Ladies First

So, here's the scoop on my conference:

PEAK stands for Performance Excellence for All Kids. Basically, it is a teaching philosophy based on sports practices with the main point being "Our Kids Are Worth Whatever It Takes."

The idea is that when you are preparing for a sport, you keep drilling the fundamentals at every practice and then maybe learn something new and then apply it to those fundamentals. For example, at some point in my baseball career, I learned how to catch and throw. Now, once I got good enough at these skills to be successful, I didn't immediately move on to hitting and never throw or catch again. Instead, we played catch each and every day, revisiting these skills over and over while adding new things, like catching fly balls, or learning to throw with a crow's hop.

Therefore, when kids succeed at new information/topics/skills, we shouldn't just forget about them when we teach, but revisit them constantly, making them more difficult and higher on the taxonomy of thinking. Things like that.

Basically, I came out of the conference with a new, more effective way to plan my lessons and some great ideas for how to set my room up next year. I'm actually pretty excited to get back to school...for now.

Spring Honorable Mentions were split into Men and Women categories. So, here's the ladies:

1. Rachel Goodrich - Morning Light
2. Rachel Platten - 1,000 Ships
3. You Say France And I Whistle - OMG
4. Young Galaxy - We Have Everything
5. The Naked And Famous - Young Blood
6. Alex Winston - Sister Wife (Star Slinger Remix)
7. The Kills - DNA
8. YACHT - Dystopia
9. Lykke Li - I Follow Rivers
10. Cults - Abducted
11. Blithe Field - Peach, Plum, Pear (Joanna Newsom)
12. The Raveonettes - Forget That You're Young
13. Julia Stone - Catastrophe!
14. My Little Pony - Breakup With Myself
15. Danielle Ate The Sandwich - Two Bedroom Apartment
16. Cassis Orange - Kotzebue
17. Heart-Sick Groans - Man On The Rocks
18. The Submarines - Fire
19. Peter And Kerry - Clothes, Friends, Photos
20. Ham Sandwich - The Naturist
21. Paper Think Walls - NyQuil
22. Larkin Poe - Desert Dream

Zach's Notes
1. Just a catchy number
3. I love their playful banter
5. I can't get past the fuzz. I love it!
6. Ah, Mormons...
8. The only reason this didn't make it's month was because of it's explicit nature. I send out more generic months than Honorables, so it seemed like a safer choice.
9. So sexy.
14. Pretty sure the girl only sings sparingly here, but it seemed like a girlie topic.
16. A city in Western Alaska where my good pal Luke Williamson worked last year.
19. Another song that just seems to have a girlie topic rather than a female singer.

Men and links to come. Time to get out of Vail!