A Few Quick Updates

As the new semester begins for my students, I should probably give fair warning. The competitive forensics/Speech Team I coach is winding down our season over the next couple weeks… the “postseason” begins in February, culminating with the Illinois state finals near the end of the month. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll explain all this at some point in the future. For those who have done this, you get the level of competition that goes on at this level. We have an amazing group of kids this year and I’d love to see our team rock the state tournament. So my focus will soon shift there and away from here for a little while.

In the meantime, you may have noticed a few changes on the site. There’s a Facebook “Like” button (that actually works!) and a Twitter button at the top of each post, along with icons for various social bookmarking sites at the bottom of each post. Feel free to use them liberally.

A few other changes are being made and I’ll write more about those soon.

Finally, the Norton antivirus threats some of you were seeing should be gone now. (Thanks for letting me know about them!)

Thanks for bearing with me as these changes happen.

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Jon Peterson

I get the feeling it’s very similar to leading a F.I.R.S.T. robotics team… and I totally get what you mean. Business gets crazy around competition time, and eats up a lot of your free time.

I hope to hear how your team does, if you ever get a moment to update us! In the meantime, I’ll guess we’ll be enjoying a greater ratio of posts from the other excellent authors here!

edited to add: Link to F.I.R.S.T. website, in case you were curious.
Feather

The warning from Norton is gone, yes.
Thanks!
John

I’m impressed with your dedication to forensics. Had a colleague, Ann Hittle, at Hinsdale Central, who took a team to the Nationals at New Orleans. The kids did quite well too. Nothing like good forensics training to teach critical (and balanced) thinking.
AnonymousSM

Couldn’t find your email (ok, didn’t look that hard), so I’ll post here… there was a recent study on ways to reduce performance anxiety in students and found that writing specifically about those anxieties before, say, taking a test resulted in a signficant increase in their results…

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=writing-exercise-may-lessen-perform-11-01-13

Also in a recent issue of Science… might help in your normal classes and maybe coming up at States
Lesa

Man, I miss forensics. It was the best thing about high school for me. I made it to state finals once, and it was super awesome, so congrats to all your kids for making it.
Jon Peterson

AnonymousSM: For future reference, the website’s email address is eponymous. (Also, there’s a button/link at the very top of the page, labeled “Contact”, which could help you out.)

Hemant: I have a small bug report… On the main blog (not individual posts) the pagination display repeats itself, and is actually kinda confusing.

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

Specifically, the issues are:
The “Previous Page” and “Next Entries” links move forward chronologically.
The “Next Page” and “Previous Entries” links move backward chronologically.
There are three links for each direction, where only one is necessary.
Kelly

Good luck in finals! I’m going to start student teaching with Speech and Debate the week after Missouri’s Districts.