A lucky 7-Up bottle in Yunyang, China. In the classroom and on my websites, we experiment to find the lucky (and often elusive) combination of factors to go UP-ward in performance.
“I’ve been trying so many things to get my students quiet so I can teach!” exclaimed a Boston-area fellow teacher, Carl, yesterday. “I tried yelling for attention all last year. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.”
I nodded, having been there myself. Carl continued. “This month I’m experimenting with just stopping and staring at kids who begin side conversations. I’ll just wait, and LOOK at them. Sometimes I’ll even murmur quietly:
“Hey, I wonder how long it will take for them to notice I am trying to teach? Hmm… I see some great students starting to pay attention…. Excellent, now everyone is focused again.”
What "experiments" were performed before the food artists in Yunyang came up with this optimally hilarious packaging? (Yes, these photos are barely related to the topic of the article, but I dig them.)
“That worked so-so, but what I loved is we all ended up less exhausted than when I was screaming.”
“You know what tactic I enjoy?” I giggled. “I just keep stopping a sentence and re-starting it over and over until students realize you need them silent. It’s deliciously annoying, and really effective!”
“I think I’ll experiment this week with snapping and clapping routines to get the kids quiet,” exclaimed Carl. “You know: “If you can hear me, clap once!””
All this experimenting is adding new tools to our Teacher Toolkit, I mused. We tinker and try different tactics in the classroom until we land upon the specific combination of Classroom Management strategies that works perfectly for us.”
Then a light bulb went off in my head. “HEY!” I exclaimed, “Experimenting with Classroom Management in teaching is exactly like what’s going on with me and my websites now as a Blogger!”
Yum... Mungbean yogurt in Yunyang, China. Is that the perfect combination of ingredient settings to make your belly happy?
“Huh?” queried my friend, perplexed.
You see, if anyone were to have been spying on me since the March 4 Dreamhost webserver crash, they would have seen me hunched over my computer for hours upon hours each day, desperately trying to find the right combination of Plugins, Server Settings, Cloudflare Options, CDNs, W3 Total Cache buttons, and more to make my two websites race at the speed I long them to achieve.
And the quest continues. Which magical combination of settings will finally get rid of the error messages and sluggishness that have been driving me batty since March 4?
Website Speed Optimization is fascinating, infuriating, and infatuating.
I can’t stop working on it or obsessing about it, and I don’t want to. For those of you who don’t know how Site Optimization works, you have NO IDEA what an insane, deep, dark world it is… and that’s why I like it.
Are cucumber-flavored potato chips the perfect combo?
Each night I have been poring over dense online tutorials, changing this setting, downloading that one, running speed tests, and exchanging countless emails with tech support gurus.
Here’s an example of the instructions on just ONE of the countless settings I’ve been toying with:
“Select manual mode to use fields on the minify settings tab to specify files to be minified, otherwise files will be minified automatically, but will not use the CDN.”
So what do you think? Should I switch it on or off? 
It is rare to find such a complex, engaging puzzle in life… unless you’re a Teacher!
Finding the perfect combination of “tools” and “settings” to optimize Classroom Management as a Teacher, or Website Speed as a Blogger: these are two quests to challenge the brain and the soul!
So… Optimization: that’s what I’ve been up to with my time. That and planning a wedding, among a few other things that keep me busy!
Not sure what this is. Hopefully not penguin. There's another puzzle for the brain: Mystery food in a country whose language you can't read!
I’d love to hear in the Comments section if you have any experience and tips for either Classroom Management or Website Optimization, and if you have any feedback on the ever-evolving layout and speed of my sites!
As of 3/20/12, I’ve worked out a bunch of bugs on both of my sites, so the speed should be medium-paced, but it’s still much slower than what I’m working towards, so stay tuned.
May we use our brains to the maximum, and solve whatever we strive hard enough to puzzle out!
Want to see a bunch more articles about Blogging and Technology? Click here!
Did anyone read the article or was that just me? Everyone is chatting the pictures. Do yanks really call yoghurt yogert??? Anyway loved the article. I like finger clicking to get kids to be silent. Click out a tune. Or if one pupil is being particularly bothersome you can get them to hold your hand at the front of class. They don’t like that at all.
As for website optimisation I couldn’t tell you much about that so I’ll have to take your word on it!
George, bless you for reading instead of just skimming photos!
Love your classroom management tips.
Ms. Marshall, the second picture is sausage. ^.^ Also the last picture is also sausage based on China’s “Facebook”, QQ. The second picture are pork sausages and the last picture is flavored with pepper.
I would like to try some of those candies. Long time ago, they used to sell them with a plastic bag but now they put it in a bag with designs on it. How much does a candy cost or chips?
In general, food costs less in China than in the U.S.
Ms. Marshall, I find it really cool that everything is in Chinese words. How did you know what each was? Going to China must have been fun.
You can often infer what a food is from the pictures… But it doesn’t always work!
Great post. I liked the different ideas on how to engage students in the beginning. Very helpful. Keep up the great work! We love Boston teachers.
Thanks, Mark!
The food in China is so unique, but it must taste great. Unique can mean better. I wonder what kinds of candy they have. I hope their candy taste good. I might want to try some of these products if I ever go to China.
They even have 7up and Lays, but they look so different. I never seen those covers before, but they look great on these products.
Their drinks and food covers look totally different from ours even though it’s the same brand!
See those photos reminded me of something. The supermarkets and trains look way better than the ones we have here in the U.S, no offense but its kind of true. Oh yeah it says “yoghurt” on the yogert.
I find that all these pictures are funny. When I went to China, I thought China was just copying America. But there are similar things that taste just a well. It seems legit.
Also the cucumber flavored Lays does not taste good. Trust me!
The bag of Meat! Meat! looks like the pig is happy being in a bag and eaten by humans.
I like how you added cucumber flavored chips. I wonder if it taste good or bad.
I’m not sure because I didn’t try them. Next time!
The way you handle your class already is neat and, organized.
Lol random pictures!!
I like how the pictures were like really random because the article was on a whole different subject.
Lol, true.
I just really wanted to use them somewhere, and you can see by the captions that I triiiiiied to link them!!!
Eww , cucumber flavored Lays! I wonder if that tastes good?
Ahhh– Case in point of how annoying/complex this website optimization thing is: I installed some new features to speed up image loading of this site, but if you click Facebook Share now, the resulting excerpt includes the ugly html and doesn’t use the lead photo. You add something to fix one thing, and it does– but breaks something in a different area! More on this here: http://www.aroundtheworldl.com/2010/05/14/how-a-wordpress-warning-relates-to-life/