Economics Gangnam Style

What ?? You don't know what Gangnam Style is ? It is the K-Pop (Korean Pop) sensation that has taken the world by storm. It  is No 2 on the UK and US pop charts, watched on You Tube some 400 million times . Everybody , it seems, wants to prance like a horse . Even the West Indies team, on winning the T20 World Cup, gave an energetic rendition of Gangnam Style (note the absence of the word cricket in this sentence !). Well, if you haven't heard of the original before, you can add to the 400m+ views by watching it here - beware, you have to practice prancing like a horse while doing so.

This blogger is seriously musically challenged and has no qualifications to write a music post - that being the domain of experts like Suja.  Or like another esteemed reader of this blog who runs his own radio station. Instead he shall demonstrate his "hipness" by linking economics to Gangnam Style !

HTC (a Taiwanese company) just declared its quarter's results announcing a 80% drop in profits. At the same time Samsung (a Korean company) announced a 85% rise in profits. You see its all got to do with Gangnam Style coolness. Galaxy S3 is cool, HTC Desire isn't. Five years ago, you wouldn't dream of owning a Hyundai car. Today, its quite OK to park your Equus next to a Japanese or German equivalent and not be subjected to hoots of derision. Or consider Amore Pacific an increasingly successful cosmetics company - after all if South Korean girls can look so young and pretty, there must be something in the cosmetics they use ! South Korea is just not ships or steel anymore. Brand South Korea is going places - Gangnam style.

The country which has the biggest lessons to learn is China. China desperately wants to be loved and is nonplussed when nobody seems to love it. It would dearly love to export "soft power" in addition to its undoubted "hard power". But it tries to do that by pouring money into CCTV globally- now it must take a seriously self flagellating masochist to watch CCTV for more than 1 minute. It shoots itself in the foot by going after anybody who said hello to the Dalai Lama. It threatens war over a few rocks in the middle of the sea. It stands no chance of global embrace by doing such things. It only results in Huawei not being allowed to sell much in the US. Nobody is going to proudly claim to own a Haier washing machine or even a Lenovo laptop. Instead it should unleash the creative forces of its wonderful people. Make them prance like a horse. Or if they like, maybe waddle like a panda. Preferably Gangnam style !

The Business October 10th 2012, The "SUPER BURRITO" Edition

The San Francisco Comedy and Burrito Festival is NOW! We plan to spend the weekend celebrating our two favorite things to indulge in late at night in the dark, COMEDY AND BURRITOS. This week, The Business has wrapped up some of the best guests of the fest into a super warm, spicy, delicious comedy experience.
 

From Seattle, Wash., Barbara Holm has performed at the San Francisco Sketchfest, the Bridgetown Comedy Festival, Bumbershoot Arts festival, and the Women in Comedy Festival in Boston. Her comedy has been described as clever, unique, idiosyncratic, and exuberant. Seattle City Arts Magazine called her a “comedy wizard.” The Bay Area’s Spinning Platters says, “She’s noted for her wit, one-liners and off-center humor.” Seattle Stranger newspaper described her as an “adorable wunderkind” and Barbara describes herself as “running away from this question to hide under the desk right now.”

Andy Haynes was raised on salmon and caffeine, in the shadows of Mt. Rainier in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. He now lives in Los Angeles, where he is a comedian, though he looks like he should be skippering a sailing regatta. With performances on Conan, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and the New Faces showcase at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival, Andy is becoming a must see performer.

 

George Peyton Gordon III (yes that is his real name) is a comedian from Dale City, VA, (or as he likes to call it, the great state of Virginia). He currently lives in New York City where you can see his stand-up almost every night, then argue with him about things like which is the better Weezer album—Pinkerton or Blue (definitely Pinkerton)—or why Alien is better than Aliens (because it just is). He has been in the New York Underground Festival, The Bridgetown Comedy Festival in Portland, OR, The Out of Bounds Comedy Festival in Austin, TX and his writing has been included in the blog Rock Bottom. (Read it.) He has an unhealthy obsession with using parentheses.

For 3 years and counting, Alice “Pretty-in-a-Not-Shitty-Way” Wetterlund has performed her non-yelling brand of comedy all over, at such clubs as Comix and Broadway Comedy Club, UCBNY and San Francisco’s Punchline, and on such critically-acclaimed shows as College Humor Live, Big Terrific, and Tigerlily, as well as at Bridgetown and Women in Comedy Festivals. She’s appeared in numerous sketches for shows like “Meatsteak is Dead” at Webster Hall, “Mad Men Jumps the Shark” for Landline TV, and the web series “It Gets Betterish” from Eliot Glazer and Brent Sullivan. She’s also starred in TV commercials for AT&T, Budweiser, BMW and Maxwell House, because she’s a real artist! She’s written for Slate Magazine and Night Of The Living with Kurth Braunholer, and the rest of the time she was caring for her special-needs cat, Sparkles (R.I.P.)
We miss you, Sparkles.

