Category: Uncategorized

How to be a Great Student: Part Two

Great series of five essays by my brother, the great Kubla. It’s a perfect time of year for a refresher. Read up and pass on to your favorite students.

wrathofkublakhan's avatarThe Profound Bartender

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
Benjamin Franklin

How to be a Great Student: Part Two

Give me five minutes.

This is part of a series, click the tag: Be a Good Student for more.

Showing up five minutes early has so many advantages.

  • It shows that you are ready to be taught and in the class.
  • It shows that you do want to be there; unlike all those late-bees.
  • You can chat with the teacher and find out more about this day’s topic or the teacher.
  • You can meet the other students who are intent on getting a good education. They are who you want in that group project, meet them, learn their names.
  • You can pick the best seat.
  • And so much more.

It is easy to dismiss five minutes and think that it is not important. Five minutes…

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How to be a Great Student: Part One

It’s that time of year, and time for a refresher.

wrathofkublakhan's avatarThe Profound Bartender

“A student of life considers the world a classroom.”
Harvey Mackay

How to be a Great Student: Part One

Get a good seat for the show.

This is part of a series, click the tag: Be a Good Student for more.

In the 1970s, video cameras became available as a tool in the universities. Researchers quickly turned the camera on the classroom.

They found that a teacher teaches the first two rows and the two rows down the middle in a classroom. From the teacher’s point of view, it would look like an inverted T. This is not deliberate, this is human nature when facing a classroom of rows and columns. They naturally give the vast bulk of their attention to these parts of a class.

Teachers know this and try to widen their focus but it is unnatural. It is a hard T to break, I used to pace…

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The Patchwork of Our Potential

Michael Kroth's avatarThe Profound Bartender

“Every day opens and closes like a flower, noiseless, effortless.

Divine peace glows on all the majestic landscape,

Like the silent enthusiastic joy that

sometimes transfigures a noble human face.”

~John Muir, 1988, p. 13

Let’s start with a proposition or two or three. One proposition is this, “At birth, each person is endowed with a bundle of potentialities.” A second proposition is this, “Circumstances may support or hinder the development of each different potentiality one carries.” And a third, “No one reaches their full potential in every one of those.”

Conclusion: No matter how hard we try we will not reach our ‘full potential”.

Therefore, why worry about it?

Our potential is cumulative of many different pieces of who we are. There are so many variegated strips aggregated here, in this pail of personal potentiality:

  • Potential earnings
  • Potential athletic ability
  • Potential to develop knowledge, skills, to learn
  • Potential common…

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Skip All The Dogma

Make me one with everything,” said the Buddhist to the hot dog vendor. (Buddhist humor, I understand. I like my Buddhism with as few of the fixin’s as possible. And that would be a breath of fresh air – in and out.)

Michael Kroth's avatarThe Profound Bartender

Over the last few years I have been exploring contemplation and ever-so-slowly developing an ever more contemplative life, one working toward having a more direct connection with the divine.  Seeking the absolute in that way is what I believe is called “mysticism”. Dogma and belief systems in general have been sticking points for me in the past, and contemplation – daily kenosis, emptying, receptivity, being totally in the present moment – has been a way that has taken me a few steps down the path. So at one point I wrote these lyrics.

Seeking or believing in a direct relationship with the divine, the absolute – God – has gotten a lot of humble, devout people into trouble over the years, and usually with a church or church leaders who thought folks needed to go through them.  But it is true that dogma, certainly ritual, belief systems, professional and called…

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Up At Five

  (This was written circa 2014, while living in our house on Caper here in Boise.) Morning It’s just a few minutes after 5:00 a.m.  Outside on my tiny, barely-holds-two-chairs-and-a-mini-table front porch I breathe in the smell of last night’s rain.  It was just a short spate, just Mother Nature spitting last night, but enough … Continue reading Up At Five →