as a teacher, but as an educator, something that has led me from high school teaching into Student Affairs with no regrets.
All writing has an audience. That’s the point. Without a potential audience what you are doing is a pointless and fruitless exercise. Writing out your thoughts allows you to put them in a coherent order and reassess whether or not it says what you want it to say, and also whether or not it’s appropriate for the audience. Writing allows something as transient as a thought to be solidified into something that can exist and be passed on to others long after the original thought occurred. And writing allows a thought from a century ago influence a new thought which will influence other thoughts.
Today someone was wrong on the internet. Yesterday someone else was. Actually a lot of people were wrong on the internet, and why does that bother us? I think we get bothered because we feel deep down that what we are doing/thinking/saying is right. If we didn’t we wouldn’t be doing/thinking/saying that. Then we take that one step further and assume that because someone else does/thinks/says similar things to us on topic A that they will do the same for topic B.
The daily show had a great bit a few weeks ago where the corespondent expressed shock that it was left leaning people primarily in the “anti-vaccination” movement. The idea that someone who agrees with us can also disagree with us shouldn’t be a surprise, and yet it is. In any large religion there are as many viewpoints as there are believers. And some of those viewpoints are opposite each other. And some of those opposite viewpoints are over key tenets of the religion. Yet both are considered part of the region. Similarly two people can have very similar views on child rearing but completely opposing views on the environment, or labour laws, or the advantages of ketchup or ranch as a condiment.
“Whether or not you can never become great at something, you can always become better at it. Don’t ever forget that! And don’t say “I’ll never be good”. You can become better! and one day you’ll wake up and you’ll find out how good you actually became.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson