http://www.superstarlifestyle.com/20-profound-things-we-learned-from-winnie-the-pooh/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=postplanner&utm_source=facebook.com

20 Profound Things We Learned From Winnie The Pooh!

Winnie-the-Pooh is a worldwide beloved fictional character created by English author A. A. Milne. The first collection of stories about this Pooh Bear was the book Winnie-the-Pooh back in 1926! Kids around the world have grown up listening to Winnie-the-Pooh tales and watching his cartoons, but it turns out there’s so much more to his incredible character! In fact, adults also can learn from these simple yet profound truths.

Here’s a list of 20 best pearls of wisdom of Winnie-the-Pooh through the years! Enjoy and share them with your friends and family

1. Piglet: ’’How do you spell ’love’?’’ Pooh: ’’You don’t spell it…you feel it.”

2. ’’You are braver than you believe. Stronger than you seem. And smarter than you think.’’

3. ’’The things that make me different are the things that make me.’’

4. ’’If the person you are talking to does not appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in this ear.’’

5. ’’If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever.’’

6. ’’As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was going to happen.’’

7. ’’Sometimes the smallest things take the most room in your heart.’’

8. ’’Some people care too much. I think it’s called love.’’

9. ’’Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.’’

10. ’’If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.’’

11. ’’Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.’’

12. ’’I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.’’

13. ’’You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.’’

14. ’’Promise me you’ll never forget me because if I thought you would, I’d never leave.’’

15. ’’A little consideration, a little thought for others, makes all the difference.’’

16. ’’A day without a friend is like a pot without a single drop of honey left inside.’’

17. ’’Love is taking a few steps backward, maybe even more… to give way to the happiness of the person you love.’’

18. ’’A day spent with you is my favourite day. So today is my new favourite day.’’

19. ’’No one can be sad when they have a balloon!’’

20. ’’How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.’’

Which quote did YOU like the most? Please let us know!

(h/t: Bright Side)

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-bowers/7-reasons-you-might-not-want_b_9832490.html?m=false

7 Reasons You Might Not Want to Teach Anymore

Comstock Images via Getty Images

Today marks exactly one year since I left teaching, a decision dictated by my family’s cross-country move. To acknowledge the occasion, let me share with you the top search — BY FAR — that brings people to my site:

I don’t want to teach anymore.

In the twelve years I was a high school English teacher, I watched people leave the profession in droves. The climate is different. The culture is different. The system is breaking, and educators are scattering to avoid the inevitable crushing debris when it all comes crumbling down.

I won’t go into detail about the budget cuts or the massive class sizes or the average salary, as that’s all been discussed ad nauseam. I’m not going to talk about the bone-deep exhaustion that comes from being onstage all day, or the drowning sensation that follows you home on nights and weekends when you have hundreds of papers to grade.

These are the other things — the stuff you might only understand if you have a key to the teachers’ lounge.

1. You are an “authority figure” with no real authority.

A friend once told me, “You have no idea what it’s like to have a real job — something with deadlines and adults breathing down your neck. You get to be your own boss.” The sheer ignorance of her declaration has stuck with me for years, and still needles me, mostly because that line of thinking is an extremely common misconception.

When we close our door each day and stride to the front of the classroom, it’s easy to fall prey to the illusion that we are in charge. It’s your name on that door, after all, so you must be the boss.

Reality check: you are not the boss.

Parents are the boss of you. The administration is the boss of you. Common Core is the boss of you. The students can sense it, which occasionally leads to comments like, “My parents pay your salary, you know.” Truth. And because of that truth, there is often immense pressure to compromise your integrity: to pass a child who has not demonstrated mastery, to allow an extension on a paper you assigned two months ago, to give less homework or different projects or more lenient grades, because sometimes you are expected to avoid rocking the boat.

2. Your day does not resemble that of a typical white-collar professional.

Despite my aforementioned friend’s ignorance, I’ll give her this: sometimes you are painfully aware that your “real job” does seem suspiciously different from other “real jobs” which require a college degree.

Here are the things your friends can do at work:

1. Pee
2. Get coffee
3. Spend fifteen minutes chatting leisurely with a colleague
4. Go out to lunch
5. Complete paperwork and other job-related tasks during the actual work day
6. Sit down occasionally

I’m pretty sure the real reason summer break exists is because the School Gods counted up all the seconds you don’t get to use the bathroom and handed them back to you in one big chunk. Twenty-five-minute lunches are not conducive to nice, relaxing meals beyond the building’s walls, and you can only relieve yourself during passing time — which, unfortunately, is the only opportunity all the OTHER teachers have to take care of business.