As always, it’s a $5 show, and you can bring a friend for FREE!!! if you bring one of our 2-for-1 coupons. That’s $5 more you have to spend on burritos.

The Business has always been BYOBurrito, but this time, WE MEAN IT. BRING BURRITOS. EAT DELICIOUS BURRITOS AND WATCH COMEDY. YOLO BITCHES.

Election Day Freebie

Election Day is sneaking up fast!  I always enjoyed election time in my classroom.  Students hear their parents talking about it, they can't escape from it being all over the television, so they are naturally curious about it.  What a better time to teach them how the democratic process works.  Whatever the grade level, you can adapt election type activities to fit the needs of your classroom.  Host a mock election, complete with registration cards.  Do some research on the candidates with your older students.  Tie in some quality literature to enhance your election studies. Check out some of my favorites: (Duck for President by Doreen Cronin, Election Day by Lynn Peppas, See How They Run by Susan E. Goodman, Vote! by Eileen Christelow, Letters from the Campaign Trail: LaRue for Mayor by Mark Teague, President of the Whole Fifth Grade by Sherri Winston, If I Ran for President by Catherine Stier)  If your school is a voting site, request one of the workers on their break to come speak to your class about the process.  They may even allow your class to come do a quick tour of the voting machines.  My class was invited to do this during a local election last year and my students were fascinated by the curtains more than anything else.  :-) During our mock classroom election we had to build a privacy area so they could vote in private!   Whatever you decide to do, have FUN and make it meaningful.  After all, we're blessed to live in a democratic society where we the people, have a voice!  Students need to learn this at an early age so they will not be afraid of the process as adults. 
 
Here's an Election Day Fun Freebie for you to get you started!  :-)  Click on the image to grab it!  

Bananas for my freedom and always thankful for those who serve to protect it,

Steve Jobs – Perhaps Apple Could Have Done Without Him

“Steve Jobs – the man was fallible” is what I wrote in October 2011. I guess it seems pretty innocent now – although there may some remnants of people who still feel offended by it – but, believe it or not, one year ago it actually triggered a small barrage of hate mail.

Since then, I have read or heard others describe him as a terrorist, an asshole, and a psychopath (which, given that many US presidents have been shown to have had psychopathic tendencies may not even be unlikely). Hey, all I said was that he was “fallible”!

But all these people, in the wake of calling him a terrorist, an asshole, or a psychopath, without exception, also described him as a genius. And a person who built the greatest company on earth, changing all of our daily lives in the process.

But, in fact, I am not so sure of that either…

I don’t mean this as some lame attempt at a final insult – suggesting that he wasn’t even responsible for building this great company – but as a genuine question: Would Apple have been equally great today if it hadn’t been for Steve Jobs? And, honestly, I think that is not impossible. And that is because I am a Tolstoy fan.

Tolstoy, in War and Peace, using Napoleon as an example, had a very clear opinion of leadership. A leader “is just a banner, they hold aloft in the wind”. “Napoleon thinks he commands a 100,000 men, but in reality, he follows them”. Tolstoy thought that what drove the French into Russia was not the act of a single man – Napoleon – but the result of much greater, collective human forces. Those forces needed a spearhead, and that became Napoleon. But if it hadn’t been him, someone else would have emerged to follow those forces as their leader. Because “The course of earthly happenings … depends on the combined volition of all who participate in those events, and … the influence of a Napoleon on the course of those events is purely superficial and imaginary”.

Would Apple have become great without Steve Jobs, or would someone else have surfaced to spearhead and personify the combined volition of the people working in that area in that company at that point time? I think the answer might be yes.

But who knows? And I know I will never know. But I also know that pretty much every person who reads this piece thinks he or she knows that the answer is “no”. “No, Apple would never have been this great without Steve Jobs”. And nothing will ever change that. Because what Steve Jobs has going on Napoleon, is that he is dead. Or better, that he died before Apple’s demise. Napoleon lived to see his armies defeated by the Russians, and by the forces commanded by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. People started to realize he wasn’t such a superhuman genius as they once thought he was.

When Apple’s performance will start to plunge (and I mean “when” and not “if”) the Great Man Steve will not be there to blame.

And of course Apple will, one day, start to underperform. One day, it will be outcompeted by its rivals, and even lose their shareholders’ money in the process (if alone for the simple reason that if it continues its current growth rate for another decade it will be more valuable than the rest of planet Earth combined, eyeing up dominance of the solar system next). It will fall. But then people will simply say that it wouldn’t have happened had Steve Jobs still been around. Because he’s their banner; their banner they hold aloft in the wind.

Stooping to conquer

I am getting tempted to write political posts, despite all my resolutions to stay away from that area. The culprit is my good friend Sriram who continuously tempts me in that direction with incisive writing in his excellent blog. We then debate and counter debate on email !!

So made a guest post there - taking the crazy liberty of  writing a letter to the President of the United States !

