My Bubblews Bank, April 17, 2013

Ever heard of Bubblews? It’s one of the newer content writing sites on the Internet that anyone can join. I joined on February 15 of this year, and that’s why I haven’t been here much. I have reviewed Squidoo, HubPages, Zujava, Wizzley and MyLot, all of which I write for occasionally now. But the bulk of my writing energy goes into Bubblews now.  Here’s why.

Bubblews can be whatever you want it to be. If you want to blog, you can blog there. If you want to share news and events about your life, you can do that. If you want to share and talk about  photos you take, people will be interested. You can write about anything that interests you – even lesson plans and funny things that happen in your classroom and get paid for it – as long as you write at least 400 characters and follow the very simple terms of service.

In the two months I’ve been a member I’ve earned over $100. You can get paid after you have earned $25.00. I have never written more than an average of three articles a day, though you are allowed to submit up to ten a day under current rules. Were I to come up with ten articles (called news on Bubblews) I would be able to earn three times as much in the same time period. You are paid for the views, comments, and likes or dislikes people give you when they visit your articles.

What I like best is that besides making better money at Bubblews than any other site I’ve previously reviewed on this blog, I’m also meeting new people and discovering that Bubblews is also a social network. One can invite one’s real life friends to join and you can get paid to do the same sorts of things you do on Facebook – as long as you write those 400 characters per post. That’s about four lines on the form on Bubblews.

The rules are just common sense and pretty standard.

1. You must write your own content. No plagiarizing or copying from other sites.
2. You must not abuse the system by joining like or view exchange groups or requesting other Bubblews members to connect with you and like or comment on your work.
3. You cannot use traffic exchanges, bots, or other non-human or IP manipulation tactics.
4. Your posts can include one or more photos, but you still must have 400 characters of text with them.
5. You cannot post anything pornographic.
6. You can’t make posts of less than 400 characters.
7. You must post in English. If you include text in some other language there must be an English translation.

Bubblews shares the ad revenue it makes with its members by the readership and reader interaction the members get on their posts. The more people who view and comment on your work, the more you will earn – as long as your posts follow the rules above. Before you are paid, your work is checked to make sure all the rules have been complied with.

One thing most Bubblews members really like is their bank page. Whenever you want to know how much you are earning, you go to your bank page and all your statistics will be there. Above I have posted my bank page for this morning, right before I redeemed my earnings. You can see all the statistics there. I check my earnings every morning and it’s very motivating.

If you enjoy sharing your thoughts and seeing what others think on a variety of subjects, I highly recommend Bubblews as a place to connect with others and earn money at the same time. My income on Bubblews is currently more than on either Squidoo or HubPages, and I’ve never had a problem with being paid. You can join Bubblews here.  If you use this link, I will make a small amount when you make your first post. The amount varies. Normally it’s only a penny.  After you join, you will get your own referral link to use when you invite your friends to join you.

One of thing that helps you earn money on Bubblews is interaction with other members. It doesn’t pay you directly, but it gets your name out there to people who may want to connect with you. You make it much easier for people to interact with you if you choose a simple-to-spell user name that’s easy to remember, because comments aren’t threaded. To make sure another member knows you’re talking to him, you have to be able to write his name. So if you choose a name like barbsbooks (mine) it’s easier than if you choose a name like Radisavljevic47 (my last name with number attached). Which would you rather have to write? You can put your real name in your profile, but make your user name short and sweet.

I will also mention that Bubblews doesn’t have much in the way of help files written yet. I have written what I call my Ultimate Bubblews Tutorial: All l Wanted to Know When I Joined Bubblews   . It will help you get off to a good start. I hope to see you soon, since it’s a great way to supplement your income by sharing what you know with others –right from your computer.

You can learn more about Patricia Polaccoand find her books, new and used, at Tomfolio.com’s Patricia Polacco’s Biography page. 

We always knew that students in poorly performing schools who could attend private schools with voucher help improved academically. Now in Illinois it appears the schools they came from also begin to improve. This would suggest that competition benefits everyone but non-performing teachers.

Jason Pinning Me at Court of Honor. Yes, he owed the camping eating tool that included a knife.

