Normal School is How We Kill Curiosity, Awe, and Wonder

"Teacher Tom, grandma and grandpa slept in my house last night!"

She'd raised her hand the moment we sat down for circle time. I knew she had something exciting and important to say even if I had no idea what it was going to be. "They're going to be here a whole week!"

Her enthusiasm was genuine and, judging by the forest of hands that shot up in response to her words, inspirational. 

"My grandma slept at my house too!"

"They slept in my room and my brother and me got to camp in the living room."

"I flew on an airplane to go to my grandparents house in Iowa."

It was a perfect circle time as the children tag-teamed their collective story for the next 30 minutes, about grandparents, flying, travel, sleepovers, excitement, and love. Even as I followed the flow, however, I was aware that in many school environments, this entire conversation would be considered a distraction. The teacher would have sat down with an agenda for this group session -- self-imposed or otherwise -- and that girl's excitement and curiosity would have been chirpily dismissed: "That's nice, but today we're talking about fall leaves." 

Of course, it's possible that fall leaves will capture a child or twos fancy. It's also possible that the teacher is talented enough to inspire interest in fall leaves. But more often than not, the lesson learned by the children in normal school is that the things they are organically excited and curious about are immaterial, so why waste time wondering about things on your own? In this process, we teach children to replace self-motivated curiosity with paying attention to what the adult is saying for the purpose of securing grades. It's a sure way to kill curiosity.

Earlier this month, education/parenting author Alfie Kohn posted a piece on his blog entitled Less and Less Curious, in which he writes about researcher Susan Engel's attempts to study variations in children's curiosity rates in suburban elementary school students. What she found, however, was "an astonishingly low rate of curiosity in any of the classrooms we visited." 

As depressing as this is, it's not surprising. From the outside, we imagine schools as a place to get questions answered, to feed curiosity, to inspire excitement about learning, but in practice, the true legacy of normal schools is that we teach our children that their own curiosity is, at best, a distraction. Engel reports that in one instance a teacher actually told a genuinely curious child, "I can't answer questions right now. Now it's time for learning."

As Kohn puts it, the children "had learned not to bother wondering." He goes on: "For more than half a century, researchers have studied our desire to explore just for the sake of exploring, our itch to make sense of the unexpected. The eminent educator Seymour Sarason argued that education should be dedicated, above all else, to stimulating the "intellectual curiosity, awe, and wonder that a child possesses when he or she begins schooling." Or at least avoid killing it."

I propose that this be our profession's most sacred oath: "Do not kill curiosity, awe, and wonder." Yet that is exactly what happens every time a teacher steers the conversation back to fall leaves. 

It shouldn't surprise anyone that curiosity is associated with higher academic achievement, but that's almost beside the point. When I'm with children excitedly raising their hands to talk about grandmas and sleepovers, I know that my job is done. I know that I've created an environment in which curiosity, awe, and wonder are stimulated. And that's not just the secret to success in school, it's the ultimate secret to a successful life: one full of curiosity, awe, and wonder.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

"At Least it's Better Than a Sharp Stick in the Eye"

Our three year old was complaining that something hadn't gone exactly as she'd hoped. At some point I said, "At least it's better than a sharp stick in the eye."

She paused in thought for a moment, then replied, "Everything is better than a sharp stick in the eye!"

My wife and I, over our decades together, have developed a collection of "jokes" that may not exactly make us guffaw any longer, but that we nevertheless return to again and again because, well, they allow us to feel more in control. This is "sharp stick" joke is one of those. I guess it's sort of our version of the advice to "look on the bright side."

Another of our jokes, the one I often call the best joke ever told, is one evoked whenever the pressure is on. All it takes is for one of us to say, "This is the critical phase." We've been telling this joke for some 40 years and it never gets old. We laugh because it reminds us that life is a never-ending series of critical phases, each looming large when resolution is in the future, but appearing as no big deal in hindsight.

I can't tell you how many times a marital spat has been nipped in the bud by one of us having the comedic chops to say, "I'm sure you're right." Try it sometime.

