Coach Wooden and Winning

Here is a great blog entry by Vern Gambetta from Elite Track:

"Steve Odgers send me an email yesterday reminding me that it was John Woodens birthday and that Coach Wooden never spoke to his teams about winning. Never speaks volumes when you think of the championships and wins his teams accumulated. The message here, a message I have seen in everyone that are consistent winners, is that they focus on the process, not the outcome. If you pay attention to details, have a plan and get absorbed in the process then the winning is an outcome. Conversely think of the losing teams and organizations you see. They are always talking about winning. There are banners and slogans everywhere, but bottom line they are focused on the outcome and they make losing a self-fulfilling prophecy. They seem to find a way to lose. Winners find ways to win to because they have paid attention to the process. If they do lose there are no excuses, just learning, then back to the process."

This just re-enforces what so many others say about the importance of the process. It's what you do every day that defines you, not the short term results of winning or losing. If you focus on each day and get the best you can out of it, then the wins and losses will take care of themselves.

Responsibility in education

Students in Finland are at the top of the world in student performance.  One thing they teach there is personal responsibility.  Teachers are responsible for their curriculum.  Students are responsible for their learning. What does this mean for us?

New Library of Congress Catalog

The Library of Congress has a new online catalog providing access to a large number of databases: http://eresources.loc.gov/  

You can read more about it at: http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/09/a-new-catalog-in-town/

Practice

How do you best move toward mastery? To put it simply, you practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of the practice itself. —GEORGE LEONARD, MASTERY

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

From TED: Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they're motivated by curiosity:

Friluftsliv: Log Blog Connections: Tai Chi and Running

Friluftsliv: Log Blog Connections: Tai Chi and Running: "While the book Chi Running has some weaknesses, I am thoroughly inspired to alter my running form according to the posture and energy flow p..."

Ayn Rand

"We the Living" (1939, 1959) by Ayn Rand. Petrograd smelled of carbolic acid. Primus stoves. Life was tough, citizen.