Because you know what else is the boss of you? The bell schedule.

3. Everyone thinks they know how to do your job. EVERYONE.

Adding to the sting of your not-in-charge-ness, many people who ARE in charge have literally never taught a day in their lives — and a lot of them are pretty sure they know how to do it better than you.

Most people have lights in their home, but that doesn’t make them electricians. My husband doesn’t know how to manage a restaurant just because we’ve gone out to eat. Can I profess to be an expert on successful lawyering because I watch Law & Order: SVU once a week?

Surely, teaching is different, though, right? At some point, just about everyone has sat in a classroom. We were all students, after all. Six, seven, eight hours a day, ever since preschool, everyone has seen this job, so everyone is allowed to have an opinion.

But even brand new teachers can tell: the view looks a whole lot different from behind the podium. So when your high, high, highest-ups are committees of people who only know what it’s like to be a student, it feels akin to a team of accountants trying to wire a building.

You know what’s probably going to happen? That sucker’s going up in flames.

4. You wanted to foster imagination, not slaughter it.

For a while now, teachers have been battling an increasing pressure to “teach to the test.” Despite our banshee-esque warning cries, this situation is not improving. Courses with “real-world” value (home economics, for example, or shop class) are dying a not-so-gradual death, as there is no “Foods & Nutrition” section on the SAT. Art and music programs are still in grave danger — and, in some districts, have already been slashed to ribbons.

An elementary school teacher I know — who is a part of one of the wealthiest, most reputable districts in her state — attended a recent meeting where staff members were instructed to “drastically limit or entirely eliminate” story time. “It’s not differentiated enough,” they were told, “and therefore is a waste of valuable class time.”

The kids are in THIRD GRADE. They deserve to gather around a rocking chair and feed their imaginations. They deserve the magic of a captivating story. They deserve to learn that you can read for pleasure instead of strictly for information.

“Core” high school classes aren’t immune to the damage, either. English teachers look on helplessly as more and more works of fiction are plucked from the curriculum and replaced by fact-driven nonfiction. Even though we’re sometimes invited to join curriculum committees (as I did) under the guise that we might have a say, it’s ultimately just a ruse: we have only as much freedom as our national and state standards allow. At the moment, there is a relentless push toward FACTS. DATA. STATISTICS.

That doesn’t leave very much room for make-believe.

But here’s the thing: discussions about fiction lead to rich discussions about life, which drives something much more important than the growth of a student — it guides the growth of a human being.

5. The technology obsession is making you CRAZY.

Our beloved works of fiction aren’t just getting elbowed aside by facts and figures. They’re also being trounced by the frenetic crush of technology. “The children must learn ALL THE TECH!” everyone shouts, flailing their arms and stampeding toward the nearest Apple store. “It is the way of the future!”

Then why are some big-shot technology CEOs sending their kids to computer-free Waldorf Schools? There’s an app — er, a reason — for that.

This one is tricky. OF COURSE, as teachers, our job is to adapt to the changing times. But I might argue that our job is also to challenge our students with something new — and, to this generation, technology is not new. In fact, it is all they know. Our kids don’t need more of it — most of them have been swiping and zooming and smartphone-ing since they were toddlers — and they continue to do it right in the middle of your (probably fact-driven) lecture about some (probably nonfiction) book, by the way. It’s incredibly frustrating when all that glorious innovation serves as more of a distraction than a learning tool.

Though we teachers tend to stick together, I also have a group of friends and family with a wide range of careers — they run the gamut from successful marketers to mechanical engineers to human resource managers. All of them have interviewed prospective employees for over a decade, and all of them now have a similar complaint: it’s becoming close to impossible to find candidates they actually want to hire.

The three C’s people suddenly seem to be missing? Curiosity, creativity, and communication skills.

Technology is wonderful — nay, necessary — for a plethora of things, but it’s killing those beautiful C’s. And as a teacher, you don’t just witness the death, you are expected to assist in the murder. Because of standardized expectations, you must incorporate more and more tech, even when all you want to do is take a hammer to anything with a screen.

6. All the entitlement and the trophies and the apathy and whatever.

The air inside your classroom walls is probably thick with the stench of “It’s not my fault, it’s your fault,” and it sure seems like the smell is coming from the students.

Ironically, this is not their fault.

