Here you will find materials that help you through courses on interesting topics
Please take the time to read up on my pedagogical beliefs.
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Calvin Coolidge
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Many great people agree: you are what you think (so be careful to choose constructive and creative thoughts).
Many people believe that their intellectual ability is hard-wired from birth, and that failure to meet a learning challenge is an indictment of their native ability. But every time you learn something new, you change the brain -- the residue of your experiences is stored. It's true that we start life with the gift of our genes, but it's also true that we become capable through the learning and development of mental models that enable us to reason, solve, and create. In other words, the elements that shape your intellectual abilities lie to a surprising extent within your own control. Understanding that this is so enables you to see failure as a badge of effort and a source of useful information -- the need to dig deeper or to try a different strategy. The need to understand that when learning is hard, you're doing important work.
-Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
The learning from interleaved practice feels slower than learning from massed practice. Teachers and students sense the difference. They can see that their grasp of each element is coming more slowly, and the compensating long-term advantage is not apparent to them. As a result, interleaving is unpopular and seldom used. Teachers dislike it because it feels sluggish. Students find it confusing: they're just starting to get a handle on new material and don't feel on top of it yet when they are forced to switch. But the research shows unequivocally that mastery and long-term retention are much better if you interleave practice than mass it.
Three concepts from Eric Thomas for success:
Here are some nice quotes borrowed from this site:
The true joy in life is to be a force of fortune instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. George Bernard Shaw
Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter, the quality that medieval theology assigned to God: "he was pure act". Henry Adams, Theodore Rex – Desmond Morris
College is about books. And by the word books, the proposition means this: College is about the best available tools—books, computers, lab equipment—for broadening your mastery of one or more important subjects that will go on deepening your understanding of the world, yourself and the people around you. This will almost certainly be the last time in your life when other people bear the expense of awarding you four years of financially unburdened time. If you use the years primarily for mastering the skills of social life—as though those skills shouldn‘t already have been acquired by the end of middle school—or if you use these years for testing the degree to which your vulnerable brain and body can bear the strains of the alcoholism with which a number of students depart campus, or the sexual excess that can seem so rewarding (to name only two of the lurking maelstroms), then you may ultimately leave this vast table of nutriment as the one more prematurely burnt-out case. Reynolds Price
The difference between one person and another, between the weak and the powerful, the great and the insignificant, is energy - invisible determination… This quality will do anything that has to be done in the world, and no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities will make you a great person without it. Thomas Buxton – Philanthropist
What an extraordinary place of liberties the West really is… exempt from many of the relentless physical and social obligations necessary for a traditional life for survival, they become spoiled and fragile like over-bred dogs; neurotic and prone to a host of emotional crises elsewhere. Jason Elliot An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan
…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one‘s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one‘s own way. And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance… in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person (you are is) the result of an inner decision… therefore, any man can… decide… that (this) last inner freedom cannot be lost. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Class is the graceful way you treat someone even when they can do nothing for you. Doug Smith
No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… any man‘s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. John Donne, For Whom the Bell Tolls
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity – even under the most difficult circumstances – to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Teddy Roosevelt
Not long ago, to "believe in yourself" meant taking a principled, and often lonely, stand when it appeared difficult or dangerous to do so. Now it means accepting one‘s own desires and inclinations, whatever they may be, and taking whatever steps that may be necessary to advance them. William Damon, Greater Expectations
Finally there is the question of whether we have a duty to feel grateful. Hundreds of generations who came before us lived dire, short lives, in deprivation or hunger, in ignorance or under oppression or during war, and did so partly motivated by the dream that someday there would be men and women who lived long lives in liberty with plenty to eat and without fear of an approaching storm. Suffering through privation, those who came before us accumulated the knowledge that make sour lives favored; fought the battles that made our lives free; physically built much of what we rely on for our prosperity; and, most important, shaped the ideals of liberty. For all the myriad problems of modern society, we now live in the world our forebears would have wished for us —in many ways, a better place than they dared imagine. For us not to feel grateful is treacherous selfishness. Failing to feel grateful to those who came before is such a corrosive notion, it must account at some level for part of our bad feelings about the present. The solution -a rebirth of thankfulness- is in our self-interest Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox
This poem picks me up if I start to lose hope:
