Throwback Thursday: Required My Students to Blog

Once upon a time in the distant past, I was a college instructor. I was entrusted to prepare my students for the real world. I was given the last subject in their syllabus. It was essentially the summary class of their whole course.

Since the students were set to graduate with a degree in organizational communications, I knew they were going to do a lot of writing in their future job. They also needed to quickly understand issues and problems and figure out how best to communicate information and solutions. So, I forced them to blog to train them to assess information, identify important points and communicate it properly.

Blogger friends, c 2008-2009

I remembered what I did because of recent issues of vloggers. What happened was the result of very high emotions. It's nothing new because these things happen everywhere. There was a lot of tsismis in the blogosphere way back, haha. 

Well, what happened this week reminded me why I started blogging in the first place. I've been asking myself why should I continue to blog daily. I've been in a rut the past few weeks and it's been very difficult to write. 

I stopped attending and organizing blogger events before because I felt it wasn't aligned with the purpose of my blog. I blog mainly for myself to chronicle what's going on and what I learn from it. And that's what I wanted my students to learn, to be purposive and to keep learning. 

I did bump into some of my students. A number of them went into digital marketing. It was all still very new when they graduated. They said they went that direction because of me. I loved reading their weekly blog posts and I hope they did learn something from it. 

Give a holler if you were one of my students. I barely made it out of that term alive, haha.

#BeKind #StaySafe

Make February Better

Oh wow, January just flew by! With everything that's happening, January felt more like the end of the year already! Like most people, I had nice plans for this year. Everything was thrown out the window again when the surge happened. I've been stuck at home all month and I don't even remember the last time I stepped outside of our gate. The boys have been doing a good job making sure I'm safe. 

Learning also from what happened last year, I'm just going to play things by ear. Here's what I hope to do to make February a better month:

1. Take care of my health better. Hope to end this on and off slight fever. Took the first step and got a blood test today. I'm running out of meds too, so this means I need to contact and see my doctors here soon.

2. Proceed with things I can control. Need to get things going with developing our home. Since plan A didn't work, we're gearing up to proceed with plan B. This goes also for a couple of requirements that need to be fulfilled like getting my car registered.

3. Accept that I need help to do some things. SOS on the way. It just pains me I can't do the things I want to do.

4. Reduce stress triggers. Much as I love to participate in what's happening now, it's just stressing me out and that's affected my health. 

5. Find other happy things to do! Or at least make what I'm doing now work better, i.e. move my sprouts to a place where they can get more sun. 

6. Sleep earlier, wake up earlier. I haven't been able to resolve this and my Mom told me it's been almost 3 months now since I got home. Hope to fix this soon. 

7. Eat better, exercise more. Fitbit told me I get more deep sleep when I do more than 2k steps per day. I'll start there. 

Keeping the list short for now. Better to just target things I can really work on for now so I don't get overwhelmed. 

Things will get better :)

And here's a summary of January :)

#BeKind #StayHome