Like cigarette smoke, it gets carried in from home, rising from their backpacks, woven through the threads of their clothes and the fibers of their upbringing. Their whole lives, generations of special snowflakes have received copious awards and accolades just for playing — NOT for excelling — so it’s no wonder kids have come to expect an A “because I tried.” But sometimes a D paper is just a D, which doesn’t necessarily mean that Johnny has an evil teacher. It means that Johnny might have actually earned a D this time. It means he might not have written a perfect paper. It means he needs to stop waiting until THE VERY LAST SECOND to start an essay he’s known about for three weeks.

But Johnny doesn’t know it means all that, because what he hears at the dinner table is that his parents are UNBELIEVABLY ANGRY that his teacher had the nerve — the nerve! — to give their baby a D. (Brace yourself for the irate phone call in the morning.)

Of course, for every helicopter parent, there is a devastatingly absentee parent, as well as an equal number who are so remarkably supportive that you wonder if they’re even real. They are warm and generous and responsible. You tell them at conferences, You are REALLY doing something right, and you mean it.

I hope I will be that kind of parent.

I became a mother a few years ago, and I must shamefully admit I get it now. My children ARE special. My children DO try. I do not EVER want them to feel like they are anything less than the most important people in the world. When my daughter’s preschool note tells me she was not a good listener that day, I feel frustrated and helpless and a little bit sure the teacher is just being too demanding. When she ran her first Toddler Turkey Trot last November, the people in charge asked if I wanted to buy her a medal. “Um, obviously,” I said. “She will obviously, absolutely get a medal.” Without hesitation, I forked over my money and contributed to the Trophy Generation Fund.

As a parent, I understand.

But as a teacher, this is what you wish you could say: Stop making excuses for your kids. STOP IT. Teach them to earn things, not demand things. Hold them to a higher standard. Challenge them. That way, when I try to challenge them, they’ll know we both expect it.

They’ll know we are on the same team.

Left to their own devices, the kids will be the first to tell you: Yeah, I totally forgot about that assignment. I didn’t really try my best. I just didn’t feel like finishing the reading. Whoops — sorry, Ms. B! They’ll cringe at you with raised eyebrows and endearing self-awareness. They’ll laugh uproariously when you pull a pretend trophy from your desk and give it a quick shine as soon as they catch themselves in the act of whining.

They know. Deep down, despite that wafting air of entitlement, they know exactly what’s going on. They are smarter than that, and they are capable of more failures — and consequently, more successes — than the world is allowing them to experience.

7. There is no reliable way to assess who is ACTUALLY good at this.

If you’re a teacher worth your salt, this might be the most troubling of the bunch.

In order for people to really know how well you’re doing your job, they have to watch you do it. But when there is only one administrator for every thirty-plus teachers, adequate observation time is often a physical impossibility. Even if an administrator’s ONLY JOB was to sit in classroom after classroom, there would still be too few hours in the day, so lawmakers and district higher-ups are scrambling to figure out a way to fill in the blanks.

A popular bright idea is to examine students’ test scores. In theory, this should work — but in practice, you’ve got to be kidding. Students are not products tumbling off a cookie-cutter assembly line. They are human beings, and there are thirty-five of them per class period, and they are influenced by FAR more than yesterday’s vocabulary lesson. You are not in charge of how well they slept, or the breakup that happened last week, or if their family has enough money for breakfast — but all of those things affect test scores. So do IEPs, 504 plans, and whether or not you are teaching an AP or Honors class filled with students who might perform well with or without your help.

As more and more districts begin to adopt this nonsensical practice, who will teach the kids who are struggling? Which educators will potentially sacrifice their own careers to guide the students who work hard for a D+? Some of the very best teachers do that now, with only intrinsic motivation working to retain them.

Another method is to place the burden of proof upon the teacher. Instead of spending your prep hour — or your Sunday night — creating a brilliant lesson plan or grading the ten dozen essays you just collected, you must spend that time figuring out how to meet arbitrary goals and initiatives that will become irrelevant and obsolete by the following school year. After that, you must waste utilize class time implementing said goals and initiatives, and then you must spend more prep time and Sunday nights writing reports to prove how well you implemented them. That, combined with your students’ test scores, shall determine whether or not you are an effective educator.

Can I please just talk about Of Mice and Men instead? Can we spend that time learning why some words on a page just made us cry a little bit? That’s the important stuff. That’s what matters. Those are the things that teach us who we are.

