Listen for a Change

This 30-second commercial, has been fascinating me for months.

I see it when I do my Duolingo Spanish lessons. I am such a nerd for this app. I do Duolingo every day, and while I am far, far, far from understanding Spanish, every once in a while, someone will say something and I will understand a word or two!

I am also a total sucker for this app’s tricks. Currently, I have186 crowns and 3,765 gems and I am on an 8-day unbroken streak. I feel a pang when I miss a day and mess up a streak but I don’t, though the app always tells me I could, spend a dollar or two to reinstate my streak.

But the commercial.

For Audible, the audio book company.

It’s just so well done.

I see it often because I am a cheapie and use the free Duolingo version, which requires me to watch ads. I always even agree to watch more ads to get more gems just because gems must be good, right?

Pretty slick that I am using Duolingo to learn Spanish and I get the commercial where a trucker is using Audible to learn Spanish.

But there’s this whole other story going on. The cute-as-a-button trucker is learning Spanish because he has a crush on an equally adorable waitress at a diner he apparently stops at a lot, and she on him. The commercial starts with his Audible book explaining that “para” is used "when you are talking about something for someone.” He goes into the diner and nervously asks her, in Spanish, for a table for dinner. She, beaming at him, says his attempt is “pretty good.” The ad finishes, as they walk away together, by asking, “Could Audible inspire you to start something new?”

Aww. Love it.

To Do Lists

Nutty.

I have ridiculous to-do lists. 

I am trying to be organized.

But even my lists are a mess. A day’s list for me is really several lists written on a Google calendar page. There are arrows, stars, exclamation points. Some things are circled, others underlined, some, but not all, numbered. This is what it’s like inside my head.

Still, I think it helps to write it down.

I work on my own. I often have several long-term projects going with lots of deadlines. And somehow, I managed to become the scheduler for our entire family.

I went through a phase where I read a lot of what my husband calls “productivity porn.” While reading a book about how to be efficient might feel like you are being efficient, spoiler alert, you’re really not.

However, once in a while, I would come across an idea that appealed. I’ve incorporated these into my to-do list, which might explain some of its complexity. I’ve written about this before.

I even read books about how to clean your house (really) and figured out how to do the least amount possible as quickly as possible to avoid ending up on the television show Hoarders.

Interestingly, one of the guys who wrote a book I liked, Tony Schwartz, turns out to be the guy who ghost-wrote The Art of the Deal for Donald Trump and is now abjectly sorry.

Another idea I like: Julia Cameron, who wrote a number of books about being creative (I liked her first such book the best), recommends, not a to-do list, but a ta-da list: Think about what you did get done, after you’ve finished your day. More often than not, although I feel like I didn’t do squat, I realize that I did do quite a lot. Yay!

Hey, whatever works.

By The Book

I’ve been volunteering at a local school through a program called Read Houston Read. If you’re looking for a volunteer opportunity, I’d recommend it.

You spend a half-hour each week reading with each child.

I think the kids, first-graders who are as cute as buttons, like it.

Read Houston Read books are about things like a boy in Africa who saves up his money to buy a bicycle so he can help his mother or a Chinese-American boy who gives his New Year’s money to a homeless guy with no shoes. There was one about the life cycle of a butterfly.

That’s fine, they’re well-written and their illustrations are well-done, but … meh.

This week, there was a book fair going on in the library, blocking access to the Read Houston Read books. The librarian suggested bringing books from home. So, I did: some of my own kids’ favorites.

One of my students picked My Life with The Wave. The other picked Elbert’s Bad Word. I also brought Sweet Dream Pie, Seven Silly Eaters and Harvey Potter’s Balloon Farm and, in case they wanted something to read to me, Dragon’s Fat Cat by Dav Pilkey, author of the Captain Underpants books.

When my own kids were small, we used to go to the library and check out piles of children’s books, whatever caught any of our fancies. Many turned out to be “meh,” but some fascinated my kids, we read them over and over. Those ones we bought to keep.

These books tended to trust the children more. Their story lines were more complex, contained magical elements and were told with wry humor. They didn’t hit you over the head with “life lessons,” but my kids, now 22 and 19, and even my husband still remember them. They were better.

Little Free Libraries

Just wrote a local article on Little Free Libraries. They are very cool.

Willpower Isn’t So Simple (And That’s A Good Thing)

The phrase “nose to the grindstone” makes no sense. How is pressing your nose to a grindstone a good idea?

When I was in college, I didn’t sit at the desks in front of the library’s floor-to-ceiling windows. I sat in enclosed cubbies: surrounded by blank walls, I thought I would concentrate better. How awful.

Sometimes I think civilizations advance, and individuals mature, when they figure out not everything is black and white.

And willpower is an example. It’s not so simple. It, or its lack, is not a matter of character.

You know the famous marshmallow test? Researchers told preschoolers they could have one marshmallow now or, if they waited a bit, they could have two. Then, the marshmallow in front of the child, the researchers left to see what the child would do.

Decades later, the kids who waited had better life outcomes: did better in school, had higher SAT scores, were in better health, were less likely to have gotten in trouble with the law and made more money than those who didn’t.

The news coverage of this was basically, “See? Willpower is good. And some people have it and others don’t.”

But that wasn’t it. The lead researcher has written a book and has been giving interviews, such as the ones here, here and here.

The real story is the kids who could wait knew how to wait. They played mental tricks on themselves. They turned their backs on the marshmallow. They sang to themselves.

Another researcher, with equally charming studies (one of his involving radishes and fresh-baked cookies) has shown that willpower is like muscle strength: it can be developed and wisely used.

It can (and should) be a happy thing – sitting in front of a pretty view or singing – not a grind. Yay.

Aloud and Proud

Whenever anyone asks for read-aloud book recommendations, I get carried away.

Here’s why: reading aloud to my kids is one of the best things I ever did – and there’s something about reading to kids that a lot of people don’t know:

You can – and should – keep reading to them, even when they’re older.

I would have thought the same thing too, that reading aloud stops when kids can read themselves, except one of my kids was diagnosed with dyslexia at 4.

You know the saying among teachers that, “They learn to read till 3^rd grade and then they read to learn”? Well, as my daughter painstakingly learned to read, with her awesome teachers who patiently went over the nuts and bolts of reading, I saw my role as making sure her general knowledge didn’t fall behind.

When all her little friends were talking about Harry Potter, she could too. I lost count of how many times I read those books aloud to her and her non-dyslexic brother. Each time a new one came out, we would reread the previous ones in anticipation. And by the way, Harry Potter is awesome to read aloud. When you get to dialogue from Hagrid, just read what’s in front of you and a cool accent will come out.

The Narnia Chronicles, His Dark Materials, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the Percy Jackson books, the Peter and the Star Catchers series, Sherlock Holmes stories (a surprise hit): our family loved nothing better than to settle into a good long read.

And we haven’t stopped. Last summer, my kids (ages 15 and 18) took turns reading Jane Eyre aloud.

In that novel, incidentally, characters spend their evenings reading aloud to each other. For fun.

Which it is.