The ability to make light of a bad situation, even cynically or sarcastically or ironically, stands as an unappreciated, but vital social-emotional skill. Obviously, there are often times when a joke is unwelcome or an attempt to deflect the truth, but laughter (or at least a knowing smirk) is often the only thing that prevents us from crying all day. It's, in a way, an extension or corallary to the advice to "pick your battles." 

When a child responds to, say, spilled water with "Oh brother, not again!" or "I did that on purpose," I identify it as this kind of coping device, one I know they've learned from me because those are among the "jokes" I intentionally role model by telling them on myself when I publicly fail or flub. I once pinched my fingertip in a door hinge. When a kid asked me if it hurt, I replied, through the pain, "It's only a flesh wound." Moments later, she repeated the line after a fall on the pavement: "It's only a flesh wound." It didn't change the fact that she needed some first aid, but it did transform the immediate story, in a flash, from tragedy to comedy, because the only real difference between the two is the ending.

I replied our daughter's epiphany about our family joke by saying, "Exactly!" She then proceeded to set her complaint aside for the moment as she joyfully listed all the bad things in life that we're, nevertheless, still better than a sharp stick in the eye: lima beans, spiders, Cruella . . .

Humor in charged moments can be tricky in that it's often perceived as insensitive or dismissive, and it certainly can be, but it also has the power to diffuse, divert, and snap things into perspective in a way that furrowed brows and earnest words often cannot. When we role model humorful responses to our own flaws and flubs, we allow children to see that there are times when it can be an empowering choice to laugh through our tears. When we respond to our own minor set-backs with humor we show children that we can, even in times of difficulty, remain the masters of our own fate, and that with a few words, we can transform ourselves and the moment.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Secret to a Happy and Satisfactory Marriage

"This was a happy and satisfactory marriage," writes Doris Lessing in her novel The Summer Before the Dark, "because both she and Michael had understood, and very early on, the core of discontent, or of hunger, if you like, which is unfailingly part of every modern marriage -- of everything, and that was the point -- had nothing to do with either partner. Or with marriage. It was fed and heightened by what people were educated to expect of marriage, which was a very great deal because the texture of ordinary life . . . was thin and unsatisfactory. Marriage has had a load heaped on it which it could not sustain."

When the subject comes up, I often say, "My wife and I have been married for 38 years . . ." I pause there to let the listener respond, usually with something like, "Congratulations." When I say it in front of an audience, it typically gets a cheer. I then turn it into a joke, "And let me tell you, it only feels like 37."

When I'm with newlyweds, I both envy and pity them. The envy is for the giddy present with all its hopes and plans. The pity is because, as Lessing puts it, "marriage has had a load heaped on it" and if the two of them don't find outside interests and relationships, and support one another in their outside interests and relationships, they will invariably come to blame their discontent on one another.

Obviously, some marriages suck, especially when one of the partners is abusive, neglectful, or dishonest, but most of the time, as marriage guru John Gottman's research finds, "69% of conflict in a relationship is perpetual. It has no resolution because it is based on lasting differences in personalities and needs. Couples can either dialogue about these issues or feel stuck." 

I've heard people say that they don't plan to get married because they don't like bickering, and that's exactly what marriage can be, 69 percent of the time, unless your up to doing the work. I've never seen research on this, but I would assert that Gottman's 69 percent applies to any important, enduring relationship, including that of a parent and child. I mean, there's a lot of bickering there as well, the difference being that in a marriage, if one person regularly resorts to "Because I said so!" that's grounds for divorce. Ideally, in a marriage there is no ongoing, my-way-or-the-highway power differential, but for many of us the power of a parent over a child stands at the core of the relationship. I imagine that this is why so many of us grow up to either resent our parents (even as we love them) or seek to create a distance (even as we love them).