This is the kind of thing that will make actual criminals out of innocent students. Take the case of Zachary Christie mentioned in this article. He is six years old and a Cub Scout, learning to be a good citizen. He innocently brought a camping utensil to school that’s an all-in-one knife, fork and spoon to be used for eating. For this offense he was sentenced to serve 45 days in reform school. I’d wager that will be a much worse influence on him than a Boy Scout camping trip. He’ll probably learn how to commit real crimes, disrespect authority, etc.

We’ve known for a long time that legislators on the state and federal level have been short on common sense, but it appears this lack of common sense also exists in public school administrators. I’ll bet a lot of them played cops and robbers (or violent video games) when they were young. In fact, if we want to prevent  gun violence, maybe those violent video games are a great thing to make unavailable for children. If the first amendment keeps those legal, maybe the second amendment can at least keep fingers and harmless guns on play figures that can’t even move legal.

A common sense approach would be that students who probably didn’t realize the items administrators find offensive  were considered weapons be informed and warned . Parents should then be called to the office and have it explained to them, and then have the parents come get the item with instructions never to let it come to school again. Things that are normally not thought of as weapons that are forbidden on campus should be listed on the school website that parents use for school policy information. The list should also be on a note sent home at the beginning of the year. Students should also be informed in their classrooms the first day of school and again about once a month.

Meanwhile, while the police are being called to drag these young and probably unintentional offenders from their classrooms, they are not available to track down the real criminals on the streets who are killing each other with real guns. Where have our priorities gone? Where has our common sense gone?  No wonder children aren’t learning critical thinking skills in some schools. Teachers can’t teach what they don’t have.

Maybe the idea is to label these children as terrorists now so they will never be allowed to own a gun when they grow up.  Then they won’t be able to protect their family someday from a real terrorist or common criminal breaking into their home.

Many people believe one of the virtues of sending children to public school is their socialization. This article claims this is not necessarily a good thing.

Home schoolers have known for years that life in the real world does not consist primarily in dealing with people the same age you are. I had a public junior high school teacher tell me that he has little influence over his students — that the real influence on them is the peer pressure from the other students. When my daughter was in fourth grade her elementary school principal told me there wasn’t much that could be done about the sexual harassment Sarah got from the older boys on the playground, since the teachers couldn’t see everything that happened during recess periods. That was the last year my children attended public schools. The next year I discovered that some private schools also have problems with socialization that’s not well supervised.

It’s my opinion that no student should be forced to go to an unsafe school when there are alternatives parents could choose. No student should have to face cruel peers for months on end because a law meant to be a blessing has become a curse for many children and their parents. Public education used to be a privilege and students and their parents could choose to drop in and out of according to their families needs. It would be interesting to see how many of today’s public school students believe getting their education is a privilege.

Water in Salinas River flowing north toward Niblick Bridge, Paso Robles

I followed the river bed for some distance, since I always get excited about what I see. Today it struck me how much science there is to investigate in the river and the riverbed.

Is there a story under this willow?

As I walked along the edge of the river, I saw these small clumps of willows everywhere. Those closest to the west channel, which always stays full of water the longest, seemed to live on top of brush piles. Let’s take a closer look at one of these. Do you think a child might wonder how all this material happened to be under this willow? Might one try identifying different types of trees from what’s in these piles? What might one learn about a river by observing this small tree?

What’s under this willow?

Although the overall impression as one walks along the river in late December is colorless brown and tan branches and dead leaves, some plants show they are very much alive, or host things that are. On the ground beneath are new weed seedlings. There are red buds on some of the twigs. Moss and lichens also add color. Children turned loose with a hand-held microscope would have fun discovering this variety of mosses and lichens of different colors and identifying the new weed seedlings.

Do you see all the colors here?

Children would also be fascinated at all they can see growing on a rock.

What grows on a rock in winter?

Not all growing on this rock is moss or lichen. We also see green seedlings. They need soil. How did soil get on this rock? How about the weed seeds? Is soil created on the rock itself? Or does it all blow into crevices? And why does the rock itself look the way it does? How was it created? There is geology as well as life science to be learned. All these questions can be answered through research and observation. As a teacher, you can inspire the curiosity that will make students want to solve the mysteries.

