Friday, July 22nd, 2005

Time	Event
10:34p	Go to this web site! Hey, everyone! I think that I've acquiesed to the fact that I'm going to be one of those occassional bloggers. I just can't motivate myself to blog that often. But, I do have a great website that everyone should to, on the Misunderstood Minds website. Go to the sitemap at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/misunderstoodminds/sitemap.html Then, click on the "Experience Firsthand" links for Attention, Reading Writing, and Mathematics. They have a really good Learning Disability simulator. I think this site gives a really good idea of what it means to have a "Learning Disability" because I get asked about that a lot. I didn't understand it very well myself before I began graduate school. I think that a main lesson to learn from the site is that having a learning disability or an attention disorder is much more frustrating for the student than it is for the teacher. How tempting was it to just stop paying attention and trying during the few minutes that you had a "learning disability" on the website. While teachers should always have consistent and firm discipline methods, I find it easier now to understand all of the behavior issues that tend to go along with LD classes. Check it out! Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: Cheesy 80s (Comment on this)
10:44p	Can you "steal" an idea? I've had this random thought progression over the past few days about the value of an idea. It stemmed from me thinking about my fiction writing class and how sometimes I have a "great idea" for a story, but then I can't make a great story about it because my writing isn't good enough. Then I started thinking about the phrase "He stole my idea!" and how it really doesn't have much validity to it. Take a few "ideas": A series of books about a magical school for wizards, a bulb that can produce light without fire, the theory of relativity, hybrid cars, putting a man on the moon. Are these ideas worth anything by themselves? I just thought of an idea that we should invent a medication that can cure AIDS and cancer and cystic fibrosis at the same time. That doesn't mean I can do anything with it! The only real "ideas" that I can think of that are worth something on their own are catchy slogans, and even those need to go along with a catchy marketing campaign. I think the real motive behind claiming someone "stole" your idea is that you couldn't do anything with it and somebody else did a much better job with it. I would probably feel upset if someone took one of my story plots and wrote a kick-ass story when I only wrote a mediocre one. But if I had the skills to write the better story in the first place, then it wouldn't matter if someone "stole my idea." Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: More 80s (5 Comments | Comment on this)

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