Weddings are the happy ending to our novels and movies. Our little girls, especially, are raised on this idea. But as anyone who has been married for any length of time will tell you, weddings are easy, marriage takes work. Perhaps, as many assert, marriage, especially long term ones like ours, is unnatural. I can see that marriage might feel like a cage. And I understand the hope that maybe the next wedding or the next will result in a happy marriage. 

My mother-in-law remarried shortly before Jennifer and I did. We were all newlyweds together. Some years into her second marriage, she confessed, "I have all the same problems in this marriage that I had in my first one. I guess I have to face the fact that the problem is me." I think about my mother-in-law and Gottman's 69 percent every time Jennifer and I bicker. When I do that, I see that much of the time, if I were to win the argument, it would mean somehow changing who Jennifer is . . . And, of all the things I want, I don't want that. Indeed, it's the aspects of her that aren't like me that ensures our life together will not be thin or unsatisfactory. I do, however, have an abiding and lifelong interest in changing me, hopefully for the better.

The parent-child relationship has had a load heaped on it as well. It's unlike marriage in that it's one of blood and instinct. But like marriage, it's meant to be a lifelong commitment. That's the beauty of both. That's why we celebrate weddings and births, even as we all know, make no mistake, that there is bickering (and probably worse) ahead. The other important difference is that parents know, from the very start, that the goal is to set their children free. What I've learned from 40 years together, more than anything else, is that this is also the goal of marriage. That, to me at least, is the secret to a happy and satisfactory marriage.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

 

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Let the Soul Dangle

Both hands were occupied, one with a piece from a Fisher Price play set while the other clutched a shiny silver baoding ball. His attention, however, was on neither as a small stuffed skunk on the floor caught his eye. He stood over the skunk for a moment, then without a second thought, dropped the ball, freeing one hand to pick up the skunk. He looked at it for a moment, then began scanning the room for whatever was next.

Young children are notorious for their short attention spans, but it's not just young children. It's all of us. Experiment upon experiment involving adults find that any given experience can only endure in our short-term memory for ten seconds before the brain exhausts its capacity for the present tense. It's not just young children whose minds ping about, starting a new stream of thought every few seconds. "When we are capable of self-awareness," writes David Graeber and David Wengrow in their book The Dawn of Everything, "it's usually for very brief periods of time: the 'window of consciousness', during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds."

I'll bet most of us believe that we're capable of concentrating on a single subject for longer than that. I sure do, but even during the time it took me to write the previous sentence, I caught my mind flashing away to other matters: I stopped to wipe a bit of lint from my screen, I noticed the shush of traffic outside my windows, I delighted in the coolness of the air coming through my open window, I recalled an errand that I need to run later today, I wondered why my nasal membranes feel so swollen this morning, I warmed myself with a sip of coffee. Each time, I came back to the sentence, but unless I really exerted my will power (a distraction in itself), I was off again.

As a culture we value the ability to concentrate, to focus on our tasks. We tell ourselves that this is the secret to success, that accomplishment, that achieving dreams, that changing the world, begins with blocking out the world in order to focus, focus, focus. We bemoan distractions, blaming them for our failures.

The paradox of attention is that the more we strive to attend, the more difficult it becomes. Sitting down to think about something is probably the worst way to think about it. Indeed, we tend to "think" best when we are in a relaxed, distracted state, in which we are open to the world. That's why we so often solve our problems while in the shower or on a walk. Indeed, it's barely in our power to control distractions and maybe that's how our brains are designed to work: maybe we attend best when we remain receptive to the present moment without feeling that we must somehow fix our minds on a single disconnected problem or challenge. After all, we know that "everything is connected," so why would we think that we can think more productively by disconnecting?

Of course, there are distractions and then there are distractions. We call our era "the information" age because there is information everywhere, but it would be more accurate to call this "the age of attention" because when information is plentiful, the most valuable commodity is our attention. Social media, for instance, is a notorious time suck, designed to move us along from one thing to the next every 7-10 seconds. This is the kind of distraction that I can usually do without. On the other hand, I have absolutely no resentment toward the small flock of Northern blue birds that regularly forages in the lawn outside my window. I welcome every text message from our daughter no matter what else I happen to be up to. And does stopping what I'm doing to watch the sunrise even qualify as a distraction? These "good" distractions connect me and my thinking to the real world around me, making it relevant, whereas the distractions offered by those who are buying and selling eyeballs do just the opposite.