Here are the other things that matter: Helping a group of students work through a disagreement civilly. Keeping everyone calm when someone vomits on the floor. Watching the shyest student in your class, the one who never ever spoke back in September, volunteer to read a part in The Crucible — and he’s hilarious, and he does it with an accent, and he makes two new friends because he finally let himself be vulnerable.

Your job is so much more than test scores, meaningless goals, and cyclical initiatives. It is tying shoelaces and distributing Band-Aids. It is listening to a parent cry about her crumbling marriage. It is showing teenagers how to debate thoughtfully, how to think critically, how to disagree respectfully. It is hearing from students ten years after graduation, because they just thought you should know it was your Spanish class that made them want to study abroad, your passion for science that led to a major in biochemistry, your quiet encouragement during their dark days that convinced them to keep coming to school in the first place.

Where does that fall on the “highly effective” checklist? How can you document that kind of delayed impact? It certainly can’t be measured by A’s and E’s, or even by weekly walk-throughs. It’s no wonder you’re getting frustrated.

It’s no wonder you don’t want to do this anymore.

But if these are the reasons you might leave, here is the reason you might stay: the kids, man. The kids. After a year without them, you might miss their unbridled school spirit during Homecoming Week, their contagious sense of humor, the way they draw pictures for you and wave joyous hellos in the hallways. You might miss their ability to make you forget about the rough start to your morning, or the looks of awe on their captivated faces when they finally learn something that matters.

If it weren’t for them, instead of Googling “I don’t want to teach anymore,” you might already be gone.

A version of this post first appeared on Michifornia Girl.

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http://ideas.ted.com/how-to-turn-small-talk-into-smart-conversation/

How to turn small talk into smart conversation

Tips from a comedian and a journalist on the art of going from small talk to big ideas — all summer long.

Imagine almost any situation where two or more people are gathered—a wedding reception, a job interview, two off-duty cops hanging out in a Jacuzzi.

What do these situations have in common? Almost all of them involve people trying to talk with each other. But in these very moments where a conversation would enhance an encounter, we often fall short. We can’t think of a thing to say.

Or worse, we do a passable job at talking. We stagger through our romantic, professional and social worlds with the goal merely of not crashing, never considering that we might soar. We go home sweaty and puffy, and eat birthday cake in the shower.

We stagger through our romantic, professional and social worlds with the goal merely of not crashing, never considering that we might soar.

We at What to Talk About headquarters set out to change this. Below, a few tips for introverts (and everyone else) on how to turn small talk into big ideas at the next Social Obligation Involving Strangers:

Ask for stories, not answers

One way to get beyond small talk is to ask open-ended questions. Aim for questions that invite people to tell stories, rather than give bland, one-word answers.

Instead of . . .
“How are you?”
“How was your day?”
“Where are you from?”
“What do you do?”
“What line of work are you in?”
“What’s your name?”
“How was your weekend?”
“What’s up?”
“Would you like some wine?”
“How long have you been living here?”

Try . . .
“What’s your story?”
“What did you do today?”
“What’s the strangest thing about where you grew up?”
“What’s the most interesting thing that happened at work today?”
“How’d you end up in your line of work?”
“What does your name mean? What would you like it to mean?”
“What was the best part of your weekend?”
“What are you looking forward to this week?”
“Who do you think is the luckiest person in this room?”
“What does this house remind you of?”
“If you could teleport by blinking your eyes, where would you go right now?”

Break the mirror

When small talk stalls out, it’s often due to a phenomenon we call “mirroring.” In our attempts to be polite, we often answer people’s questions directly, repeat their observations, or just blandly agree with whatever they say.

Mirrored example:
James: It’s a beautiful day!
John: Yes, it is a beautiful day!

See? By mirroring James’s opinion and language, John has followed the social norm, but he’s also paralyzed the discussion and missed a moment of fun. Instead, John needs to practice the art of disruption and move the dialogue forward:

Non-mirrored example:
James: It’s a beautiful day!
John: They say that the weather was just like this when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. If that actually happened.

See? Now James and John are talking! Be provocative. Absurdity is underrated.

Leapfrog over the expected response

An even better way to break the boring-conversation mirror is to skip over the expected response, and go somewhere next-level:

Instead of :
Ron: How was your flight?
Carlos: My flight was good!

Beverly: It’s hot today. Gino: Yeah, it sure is hot.

Riz: What’s up? Keil: Hey, what’s up?

