A Couple Of Interesting Bits

 Been a long time coming, but I ran into a couple of videos recently that I thought would be interesting.

First this one with a reminder that what you make doesn't have to be awesome, it just needs to exist.

Second, and a bit longer, but totally worth it is this one about allowing yourself to be bored.

Yes, both of these would take half an hour of your time, but I think it's worth it for students to see them - even if it isn't directly about drawing and painting. In the end I would suggest it's pretty good life advice.

Are You Overdoing It?

I just finished THIS ARTICLE from 99u (a great platform from Behance...which is from Adobe - right in our back yard) about the necessary aspects of breaks during the day.
This is more about "adult life work", but I think it applies to you students as well.

If you are go go going all day between classes and practice and work and homework and chores and messaging your friends and social media, well, it is just too much. Where is the balance?

I am guilty of this. Our machines make it way to easy to constantly be connected, and there is always - it seems - so much to do. For example, I've been doing work here at my laptop for the last 25 minutes and couldn't it wait? I worked all the way through last Friday at lunch, but did I need to?
I feel like I did. There was a lot of work to do. But is that going to yield nothing but negative results by the middle of the afternoon?

It reminds me of all the parents and school board members that have voiced feelings of concern and frustration that you students have a 40 minute tutorial in the middle of the school day when "you should be in class", but science just doesn't back that up.
At all.

Which leads to my next points...

At any rate, this sort of couples with what I listened to at Stanford on Friday night. There was another Challenge Success event and the keynote speaker has some interesting research to share.

Teens spend, on average, NINE HOURS on their devices for non-academic purposes each day. See, that 30 seconds or 2 minutes adds up over time.
The other big thing that stood out to me was that the part of our brain that is needed for studying and learning is the same part of our brain that is engaged when we have a screen in front of us.

What this means is that we think we might be zoning out and relaxing by checking a Snapchat Story, or watching Netflix, or scrolling through Instagram, but we aren't. Ultimately we are just adding to the exhausted and fatigue that we get from doing homework and being in class.

Interesting, huh?