Each time I return to the task at hand after a "good" distraction, I do so renewed, refreshed, and with often with exactly the shift in perspective I need to see things more clearly. I imagine that's how the young boy felt as he flowed from one thing to the next.

The Germans have a wonderful expression -- die sell baumelm lassen -- that translates as "let the soul dangle." This suggests to me that our minds are something like our muscles in that in order to grow stronger they need to contract then relax, contract then relax: think, then dangle, think then dangle.

The boy spent his morning going through our classroom, hand-over-hand, from object-of-interest to object-of-interest, limited to one per hand, but always with yet another object in view, his soul dangling, thinking without thinking, open to the world.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

"We Need Help! Everybody, We Need Help!"

I help children when they need my help, but most of the time when they ask, it isn't my help they need, but rather help in general, help that could be just as easily provided by other children.

When a kid asks me, for instance, to push them on the swing, I call out, factually, "Audrey wants someone to push her on the swing!" and wait. Sometimes I have to announce it a second time, but invariably, before I've said it a third time, someone has come to the conclusion that they will be the ones to help Audrey.

If a child asks me to, say, lift a heavy car tire on top of a tree stump, I might respond, again factually, "There are a lot of strong kids around who could probably help you." And on most days it only takes one or two requests to find someone willing and able to help.

Asking for help is a vital life skill. When my wife was starting out in business she often worried that asking for help would cause her male superiors to think her incompetent, so she would try to do everything on her own. One day, however, in a pinch, she broke down and asked her boss for help. It was an epiphany. Not only did he lean in, providing the help she needed, but as she later said, "He thought I was brilliant because I'd come to ask him for help." To this day, one of her mantras is, "Most people want to help you, but you have to ask them."

She's right. I've had to train myself to not instantly come to the aid of a child who asks because my natural inclination is to just leap to it. But I've come to see that too often what that means is that I wind up doing it for the children when one of the main goals of any education is for children to learn to do things for themselves. And that includes asking peers, rather than adults, for help. Again, I have to use my judgement, sometimes they need adult help, but most of the time, the kids can do it for themselves, including helping one another.

A couple of girls wanted to stack our large wooden boxes to create "bunk beds." They're heavy things, awkward for small bodies to hoist. Most children need help to lift them. They managed stacking the first box on their own, but then realized that was their limit without help. I was sitting right there, but being children experienced in how our school works, they began calling out, "We need help! Everybody, we need help!"

And sure enough help arrived to assist them in wrangling a third box on top. 

When they began working on a fourth box, however, I expected they would turn to me. Honestly, I was nervous about the idea of stacking them four high. I knew that their plan was to climb to the top to "sleep" and an unsecured tower like that could easily fall with children clambering all over it. I was prepared to issue my adult cautions, but they took on the challenge of a fourth box without even turning toward me. I stepped a little closer to be prepared for a rescue if necessary. It wasn't easy to get that fourth box up there. Indeed, thought it impossible, but four of them working together did it. (I then unobtrusively nudged the boxes into alignment to satisfy my concerns about stability as they curled their bodies into those empty bunks.)

"Look what we did, Teacher Tom! We made bunk beds!"

I answered, "You asked for help and your friends helped you."

She replied, "They did." Then she corrected herself, "We did!"

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

When We Let Young Children Lead

One of the reasons I'm inspired by working with young people is that they lack a deep sense of "pastness," largely because they have so little individualized past to sense. As older humans, our birthday evokes and includes every birthday we've ever experienced, but for a two-year-old this birthday is the birthday. This leaf is the leaf. This puddle is the puddle.

I feel privileged to be with them as they begin the lifelong process of creating a past that will be stored in memory and referred to -- consciously or unconsciously -- for the rest of their lives as episodes in the story of what they know, how they feel, what they expect, and, most importantly, who they are.

