A regular habit
I shower at least once a day. Normally once is enough, but if I’ve been out getting some exercise, such as walking to work and back, it’s good to jump into a hot shower to wash off the sweat and generally freshen up. I don’t usually shower immediately after getting up, preferring to wait until I’ve finished my morning coffee and news routine, or sometimes even later. I usually have my daily shower an hour or so before I have to work or go out, for example to meet friends for lunch. If I don’t have work or any other appointments, I might not shower until late in the afternoon.
Even though Bangkok has warm weather, which is one of the things I love about it, I like my showers hot. My usual practice is to set the air conditioner to 20C, which makes my home pleasantly cool; in fact, my guests sometimes complain that it’s cold. But when I lived in Australia, a hot shower in cold weather was a joy, and spending 15 or even 20 minutes under hot, steaming water warms me up, makes me feel clean, and it’s refreshing to then step from the sauna-like bathroom back into my pleasantly cool room. After cooling down again, I then set the air conditioning to a more sensible temperature, or turn it off for a while.
And like walking the well-known route to work, showering lets my mind wander. I often have great ideas when I’m standing under the hot water streaming down as I brush my teeth, scrub away at my skin, or just enjoy the meaningless sound of the water gushing as it washes over me. Ideas for my lesson plans, for projects, or a better way to write down an idea often pop into my head while it’s under the warm, soothing water.
This 308-word piece of writing took me 18:00 minutes planning + 17:00 minutes writing + editing = 35 minutes total. As examples, you can see both my planning (18 minutes) and my prepublication Google Doc (17:00 minutes). Remember: an important purpose here is to introduce ourselves.
Getting my news
My day always starts at 7:00 with morning coffee and checking the news. After starting the coffee, I turn on my computer and then sit down to read the news for an hour or two. My morning routine has been very settled for many years.
As I sip my coffee, I read the Bangkok Post first. This doesn’t usually take long. I scan the front page for interesting stories about Thailand, and have a look at the opinion section. I like a couple of Post’s opinion writers, although I also regularly read their essays on current topics by columnists I more or less strongly disagree with. It’s good to get an opposing perspective on topical issues that people are discussing, especially local political questions.
For international and other news, I next go to the BBC, where I again browse quickly for articles that catch my attention. This can include articles about Australia, but more often I read world news stories or articles from the technology and science sections. The BBC is good because the articles are generally not very long. After 15 or 20 minutes on the BBC, I look at The Sydney Morning Herald, which gives excellent coverage of Australian news, which I like to follow. Finally, I open The New York Times (NYT), which for many years has been my main general news source. I spend up to an hour on the NYT most days. They cover pretty much everything every day, from global business and politics, to cooking, book reviews, and science, and I often enjoy articles from those and other sections. And as with the Bangkok Post, I enjoy the essays from the regular columnists and guest writers in the opinion section, which often includes original pieces from academics whose work I follow.
Apart from my regular morning routine, I also read a few magazines every week; these are The Economist and New Scientist, which covers science news extremely well from geology to mathematics.
TV? The last time I watched TV news was about 40 years ago. Facebook? Facebook is useful because it knows my interests well, and shows me articles from my regular news sources publications that I might have missed.
Although this is still over the 300 word limit, it's much shorter now that I've revised it to cut a lot. The first draft was over 400 words, which was definitely too long. As I suspected, when I did my planning, I had far more ideas than I could possibly fit into the allowed word limit, so had to leave out a lot, and then cut more when I edited.
Regarding my regular habit of enjoying a long, hot shower, yesterday I got an idea to revise the presentation for my EAP classes for this week (or possibly next week) when we cover the page in Skillful that introduces the Harvard system for citing sources. It meant deleting the slide I had already prepared and replacing it with three new ones, but I think the new approach will prove more useful in clarifying the reasoning behind this system of citing sources in our work.
ReplyDeleteAnother example is from my shower today, when it occurred to me that I could greatly simplify the way my students create their own blog posts. Unfortunately, this idea involved a lot more work: in addition to editing the underlying blog template, I had to go through some work already prepared in Google Docs and Classroom and substantially revise it. I hope it works as I hope. We'll find out in the coming days. Making the tools easier for students is a good thing; it allows us to focus on the ideas and language.