Try:
Ron: How was your flight?
Carlos: I’d be more intrigued by an airline where your ticket price was based on your body weight and IQ.

Beverly: It’s hot today. Gino: In this dimension, yes.

Riz: What’s up? Keil: Washing your chicken just splatters the bacteria everywhere.

Go ahead, be bold. Upend the dinner table conversation! Turn small talk into big ideas at the next summer wedding reception you’re forced to attend! You never know which ideas will be worth spreading next.

This excerpt is adapted with permission from What to Talk About: On a Plane, at a Cocktail Party, in a Tiny Elevator with Your Boss’s Boss by Chris Colin and Rob Baedeker (Chronicle Books).

Featured artwork by Dawn Kim.

• book excerpt
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http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Parable of the Madman (1882)

THE MADMAN
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. 

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto." 

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves. 

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?" 

[Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.] 

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Coca-Cola: Who Was Dr. Joseph Jacobs?

http://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/jacobs-pharmacy/

Who Was Dr. Joseph Jacobs?

In my 19 years in the Coca-Cola Archives, I must have said the line: “Coca-Cola was first served on May 8, 1886 at Jacobs’ Pharmacy” thousands of times as I have discussed the history of the drink. 

With the constant repetition, Jacobs’s Pharmacy had become a “thing” rather than a place or store run by a family. This year, for our 130^th birthday, I wanted to go a little deeper and introduce you to Dr. Joseph Jacobs, the man who founded Jacobs’ Pharmacy.

Dr. Joseph Jacobs. Credit: Atlanta History Center

A native of Jefferson, Ga., Jacobs studied under Dr. Crawford W. Long, the Jefferson doctor who discovered the use of ether as an anesthetic. Long was instrumental in ensuring Jacobs' acceptance to the University of Georgia. After graduation, Jacobs continued his education at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science before returning to Athens, Ga. to open the Athens Pharmaceutical Company. The growth of Atlanta lured Jacobs to the city, and he moved there in January 1884 and purchased Taylor Pharmacy at Five Points in downtown Atlanta.  

In 1929, Dr. Jacobs wrote an article for Drug Topics, an industry magazine for the pharmacy trade, called “How I Won and Lost an Interest in Coca-Cola.” In this article, Jacobs described the soda fountain in his building.

“On the right-hand side of the entrance was a soda fountain conducted by Willis Venable, who was assisted by his brother, John Venable, and his son Edward Venable, (now one of the leading restaurant keepers in Atlanta.) The fountain enjoyed a wonderful reputation and did a large business. It averaged fully $150.00 a day from the various drinks.” As was the custom of the day, the fountains were often set up on space that was rented from the pharmacy owners. This is the case with Venable and Jacobs.

It's important to keep in mind what pharmacies were like in 1886. They were more like general stores that also dispensed medicine. Open to men and woman, pharmacies were often gathering spaces for people to get the news of the day, pick up their items and enjoy a moment at the fountain. Jacobs’ Pharmacy was one of the leading pharmacies in Atlanta.

Part of the reason for its popularity was Dr. Jacobs’ innovative business practices. Jacobs was one of the first Atlanta retailers to discount his goods. In an interesting story, the smallest currency used in Atlanta after the Civil War was the nickel. Jacobs saw an opportunity and purchased $300 worth of pennies from the mint in Washington and began to discount items from $1 to .98 cents so he could provide change. The discounts attracted customers but angered competitors to the point that he became the target of threats and lawsuits. Jacobs stuck to his strategy and, as the anger simmered, the penny had come to stay in Atlanta.

As Jacobs’ wrote in his 1929 article, he was once a co-owner of The Coca-Cola Company for a short time. Willis Venable had purchased a share of ownership from Dr. John Pemberton, the inventor of Coca-Cola. With that purchase, Pemberton retained a share but also received a royalty per gallon from Venable. Venable became strapped for cash because he was building a home in Atlanta’s West End. To raise funds, Venable sold his portion of the formula to Jacobs in return for a cash advance. 

At this point, Asa Candler enters the story. Jacobs and Candler were well acquainted as two of Atlanta’s leading pharmacists. Asa even arranged for his son, Charles Howard Candler to work in Jacobs’ Pharmacy so he could learn the trade. Candler expressed an interest in getting out of the pharmacy business, and Jacobs has told him he knew little of Coca-Cola and wished to dispose of his interest in the product. The two struck a deal where Candler gave Jacobs an interest in a glass factory in exchange for his share of Coca-Cola. Candler, in turn, purchased Pemberton’s portion and soon took total control of the company.

Jacobs Drug Store at the junction of Peachtree Street and Roswell Road in the heart of Buckhead, circa 1944. 

"Ater disposing of my Coca-Cola stock to Mr. Candler, I never owned any more of it, which evidences my poor judgement," Jacobs wrote. But that does not due full justice to his success as a business leader. From his single store at Five Points, Jacobs continued to expand his business and became the leading drug store owner in the city. At the time of his death in September 1929, Jacobs owned eight stores in Atlanta. His son, Sinclair Jacobs, also a pharmacist, continued to grow the chain until there were 21 stores in the South. Sinclair sold the chain to Revco Drugs after World War II.

Joseph Jacobs was a member of The Temple and well respected in the community. His son Sinclair was president of The Temple during the 1940s. The family owned a 40-acre estate on Roswell Road north of Buckhead. Sinclair died in 1977 and was survived by his son, Tory, who moved to Miami until his death in 2011.

While the original Jacobs’ Pharmacy location at Five Points is long gone, you can still get a sense of the family by visiting Historic Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta to see the Jacobs’ Mausoleum, one of the first and finest in the city.

So the next time you read or hear the phrase, “Coca-Cola was first served on May 8^th at Jacobs’ Pharmacy,” I hope you have a fuller sense of the man.

Ted Ryan is director of heritage communications at The Coca-Cola Company.

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http://www.alternet.org/education/cruel-and-pointless-push-get-preschoolers-college-and-career-ready

The Cruel and Pointless Push to Get Preschoolers 'College and Career Ready'

In case you missed it, April 21 was officially Kindergarten Day. This obscure holiday honors the birth of Friedrich Frobel, who started the first Children’s Garden in Germany in 1837. Of course, life has changed tremendously in the 179 years since Frobel created his play-based, socialization program to transition young children from home to school — and so, too, has school itself. But what hasn’t changed in all this time, not one iota, is the developmental trajectory of the preschoolers Frobel was thinking about when he created what we now call kindergarten.

Frobel, a German teacher, strongly believed that children learn through play and by using open-ended materials like blocks, which he called “gifts.” His approach was a radical departure from the way children were viewed and taught at the time. Prior to Frobel, children were thought of as mini-adults who were educated through lectures and rote recitation. How ironic that today kindergarteners, and even preschoolers, are once again being subjected to these inappropriate methods of instruction. This despite all we have learned about child development in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Through research, we now have a clear understanding of how young children learn best. According to child psychologist Alissa Levy Chung (who happens to be my daughter):

“Preschoolers learn through the language of play and through movement and active participation. When children play, they integrate cognitive, social, and emotional gains. They build their language skills by communicating their ideas with their peers and then challenge themselves cognitively to integrate others' ideas with their own. In play, they also have to regulate their excitement, anger, frustration, and sadness through the course of their games and interactions. All the while, they are building their social skills by learning what kinds of behaviors attract friends and keep others in the game and what kinds of behaviors upset others or push them away. In self-directed play, children learn that their towers stay up better when they put the bigger blocks on the bottom. When they are in teacher-directed activities, children learn better when they can tie their knowledge to their real lives, to things they can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. They may be young scientists, learning about plants by putting seeds into the ground and taking care of them, seeing what happens with water and sunlight. While reading books with adults, they are encouraged to ask questions about the stories, to predict what might happen next, and to make connections to their own lives. They learn how to tell their own stories, the seeds of future writing projects. All of these foundational skills are critical for later learning. It may look like they are "just playing," but it is the critical work of childhood. Numbers, letters, and seatwork come later, but without these foundations for how to ask questions, how to integrate ideas, how to be part of a community, and how to regulate emotions in a social context, learning will only be superficial.”

I recently received a heartbreaking example of how backward we are now getting early education from a source of educational materials I greatly respect: Handwriting Without Tears. Its spring 2016 catalog announces a new pre-K curriculum called Get Set for School. Sadly, a company I greatly admire for its approach to teaching children how to print their letters, designed for occupational therapists to use with children who are developmentally delayed and for elementary school educators, appears to have now drunk the Kool-Aid on early childhood education.

For the record, there are many wonderful materials in this new catalog. I greatly appreciate the Handwriting Without Tears approach to learning cursive writing and even bought a workbook for my granddaughter when her school stopped teaching this skill. The keyboarding curriculum for grades kindergarten through five teaches a very necessary skill for today’s elementary school students. Many of the math materials are wonderful and inspired by Froebel’s hands-on approach that featured blocks for children to manipulate. But the workbooks and worksheets in the Get Set for School curriculum are just plain wrong for preschoolers.