Some philosophers, like John Locke, believed that memories constitute our personal identity, our consciousness. More contemporary thinkers and scientific researchers tend to believe there is more to identity than "pastness" alone, but no one doubts that memory is a vital aspect of what we call our selves. For one thing, our memories are the only evidence we have that we are continuious beings that have existed and will exist (fingers crossed) in the future. It's in memory that we store our ideas of our personality, abilities, and flaws. Without memory, we wouldn't know that we can succeed or fail; what and who we love and what and who we hate; what we crave and what we fear. Memory is, in many ways, who we are, and for many of us, memory can be a kind of trap.

In her novel An Accidental Man, one of her characters insists, "I've told you I'm not a continuous being. My words cannot be used as evidence against me." It strikes me that this is the state in which we find very young humans, neither defined nor trapped by anything that has gone on in the past. After all, they are babies. Their entire life is about growth and change. Their bodies, their brains, their emotions are, from one day to the next, discontinuous, a series of not necessarily connected presents. As adult outsiders looking in, we of course can't help but find threads connecting their past with their present. It's what we've learned to do to make sense of the world. But for these young children, there simply isn't enough past in their lives to provide evidence of continuity. In other words, they are being born anew with each experience of themselves in the world.

These young humans are relentlessly living in the present because, for them, there is very little evidence of the past and none of the future. This is what inspires me. When I'm with them, I'm privileged, when I let them lead, to be free of the cage of my past as I'm down there on the floor, eye-to-eye, shoulder-to-shoulder, sharing breath, as our heads press together over whatever mote that has, right now, sparked our mutual curiosity.

"I understand that forgetting can also be incredibly dangerous," writes Kate Eichhorn, author of the book The End of Forgetting, "But there are times when the ability to forget and be forgotten is integral to social transformation." Her point is not that we should try to somehow stuff our bad memories, but rather that a normal part of personal and social growth involves more forgetting than most of us realize. Today, however, we live in an era in which forgetting is becoming increasingly difficult. Youthful indiscretions, mistakes, and embarrassments live on the internet forever, which leads more and more of us to pre-edit ourselves in order to craft the story we want told about ourselves, rather than, you know, just living.

And "just living," for me, means these moments during which I can escape into the present alongside my young guides who understand what the physicists know: the past and future are illusions. Existence, in reality, is neither continuous nor discontinuous, but rather an ever-emerging now.

In another of Murdoch's novels, The Flight from the Enchanter, a brother advises his sibling, "Live in the moment, Sis. And remember, you're the person who decides how long the present is."

This is the lesson I learn when I drop to my knees and let young children take the lead: this leaf is the leaf.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

My One and Only Political Endorsement

There is at least one major US party candidate running for a statewide office who believes that women should not have the right to vote. The fact that at least 40 percent of the electorate will nevertheless vote for him is staggering, although ultimately it's this attitude about women that will likely sink his campaign. The 19th Amendment passed a little more than a century ago, so most of us can't remember a time, let alone imagine a time, when over half the adult population was banned from the ballot box and this man's irrational ideas will be his undoing in the "free marketplace of ideas."

Contemporaneous opponents of women's suffrage argued that adult women could not be trusted with the vote, insisting that they were not intelligent enough, overly emotional, too easily manipulated, and lacking in the "real world" experience necessary to make rational decisions. When pressed, these opponents got angry, resorted to name calling, and behaved irrationally, just like this modern day candidate for statewide office. 

Previously, the same arguments were made for disenfranchising Black adult men: not intelligent enough, overly emotional, too easily manipulated, and lacking in real world experience. Irrationally, the man running for statewide office is a Black adult man.

I'm simplifying, of course, sexism and racism in America cannot be summed up in a couple of paragraphs, but my point is that to most of us, these arguments are, on their face, bigotry, and fairness demands equal political, economic, and other rights, including a say in our national project of self-governance. At bottom, the women's suffrage movement, like all civil rights movements, was based on notions of fairness.

