Mindfulness has been a trending topic in education lately.  Like all trending topics in education, the popularity has led to much sarcastic skepticism about what it really means to be “mindful”.  There are lots of super fun internet searches involved in this! Someone with a reasonably sarcastic sense of humor (me, my boyfriend, the majority of people I choose to spend time with) can have a ton of fun debating the merits of quotes like “Mindfulness is the opposite of mindlessness” and “Spending time on purpose”. But seriously, I sort of get it. It is about being present in the moment.  That’s important.  It involves lots of deep breathing.  I…

This morning I photocopied 27 pages out of The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman.  The book is a study of current worldwide water use practices and includes some fascinating and terrifying observations observations about the general human attitudes towards water consumption.  I want to read it with my IB Environmental Science class in some vague hope that the students will grow up understanding that water consumption is an important issue and problem in their lives.  I believe it will be a very worthwhile activity. However, it took 25 minutes to make the photocopies.  It got me started thinking about the value of time. Today, I chose to spend those 25…

On Sundays I enjoy doing nothing.  Walks, lunch, pedicures. Pondering serious life questions like this one: What defines you? In this view, I’ve recently branched out Sunday “nothing” to include watching documentary films on iTunes.  In this vein, during the latest quest of nothing I discovered Lizzie Velasquez.  She’s 26 and weighs 64 pounds due to a rare congenital disease.  She gave a TED Talk in 2013 about a YouTube video labeling her “The World’s Ugliest Girl”, which went viral complete with thousands of comments from strangers demanding that she kill herself.  In her TED Talk, she said when she considered how to deal with the video, she asked herself…