Interactive Notebooking

Interactive Notebooks...Who has started?  Whose district has required it?  Or who is doing them on their own?  Why the surge of interactive notebooking for students?  From what I've read, research shows it fosters creativity, organization, and independent thinking.  Who doesn't want that for their students?  I personally like them because they serve as great review tools, they are of high interest to my students, and students take total ownership in their learning!  Let's face it, some topics don't lend themselves to "hands on" learning.  Interactive notebooks ARE hands on no matter what topic you're teaching.  What they are NOT, is students listening to a lecture and taking notes (insert high school and college flashbacks here).  They're called interactive for a reason, right?  Students are DOING.  So what are they doing?  They are cutting, bending, folding, coloring, drawing, labeling, creating, writing to explain, and quite simply "showing what they know." It goes without saying that if your students can explain it, they KNOW it!  My students have been "notebooking" for 3 years now.  They WE get a little better each year.  I also try to tackle a little more each year.  I started with ONE Social Studies unit my first year.  (Geography)  The following year I added another S.S. unit. (Government)  This past year I added Economics and am now full throttle with math notebooking. (addition/subtraction, numeracy, money, multiplication, division, fractions, geometry, etc.)  They are available as individual units or cheaper all bundled up.  I'm still creating and adding!


 The few things that stand out about notebooking with my kids is 1.) They love it!   2.)  They have no choice but to be organized!   3.)  Their parents love it because their child IS organized and has access to all of their notes in ONE place.  4.) They are retaining the information better!  (Test scores are climbing!)  5.)  It has helped ME get organized AND more excited about teaching some topics that could normally be considered "boring" or "difficult" to teach.
I'd love to say there was some magic road map that helped me start at point A with interactive notebooks, but there wasn't.  A lot of it was trial and error (and continues to be a work in progress)!! But I would say that the place to start is the curriculum.
A.  Know what you're responsible for teaching and teach it in a way that your students can respond to it!
B.  Get familiar with foldables!  There's nothing MORE FUN than folding paper in a variety of ways to motivate your students into getting information down!
C.  Let go!  You'll be amazed at how creative your students will be if you let them.  TRUE STORY:  I was using the Government interactive notebook template that I created with my students and there's a picture of an old scroll in there.  Students were to cut it out and glue it in their notebooks and add some of the rights we as American citizens have in our country.  I was monitoring their progress when I noticed a student wadding his scroll up.  My first thought was "That little STINKER..." (and I won't go any further with that).  When I asked him what he was doing, he informed me that he was making his scroll look OLD (like the REAL Bill of Rights image we had just seen).  Not only that, but when he was finished making it look 'old,' he wrote some of the rights he had learned, rolled it up to look like a real scroll, and asked me for a piece of ribbon so he could tie it like a real scroll.  :-) He wanted to "QUIZ" his parents about some of our American rights and let them unroll the scroll when he got home in his notebook to see if they were right.

Need some additional interactive notebook ideas?  Try this INB LINKY!   What have you tried?  Success stories you'd like to share?  We'd love to hear! 






NEW to the Interactive Notebooking Party....GRAMMAR GATORS!  Learning about the parts of speech is full of some Super Hero fun!  

Bananas for writing to explain, so you can truly tell "THEY'VE GOT IT!"

The Business October 3rd 2012, The "Cool Hand Joe" Edition

Though The Business does not endorse any criminal act, we definitely endorse badass stories about robbing banks.

The truly thrilling part about Joe Loya’s story is his own transformation, but along the way… he robs banks. ROBS BANKS. I mean, we’ve all thought about it if we get into a bank line too soon after seeing Point Break, but this guy DID IT. A BUNCH. It’s a pleasure to welcome him to The Business.

Joe’s essays and book reviews have been published in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, UTNE Reader, Washington Post and other national newspapers and magazines. In 2002 he wrote and performed his one-man show, The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell, at the Thick House in San Francisco. He has appeared on CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, FOX’s O’Relly Factor, and other TV shows to comment on cultural events. In 2007 the documentary Protagonist featured the story of his radical life change. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed memoir The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell: Confessions of a Bank Robber (the New Yorker called it “…genuinely thrilling…”). He regularly speaks at universities, conferences, and to business groups, to talk about the creative power we can unleash in our lives when we own our story. In 2009, with national award-winning editor and writer Kerry Tremain, he co-founded Own Your Story to help folks find illumination and change in their lives through the transformative power of writing one’s life story.

We are also pleased to have friend of The Business, Kevin O’Shea joining us this week.

Kevin O’Shea is a comedian. He is large and covered in hair. He no longer wears glasses. He has been described as dark, dry, sharp, oaky and full of tannins. He might have read that off a bottle of wine. He has been featured on IFC and Comedycentral.com. He has appeared at the 2010 & 2011 SF Sketchfest and the 2010 Bridgetown Comedy Festival.

We SELL OUT! So if you want a seat, make sure you’re there before 8. BYOBurrito and remember, mild salsa is for sissies.