Every now and then, I float the idea of granting voting rights from birth, meaning that any citizen, no matter their age, have the right to vote. I don't suggest this because I'm hoping to spark a civil rights movement, but rather because I find it both fascinating and worthy of reflection that the primary arguments used to disenfranchise children are almost identical to those used for the disenfranchisement of women and Black adults: not intelligent enough, overly emotional, too easily manipulated, and lacking in real world experience. 

Is it fair that 74 million citizens, over 22 percent of the population, are, by law, left without a direct say in their own governance based on these very same arguments? 

But more to the point, what does it tell us about our attitude, as a society, toward young children? I mean, it's common knowledge that the concerns and needs of children are typically at the bottom of every public policy priority list. One in five of these citizens live in poverty. Childcare is an underfunded and therefore often a make-shift operation. Public spaces are increasingly child-free, and those that aren't ban such necessary childhood needs like running, shouting, singing, and dancing. Increasingly, we've segregated our children into pink collar ghettos like preschools and fenced off playgrounds, and even then people complain about the noise and disorder. This is what always happens to categories of citizens who do not have a say in society. It makes it easier to ignore them.

Generally speaking, the only time children's "issues" get breathing room in our society is when it comes to schooling. Decisions about schools are largely made by policy-makers who were put into office without any input from children (the people most impacted by their decisions), business people who are hoping to turn a profit off the backs of children's labor, and economists (it's always economists) who tend to take a mechanistic (e.g., behaviorist) approach to problem-solving. Actual educators are rarely consulted. Parents, who hopefully have their own children's interests at heart, are our children's best hope for having their point of view represented, but as anyone in education knows, it can be like pulling teeth to get most parents to take an interest in schools beyond the free childcare being proffered. Wouldn't it at least make sense, if we really cared about fairness and are unwilling to grant them a vote, to institute some form of shadow school board comprised of children, who could offer their opinions and ideas? We all know that politicians only respond to two things: money and political pressure. Kids are not legally allowed to have their own money (a topic for another day perhaps), so maybe this would at least give them a modicum of say over the institutions in which they are mandated to spend an outsized part of their early lives?

Yes, young children are developmentally different than adults, but as an adult with over six decades under my belt, let me assure you that we all go through "stages" throughout our lives: development is not just a childhood thing. My wants, needs, and perspectives are today vastly different than those of my, say, 30's or 40's, which means I have different priorities than I once did. But no matter how old I get, no matter how physically and mentally enfeebled I become, even if I'm objectively not intelligent enough, overly emotional, too easily manipulated, and living a life far outside the real world experience of the majority, I cannot be disenfranchised. I know many young children, even preschoolers, who are more mentally and emotionally competent than, say, dementia patients who continue to vote despite their condition. In fact, NASA's own testing finds that 98 percent of five-year-olds qualify as "creative geniuses" (e.g., facile divergent thinkers) whereas only 2 percent of adults do. Wouldn't it be smart to at least try to tap into this amazing developmental capability? 

If you've read this far, you're probably going along with this exercise of reflection, although from past experience I know that some readers are feeling quite angry. And while I do believe that we ought to consider lowering the voting age to something like 16, please know I'm not actually suggesting that we give newborns the vote, but it's instructive, I think, to consider why we don't and what we, and our children, might gain from fuller rights of citizenship. 

In the meantime, as we begin casting our ballots, I'm making my one and only political endorsement for this election cycle. Our children are, by far, the largest segment of US citizens who are disenfranchised, and whether you find this situation tenable or not, they are counting on you to represent them in the voting booth. I endorse asking children about their needs, wants, and dreams. I endorse listening to them. I endorse listening to them not just with your ears, but with your whole self, then allowing their views to influence your own. The decisions we make today are being made, in part, on their behalf, and will have a direct impact on their lives both today and in the future. I endorse considering this obligation to represent children as something sacred. They are, as always, counting on us.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!