Full export of your blog in Blogger for backup and migration

If you use Blogger, you may sometimes want to backup or move your blog data outside of Blogger.  To do this, you'd normally log into your Blogger blog, go to the Settings tab, click on Export blog at the top of the page, then click the big orange Download Blog button.

But unless you also have allowed your blog feeds to "full", you'd only download a short portion of each of your blog entires (not so great for backups!).

To enable the "full" blog feed, again go to the Settings tab, then click on the Site Feed sub-tab, and then select Full in the drop-down menu next to the Allow Blog Feeds setting.

Reasons to learn math you'll never use

The film, "An Education", is about the experience of a teenaged girl (Jenny) growing up, meeting an older man, and making decisions regarding pursuing school versus marriage.  There is a passage near the end of the film that rather haunts me, especially the very last line (in bold below):

Jenny: Studying is hard and boring. Teaching is hard and boring. So, what you're telling me is to be bored, and then bored, and finally bored again, but this time for the rest of my life? This whole stupid country is bored! There's no life in it, or color, or fun! It's probably just as well the Russians are going to drop a nuclear bomb on us any day now. So my choice is to do something hard and boring, or to marry my... Jew, and go to Paris and Rome and listen to jazz, and read, and eat good food in nice restaurants, and have fun! It's not enough to educate us anymore Ms. Walters. You've got to tell us why you're doing it.

An Education

It strikes me that much of the frustration at all levels of education comes down to people having varying beliefs that are often contradictory, sometimes confused, and at other times missing altogether, about the purpose of education (and by that, I mean formal education in the school setting).

Some think education is for opening the mind of young people to the light of reason.  Some believe education is essentially career and job skills training.  Some think it is to "raise the kids" in the parenting sense, as though teachers are parents.  Many think it's more or less pointless, but essential as a child caring service while the children's parents are out making a living.  Some don't think about the question altogether, opting to do whatever the teachers say, as education is just traditionally "the thing to do".

The list of purposes ascribed to education by various people goes on...

Things to remember as a professional

Communication, communication, communication!

Feedback, feedback, feedback!

Energy, energy, energy!