Mr Hammerlund

The beginning of the festival in a gym - this would be backed before long A lady at my tennis school lives in the neighborhood. A few weeks ago I heard that she was in charge of setting things up for the neighborhood festival, and since I am interested in volunteering more, I told my wife that I want to get involved somehow. Today was the day of the festival, so my wife called the lady and said I am interested in helping out and she said I should show up at 3:30. I got there and went to my area's booth (the cotton candy and popcorn booth)  at 2:30 just in case there was anything I could help out with, but they said there wasn't anything and to come back at 3:30. When I came back (on time this time) I talked to a guy at our booth who looked like he was in charge. He showed me around and had me practice making cotton candy a few times. Making cotton candy is harder than it looks. I bombed both times I tried and the guy asked me if I would rather help get the cups of sugar ...

I have seen the term "teacher entrepreneurs" around on the Internet, but I never looked into what it meant assuming it was referring to teachers who make extra selling lessons or possibly those who facilitate teacher training. Today I was listening to The Harvard Business Review's podcast (ideacast) and they had two authors on the show who wrote an article for hbr.org called, Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact . This article is all about how the landscape of business has changed and how the relationship between employee and employer has entered a mutually-beneficial compact where the employee goes to work and builds their own skill set while helping the company prosper. In this scenario, it is expected that employees are "free-agents" and will leave for a better job and the employer should encourage it to maintain flexibility. While I was reading this I could not help thinking of how similar this is to the international school culture. Afte...

I started playing tennis a few years ago. It came about as a perfect storm of influences came together at the same time: my wife was playing, we wanted something to do together, and my futsal club fizzled. (I really wanted to continue playing futsal.) So I started taking tennis lessons on Saturdays. I did this for a while and I saw mild improvement in my game. I switched tennis schools last fall and happened to be put into a class where I was the only student. This allowed for not only personalized instruction, but I also got to play against the coach. Side note: For some reason three of three tennis schools I have been to do not have beginners play games. A topic for another blog post is how playing games shows the students why the coaches have the students play a certain way. Without playing the game, the drills and instruction have no meaning. Once you play a game, you can see why the coaches have you do certain things. Playing against him was a lot of fun and helped me s...