My First School Book and Kick Start Kindergarten, targeted to the preschool population, are in fact workbooks more suitable for late kindergarten or the beginning of first grade. They ask children under the age of five to trace and copy letters, write neatly on lines, and discriminate between upper- and lower-case letters. Most preschoolers lack the fine motor coordination to accomplish these tasks. And as cute as the illustrations are, these are still passive learning materials that require too much sitting and rote instruction for young children.

Just out of curiosity, I downloaded some sample pages from the book to see what three- and four-year-olds were being asked to do. The first one was a worksheet with an orange crayon on top and a row of three objects: a pumpkin, traffic cone and carrot. I guess a preschooler is expected to learn that these things are orange and color them as such. (But I also know allowing the child to explore, touch and play with a real pumpkin, traffic cone and carrot would teach far more than the color “orange.”) In the next row, a circle, a triangle and a rectangle appear below the pumpkin, the traffic cone and the carrot. I guess the pumpkin corresponds to the circle, but the traffic cone drawing consists of a triangular shape on top of a square. And in what universe is a carrot shaped like a rectangle?

The other pages ask very young children to trace and then write the letter “v” (upper and lower case) for “van,” and to trace and correctly form a lower-case “p” (both on and below the line) for “puppy.” Again, this is a good exercise for a child several years older than a preschooler.

The final sample asks the young child to write her name in “title case.” This means that first the teacher will demonstrate how to do this, using a capital first and lower case for the rest of the name. All of this will fit in a box (for the capital first letter), and between the two lines (for the rest of the name). To ask this of a 3-year-old is heartbreaking. Some children at this age simply cannot print their names yet. Others write their names backward or flowing all over the page. Critically, this is a normal part of development, as many kids this age lack the fine motor control to do otherwise. Yet these exercises set them up for failure by making demands that many cannot meet.

Even more distressing, in order to attempt these tasks a preschooler needs to a) sit at a table for a long period of time; b) grip a pencil properly; and c) copy a model created by an adult. This expectation does not seem too different from the early 19th century view that play had no purpose in learning and children needed to be molded to fit society’s expectations. The very model that more than a century of research has told us is wrong.

I’m guessing this wonderful company decided to adapt its approach to give the people who determine our preschool curricula what they seem to want these days: materials to prepare kids for the “college and careers” trajectory. I just wish Handwriting Without Tears had resisted the temptation to cash in on this Race to the Top version of early childhood education. Froebel, who believed so deeply in the idea that children are naturally creative and imaginative and learn best through play, would have hated watching preschoolers struggling to complete developmentally inappropriate worksheets. We should all be similarly aghast.

In Froebel’s vision of kindergarten, he describes play as, “the highest expression of human development in childhood, for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child's soul.” Surely, before preschoolers even arrive at the start of their formal education, play-based learning should be what they receive. To do otherwise, by pushing down on them educational approaches meant for children three or four years older, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of child development and the way preschoolers learn. Stop the madness.

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How Running and Meditation Change the Brains of the Depressed

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In 2007, writer Jen A. Miller went through a terrible breakup. (Her ex’s parting words: “I’ll keep you in the top eight of my Myspace friends.”) Soon afterward, her grandfather died. Soon after that, she bought a house and signed the paperwork just months before the recession hit. “I did not handle this well,” Miller wrote in a widely-shared 2014 column headlined “Running As Therapy” for the New York Times. “As I was helping my mother pack up her parents’ house, I found myself too drained to move and lay down on the floor and sobbed. My mother suggested I try therapy. I signed up for a 10-mile race instead.”

That column could be seen as an early draft of Miller’s memoir, Running: A Love Story, which is out this week. In it, she details her lifelong relationship with the sport, and how the simple act of putting one foot in front of another over 10, 15, or 26.2 miles brought back her mental clarity. In her book, Miller distances herself from the Times headline, writing that she “probably should have sought professional help,” and that she doesn’t mean to suggest self-care is an adequate treatment for the depressed. And it’s true that many severely depressed people are so ill that physical activity becomes impossible; it is also true that seeking professional help is crucial for those who struggle with mental-health issues.

But it is also true that for many people who are depressed, physical activity, and running in particular, helps tremendously. Now, an intriguing line of research is suggesting that for some, a combination of physical and mental training — called MAP training — may provide substantial help to those with major depressive disorder. Studies have already suggested that physical activity can play a powerful role in reducing depression; newer, separate research is showing that meditation does, too. Now, some exercise scientists and neuroscientists believe that there may be a uniquely powerful benefit in combining the two. In one study, published last week in the Nature journal Translational Psychiatry, a team led by Brandon Alderman at Rutgers University found that MAP training reduced depressive symptoms in a group of young people with major depressive disorder, and by an impressive margin — 40 percent on average, their data show.

The reason why this works is not yet clear. But Alderman and his colleagues have a hunch, taken from the neurogenesis theory of depression. Not long ago, scientists believed that by adulthood, your brain had already produced all the neurons it ever would. Recent research, however, has shown that some regions, including the hippocampus, generate brand-new neurons throughout the lifespan. But in some — not all, but some — depressed people, the hippocampus generates fewer new neurons than in non-depressed people. This may be one of the reasons that antidepressants work: In addition to increasing serotonin production, the medications may also increase neurogenesis. (This, by the way, is one of the weirder facts of pharmaceutical research — many drugs work even though their inventors are not totally sure why they work.)

And yet antidepressants are likely not the only way of increasing the birth of these new neurons — though this is where things get a little theoretical. Increased neurogenesis has not yet been observed in humans; the technology does not yet exist for that. But animal studies have suggested that aerobic exercise — in particular, running — can double the amount of new neurons produced in the brains of mice. The problem is that these newborn neurons don’t stick around for very long. “Even under ‘healthy’ conditions, many of these new cells can die within several weeks of being born, often before differentiating into mature neurons,” Alderman and his colleagues write in their paper.

Enter meditation. Those newly-generated brain cells can be “rescued from death by new learning experiences,” the researchers write. For instance, research has shown that “aerobic exercise increases the production of new neurons in the adult brain, while effortful mental-training experiences keep a significant number of those cells alive.” So what would happen if the two were paired?

To test this, Alderman and his colleagues recruited 52 young adults, 22 of whom had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder and referred by a university counseling clinic. (The rest of the participants were “typically healthy” individuals.) Once a week for eight weeks, all of the study volunteers reported to the lab for two MAP training sessions, during which they spent 30 minutes in “focused-attention meditation” and 30 minutes running on a treadmill. At the start of the study, they all took surveys measuring their depression symptoms, as well as a test designed to measure their cognitive control — that is, their ability to harness their own attention. They repeated these tasks at the study’s conclusion, and the researchers’ analysis shows a decrease in self-reported depressive symptoms for both groups — but especially for the group with major depressive disorder. Both groups improved their performance on the cognitive-control test, too.

Again, the why factor here is not so clear. But here’s the theory: The hippocampus is associated with both learning and memory — short-term episodic memory, specifically. You can think back to your last birthday because it was an episode in your life, and the hippocampus is thought to help you do that. In focused-attention meditation, the person learns how to focus her thoughts on one steady thing, often her own breath. If her thoughts drift, she acknowledges the change, and simply returns her attention back to her breath. “With practice, the person learns to recognize deviations of attention,” Alderman and his colleagues write, “thereby acquiring new skills that can help direct attention to the present moment, not only during meditation but also in everyday life.” Maybe, they argue, the newborn neurons in the hippocampus — brought forth by running and nurtured by meditation — helped the study participants do this.

Then again, maybe not. These researchers didn’t test the reason why this change in depressive symptoms might be happening; they simply noted that it happened. But it’s the second such study to point to the power of running and meditation when paired together. In a smaller, earlier study, Alderman and a team of scientists did a version of this very same research project, only with a much more troubled population: Recently homeless young mothers, most of whom had a history not only of depression, but of addiction and sexual or physical abuse, too. In that study, the young women’s depression symptoms dropped nearly in half.

For some people, then, there may indeed be considerable power in combining a simultaneous focus on the body and the mind. In her book, Miller mostly sticks to her personal narrative, but she also considers the sometimes transformative nature of her sport. She quotes Katharine Jefferts Schori, the 26th presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, who also happens to be a marathoner, as saying, “Runners begin to understand the blessing that comes with putting the body to work and emptying the mind.” Miller adds, “She was referring to prayer, but I had stopped going to church in college. Those long runs were the closest I came to going back.”

This article was written by Melissa Dahl from New York Magazine and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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