Thoughtworthy (Recommendations Edition)

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This month in

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Podcast episode of the week:

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This week’s links collection:

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Answering your questions:

First recommendation: the What Have You podcast. For reasons:

1. Loads of truth about Christian motherhood,
2. With a *good attitude* about reality and
3. Copious amounts of laughter.

Look, Scholé Sisters gets a lot of flack about the laughing, but we’ve got nothing on these two, so if you want more laughing while we’re on break, go here and get wise and jolly all at once.

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Second recommendation: get 5,000 steps by noon. I already said this on Instagram, so maybe you’ve already heard this obvious wisdom of mine. The day, you see, has two halves. If I don’t get 5,000 steps the first half of the day, it’s almost impossible to get 10,000 by the end of the day, especially since I don’t want to spend hours of my afternoon walking when I have Things To Do.

The photo, by the way, was taken a little after 10:00 PM on Wednesday night. I didn’t quite hit 10,000, but I was close enough to pat myself on the back. This is a mechanical pedometer. I had a FitBit for years, and it was very nice, but when mine died, I chose a non-EMF device because my husband said my arm was going to fall off from all that Bluetooth.

Ha.

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Third recommendation: get steps while homeschooling. This sounds like the same advice as my second recommendation, but it’s a little different. When the weather is fine, I will read aloud to my youngest and then we will walk together around the backyard while he narrates. Yesterday, I would give math instructions to my daughter, do a lap in the house, and return to see how she was doing. I got hundreds of steps doing this, and returning to her again and again meant she felt like I was still available if she needed me.

I have been known to hop on the treadmill to receive narrations when I’m feeling especially desperate.

How do you stay active during the homeschool day?

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Fourth recommendation: subscribe to AfterCast! Ha. A new episode came out yesterday, so it’s on my mind. But seriously: next week we’re interrupting the series with a great one-hour discussion I had with Brittney McGann. Subscribe in your favorite podcast player so you don’t miss it!

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This month in 2018:

This approach is still working well for us (grade 11). This year, our focus is on learning to write an essay, so we’re slowly working our way through The Lively Art of Writing, applying the ideas as we go. The book has been so handy. When my oldest had an 8-10 page paper due for a class he was taking, we used it to help him write the paper, yes, but also to go back through and help him edit as well.

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Recommended Reading Assignments:

• Decluttering And Simplifying Your Way To Hell from CiRCE Institute
  • We’ve talked about something similar to this on Scholé Sisters — what happens when minimalism transfers from the material realm into the realm of ideas? One bit of pushback we gave came in our Just Add Joy episode.
  • I admit I loved the title of this post.
  • Yes, I still declutter my house.
• FACEBOOK’S ’10 YEAR CHALLENGE’ IS JUST A HARMLESS MEME—RIGHT? from WIRED
  • “Imagine that you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on age-related characteristics and, more specifically, on age progression (e.g., how people are likely to look as they get older). Ideally, you’d want a broad and rigorous dataset with lots of people’s pictures. It would help if you knew they were taken a fixed number of years apart—say, 10 years.”
  • Yep. It’s like when your security question answers are being harvested through memes asking you to share your first pet’s name and your hometown.
• Report: Amazon Ring Gave Employees Unrestricted Access to Footage of Customers’ Homes from Breitbart
  • What could go wrong?
• EXCLUSIVE: In Closed-Door Testimony, Papadopoulos Identified Alleged Spy in Trump Campaign from The Epoch Times
  • This story just keeps spinning more out of control.