If you aren’t in a position to take your students on a field trip, you can at least make the trip to the river yourself with a camera. Take the pictures that will arouse interest in what you want students to learn. And don’t forget the videos. Watch the river’s current. Study the rocks in the riverbed to try to understand how they became what they are. You can even collect a few rocks to bring into the classroom. Here are some specimens I found.

Egg-Shaped Rock and Some Other River Rocks

Interesting River Rocks and Milk Thistle Seedlings

I used to work in this office occasionally back in the 1970′s, in the days before computers were on every desk and hardly anyone used the Internet for anything. You walked over to someone to speak to him personally and you used the phone to talk to someone outside the store. It worked.

Barbara Gago envisions a completely different business environment to evolve by the next decade. She sees email being dead on a business network and being replaced with instant communication and video communication on enterprise social networks.

She sees more people working at home on their computers, making an office environment unnecessary. I can go along with that. I can also understand that a company CEO or manager might want to communicate by video with employees rather than calling everyone to be physically at a meeting. That saves time and energy for everyone involved.

What I’d personally find difficult is the instantaneous nature of this proposed network communication. If it doesn’t come by email, how does it come? Instant messaging? Will it be a constant barrage of dings on the computer screen as different people in the organization decide they have something important to say that must be said immediately? I can’t see all those interruptions encouraging productivity, since they break concentration as employees try to perform tasks. Nothing makes me crazier now when I’m trying to write or calculate or work in Quickbooks than hearing a ringing phone (that’s probably a sales person) or the ding of someone instant messaging me just to say “Hi.”

Another thing I don’t like about instant communication is that it allows little time to think over what one will say before sending or responding to the message. I’m guessing much will be said that would not be said if one had to walk to someone’s desk to say it, or even make a call. Each of us thinks what we have to say is important. The question I have is whether it’s all important enough to interrupt someone with, or whether it could wait until that someone is ready to check email during the next hour. Everything important is not necessarily urgent.

What do you think?

My Mother, in her English Classroom

My mother, Marjorie Hart, was an excellent teacher.  She got her B.A. and her credential to teach English  in California when I was in high school. She started her first teaching job in Artesia with only an emergency credential, when I was in college. Her first year was very hard on her physically and emotionally, since she still had one school age child at home and she was still having to take classes at night. She almost didn’t make it.

She kept at it, though, and finally got tenure. She finally became head of the English department and trained her share of student teachers. She also taught English as a Second Language at the high school and, for a semester, at the adult school as well. She loved teaching the adults, until the district forced an unimaginative curriculum which her students hated on all adult ESL classes. So she did not continue the adult class when the semester ended. At various times in her teaching career she was the advisor for the school yearbook and the the school newspaper.

Beside me I have my Mom’s scrapbook. It’s devoted to pictures students gave her or sent her after they left her class.  There are wedding pictures, Valentines, birthday, thank you, and Christmas cards. Here is a sampling of messages on the backs of the pictures and in the cards. The student year book for 1969 is full of similar messages.

Mrs. Hart, from one of your most grateful students (I actually know a little about grammar.)

Mrs. Hart / One of the finest teachers I’ve ever known. I hope that the rest of your life is as beautiful as you’ve made mine. I love you always. / Ed-in-chief, Class of 76

Mrs. Hart, / Words can’t express my gratitude to you. I want to thank you for all the help you’ve given me. Your (sic) my favorite teacher and I’ll always remember you. With love, T.D., -76-

My mom did not teach all college prep classes. She taught a lot of the students who would probably never go to college. Many had trouble speaking English. Many had problems at home and  confided in my mom. She would tell me about how hard it was for some  to finish homework when they had to care for siblings at home and fix the meals while their parents worked. I know my mom cared about her students. If they weren’t learning, she kept trying to find new ways to help them.

Contrast that with this high school teacher in Pennsylvania who was just fired for blogging that her students were  “rat-like”, “frightfully dim”, “lazy whiners”, and suggested that their future employment was with the local trash company. She considered it all their fault if they didn’t learn.

