JumpStart National Sock Day (12/4/23)

​It’s also National Cookie Day. Curl up under a weighted blanket in cozy socks and warm cookies?  Yes, please! What’s your favorite cookie recipe? Here’s a Weld family recipe.  It was one of my dad’s faves, mine, and now our son’s (is it a male thing?).  We’ve already made one batch this season, and will probably do more.  If you need to go GF, you can sub the flour but flatten the dough before you bake. (Oh, and no one knows where the name came from.)

Big Idea:  Earlier this week, I was in the men’s room at Menards, and taped above the urinal was the weekly ad, showing me of all the things I didn’t know I needed. At the bottom, in very fine print, was Pema Chodron’s quote.  Oh, the irony!

Earlier in November, my wife attended a yoga retreat in Costa Rica, nestled in the mountains outside of San Jose. Costa Rica is a place where poverty is mean yet people are happy.

So why is there a mental health crisis in the US where the majority of us have everything we need?
During a commute this week, I listened to an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast where they were talking about the Hedonic Treadmill. This is the idea that a person’s level of happiness may rise and fall with events, but will then make its way back to where it was before the event.  There have been studies where people who experienced paralysis of their lower body were compared to lottery winners.  Within a year, they both reported the same level of happiness.

This week, try this: In this season of spending, consider giving experiences rather than things.  Experiences have been shown to provide happiness for longer because 1) you generally experience them with other people so they make deeper impressions (and we are social creatures), and 2) you make memories from experiences that you can’t get from things, and memories can change the way we respond to future events in ways that objects cannot.

Quote:  We already have everything we need."  (Pema Chodron)

Educator Resource:  DitchSummit on TeachIllinois: Year 7
That’s 76 PD hours you could earn between December 11 and January 5 because in addition to the 8 new sessions Matt Miller has created for this year, he and I (Matt Power!) have been collaborating for 7 years to enable Illinois teachers to earn PD hours for attending DitchSummit. Each year, he also opens up all his past recordings, too, so you can really find some good stuff by some of the best educators and authors around, including James Clear, Dave Burgess, and Alice Keeler.  

​Register on the DitchSummit site to join the notification list.  Watch the sessions there, and then go to TeachIllinois with your certificate of completion to get your IL PD hours.

Dad Joke:  How do you console an English teacher?  There, they're, their.