Warren Buffett: Barack Obama Best Able to Lead the Country!

Dear Commons Community,

In an interview on CNN today, Warren Buffett when asked who he preferred for president, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, without any hesitation indicated his preference was Obama.  He added that Obama was best able to lead the country back to economic stability.

In response to another question on the influence of super PACs, he indicated that he was totally against them and if left unchecked would lead to America becoming a plutocracy.

Thank you Mr. Buffett for your wisdom and straightforwardness.

Tony

National Teacher Appreciation Week!

Dear Commons Community,

This week is National Teacher Appreciation Week. And Tuesday, May 8th, is National Teacher Appreciation Day.  The United States Department of Education is hoping that people will take to Facebook and Twitter to thank a teacher who has made a difference in their lives.

Charles Blow in his New York Times column tells of his mother who was dedicated teacher who taught him many of life’s lessons.She worked in her local school system for 34 years before retiring. Then she volunteered at a school in her district until, at age 67, she won a seat on her local school board. Education is in her blood.

“Through her I saw up close that teaching is one of those jobs you do with the whole of you — trying to break through to a young mind can break your heart. My mother cared about her students like they were her own children. I guess that’s why so many of them dispensed with “Mrs. Blow” and just called her Mama.

She wasn’t just teaching school lessons but life lessons. For her, it was about more than facts and figures. It was about the love of learning and the love of self. It was the great entangle, education in the grandest frame, what sticks with you when all else falls away. As Albert Einstein once said: “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”

She showed me what a great teacher looked like: proud, exhausted, underpaid and overjoyed. For great teachers, the job is less a career than a calling. You don’t become a teacher to make a world of money. You become a teacher to make a world of difference. But hard work deserves a fair wage.”

Mr. Blow’s message is sorely needed as a balance to the so-called “education reformers” and their corporate partners who relish in bashing teachers at the same time that they are trying to turn education and children into profit centers.

Tony

 

 

Taking Email Vacations Can Reduce Stress!

Dear Commons Community,

As reported in the New York Times, a new study released Thursday by the University of California, Irvine, which was co-written with United States Army researchers, found that people who do not look at e-mail on a regular basis at work are less stressed and more productive.

The study, “A Pace Not Dictated by Electrons: An Empirical Study of Work Without Email,” looked at 13 workers in a typical office setting and asked them to discontinue e-mail for five days. The results were that during the e-mail hiatus, these people spent longer periods of time focusing on a single task at work and shifted between computer windows much less than those who were slaves to their in-box.  The New York Times reported that:

“The researchers also tested people’s stress levels by attaching wearable heart rate monitors and found that their stress levels were much lower when not checking e-mail on a regular basis.

“The fact that we found that people are less stressed when they don’t have e-mail shows that there are ways to change the way we use e-mail in the work setting,” explained Gloria Mark, an informatics professor who has been studying the effects of e-mail in the workplace since 2004. “We suggest doing what we call batching e-mails, where organizations send e-mails once or twice a day, rather than continually, so employees know not to check their e-mail every 10 minutes.”

Ms. Mark also suggests taking “e-mail vacations” where people take a few days away from their in-box.

This sounds like a variation of “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.

Tony