I have had some English students who did not want to learn anything and did not want to be in school. Many of them had bad attitudes and were in trouble with the law. But I tried to show them the respect due to every human being. Although I was able to help and reach some of them, I failed with some others. I was young and inexperienced and came to the conclusion that teaching in public school was not the right job for me. I only knew how to reach the college prep students. I simply wasn’t prepared enough to give the unmotivated students the inspiration they needed to succeed.

Steven David Horwich, who introduced the Pennsylvania teacher I mentioned above, in his blog, spends the remainder of his blog describing the job of a teacher. If you are planning to go into a classroom to teach this fall for the first or  the twenty-first time, you might want to read this for inspiration.  These are just a few of the words Horwich shares:

It is the teacher’s job to provide the environment wherein a student can experience and grasp information, develop ideas and ambitions, experiment, try, fail, try again and finally succeed. We will need our young people’s ideas and ambitions if we are to progress in any direction as a culture and a people. A teacher who berates a student for failure, who makes an issue of it, is a teacher helping to build human beings who will refuse to try, refuse to reach, will not experiment, try again or ever succeed. The price for trying and failing will be seen as simply too draconian and painful, the lesson students actually learn from teachers who cannot control their critical instincts.

It is a teacher’s job to find any and every way to open up the world and its possibilities to a child. And when that child smiles and reaches for a particular idea, it becomes the teacher’s job to fan that flame of interest into a bonfire with additional experiences and ideas along the same line. This is how a teacher helps to build the next great artists, athletes, business and political leaders.

My mom was that kind of teacher. What kind of teacher will you be this year?

Children Love Helping to Build this Sand Castle at Festival of the Arts, Paso Robles

I have just returned from the Paso Robles Festival of the Arts for 2012, and was full of regret that my children had never had the opportunity a local art festival presented to see how creative people could be. Both of my children had some artistic talent, but I was not artistic enough to help them explore what they could do to develop any but their musical gifts.

Children Experiment with Instruments at the Musical Petting Zoo

Paso Robles held its first Festival of the Arts in 2009, and I’ve attended each one since 2010, making this my third. Each year it gets better. I always encourage people to come and bring their children because they will have the time of their lives. In my latest post in my local blog, Tidbits from Templeton, I posted pictures of  many activities that were available to children this year. I’m only able to include a photo of the 2011 musical petting zoo, which allows children to try out playing a wide selection of music instruments. I only have this year’s in video. I will be writing an article that incorporates video on  these activities as soon as I can get them processed.

Children Make Tie Dye Art at The Paso Robles Festival of the Arts

The variety of hands-on activities ran the gamut from music and painting to wading in rose petal pools, building a super sand castle,  and making zany hats. There was also plenty to see that might inspire creativity.  The stilt walkers were awesome. There were performances of the high school jazz band, creative dance, dance teams, Singing Hands Children’s Choir, Mexican Folklore dance, and dance students on the Youth Stage. As I was walking near the center of the park there was someone juggling with a Chinese yoyo (forget the Chinese name for it) grabbing the attention of any young person nearby. There were also plenty of art forms on display in the more adult area of the park — painting, photography, mixed media, items made from found objects recycled into art, fused glass, sculpture, and more.

Sarah With Model Cliff Dwelling

Sometimes all children need is an idea and available materials to execute it. I saw that when my daughter made her model of a cliff dwelling while we were on vacation in Colorado and had just visited Mesa Verde National Park. She went outside after dinner and then came in a couple of hours later to show us what she had done with just the materials she found around the cabin.

The children in every community should have such activities  available. If your city or county doesn’t have an annual art festival for the community, maybe your school or home school group could get the ball rolling.  There are many businesses that specialize in providing art experiences for children at large events or at parties. One of these is Paint Jam, which takes care of bringing everything to  your location that children will need to be an artist for a given time –paint, brushes, easels, aprons, etc. They take charge from greeting to cleanup, and the children each have a completed picture they created to take home. They are located in Santa Barbara and had to travel to participate in the Festival of the Arts. Maybe there is a similar group in your area. Maybe you could even start such a business yourself if it doesn’t exist in your area yet.

You can get great ideas for children’s art activities suitable for art fairs and festivals from the books on this web page.  These would also help someone wanting to start a children’s art party business or just entertain their own children over the summer. Consider a family art night where everyone participates in his or her creative activity.