This post will mostly revolve around a revision of my goals list.  As I feel was made very apparent by Tyler, it is important that we are constantly visiting our goals list in order to stay well organized and make any necessary changes.  Given I am a month into this project, it seems convenient to revise my list in depth at the end of each month.  I feel in advance that it will be important to review the list periodically throughout the weeks in between, however, I think that the easiest time to make important changes to the list would be at the end of each month so that I can review the progress I had made in the previous weeks.

For this post, I have categorized the group of goals that I have had all my focus on for the past month.  They will also be slightly altered to offer a more specific pursuit.I have decided to name this particular group of goals ‘Life Goals.’  It sounds vague, but unfortunately, it was the only thing I can think of for now.  I am calling it ‘Life Goals’ because I feel these are the goals that have the most prominent long term effect on my life and they are also the ones that my life will revolve around in many ways.

Life Goals

1.  Become a Licensed Teacher – I decided to add ‘Licensed’ in there because I realized that, in many ways, I already am a teacher to the extent that each of us is in our own way.  We all have our particular skills and talents, and we all at least attempt to pass our abilities on at some point.  The goal ‘Become a Teacher’ could be crossed off the list immediately.

2. Reform Education – This goal is a pretty ambitious one, however, it is one that I am passionate about.  Right now, the education system in the United States is incredibly flawed.  The two things that strike me as the main flaws with our education system are how we are taught and the cost and availability of education. For the former, think about how we are taught science.  The first science class you will encounter is Biology, followed by Chemistry, and lastly, Physics.  The reason you encounter the subjects in that order is simple:   alphabetical order.  However, as science enthusiasts and scientists know, we should be taught in the reverse order.  To understand and appreciate Chemistry, you must understand Physics.  To understand and appreciate Biology, you must understand Chemistry.

Mathematics is another subject that is taught improperly in the United States educational system.  All throughout elementary school you’re taught basic computations:  addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.  You basically spend grades K (if you go) through 6 learning the same mathematics each year, with any changes being in the size of the numbers you work with.  7th and 8th grades generally focus on Pre-Algebra mathematics, followed by Algebra 1 and 2 in high school, with Geometry/Trig thrown in there occasionally (my school did not even have a Trig class).  However, it would be incredibly beneficial to begin teaching Pre-Algebra skills as soon as possible in elementary school, maybe even as early as 3rd grade, but at least by 5th.  With good teaching, most kids will be more than ready to tackle Pre-Algebra by that time.  This opens up the door to bring Algebra 1 to elementary schools and insuring Algebra 2, Geometry, Trig, Pre-Calculus, and Calculus are taught in high school.  Every high school should teach Algebra and Calculus and everything in between.  Teaching Algebra in elementary school as early as possible opens the door to being taught physics in order to get that fundamental base for understanding higher sciences.

I also think that we need to teach students in high school more about life and how the world really is.  We need to have more teachers who are not afraid to make kids question things, about their subject, about life, about government, etc.  Learning needs to be more involved in the life of an individual, an experience rather than a requirement.  This leads me to my next point.

Teachers teach based on standardized tests.  With the introduction of No Child Left Behind, if your state didn’t require standardized testing for all students, it does now.  The core idea of NCLB is a great idea.  If we could keep kids from ever falling behind and insure every individual is on the same level, that would be great!  Sadly, that is not how learning works.  NCLB generalizes teaching and learning and makes it one dimensional based on the idea that everyone learns in the same way.  It takes all of the personal experience of learning and teaching away.  The reality is, some students need to be taught differently than others.  Not all students are good test takers and not all tests show a good understanding of the subject matter.

To top it off, NCLB allows state boards to decide what should be taught in the classroom.  One red flag here is that it limits the teacher, and any situation where the teacher is limited in respect to being able to teach their subject matter is not a good situation for the students.  State boards, filled with many people who may not even be familiar with the subject of, for instance, Chemistry or English, decide what Chemistry and English teachers must teach.  People who have degrees in political science, paralegals, etc. are the ones out there deciding what educated people should teach young individuals.  This has ruined the United States educational system.

Fortunately, state boards have very limited power when it comes to colleges like community colleges or private institutions.  However, if it is a state college, for instance, from my state, the University of Virginia or Virginia Tech, are controlled the exact same way high schools are controlled with the absence of standardized tests.  People with PhD’s in particular fields are told what to teach by people with Associate’s degrees in being a secretary!  It is ridiculous!  But of course, those college professors are rare to care about this issue because, unfortunately, most of them aren’t at a university to teach, they are there to research their particular field.  That too is a sad problem. (Side note:  for those going to college soon, go to a community college first, it is the smartest decision on education you will make).

And lastly, the cost of all this.  When people making 5 figures a year and more are struggling to put their children through college, you know something is up.  College should be something every individual has the right to.  Philosophically speaking, it should be free, and the federal government should run the institutions.  I feel that way because education and health care should be two fundamental rights the government should provide and protect (but I will not discuss health care here).  It is ridiculous that most students are told to pay $25,000 – $30,000 a year average to go to an institution that controls what you are taught.  Both of those things do nothing but stand in the way of education.

The thing I want to do to change this is raise awareness about it.  Now, when I am a teacher, and however long it takes after that to change things.  I hope the rest of you in the Tribe will spread the word.

Wow, that was quite ranty, I apologize.

3. Read Something Informative Every Day and Review it – This is something I used to do all the time, but lately I have slacked off quite a bit.  I think reading every day, or at least very frequently, is something we should all do.  I have a passion for knowledge and sharing knowledge, and reading allows us to become better learners and better teachers.  I have a shelf full of books I have not finished (or started for some) or that I need to read again.

I really want to do book reviews as well, and I think doing so will give me more motivation to read every day.  With that said, now, any time I finish a book, I will upload a brief review to YouTube to let you all know how it was.  I will also gladly take recommendations/requests.

Reading is a valuable skill that all of us should take advantage of.  Knowledge is something we should all crave and appreciate.  You can never be too smart or too knowledgeable.  As Socrates said, “All I know, is that I know nothing.”

4. Maintain a 4.0 In My First Year of College – College starts for me one week from today.  As of now, I cannot give a lot of detail about how I plan to achieve this goal other than study hard and dedicate myself to reaching it.  I will go into more detail once I adjust to the setting and the workload.

5. Prepare to Move Out With My Gf/Learning Necessary Skills – Moving out will give me responsibility, independence, as well as knowledge in its own way that I could pass on to other people.  I am working on getting into good habits of doing my own laundry, washing dishes regularly, taking care of the yard work, keeping my care in good order, and cleaning my room and areas I use frequently.  That last one has been the hardest so far  I have also been cooking my own meals and planning a budget for myself.  I have been trying to gain my independence by doing everything I possibly can for myself.  Proper budgeting will also allow me to be in the necessary financial state when the time comes, which will hopefully be sometime next summer.

Those are the five goals in this section of my list.  I will be focusing primarily on these goals as they are what I would consider fundamental to my pwning life.

One final note:  After a week of voting, I think it is clear that guitar lessons have won on the What Should I Teach You Guys? poll.  I will probably go ahead and prepare the first video today or tomorrow, so be looking forward to it!

For this week though, I have some plans that will get me closer to my goals of becoming a teacher, maintaining a 4.0, and reforming education.

Tomorrow morning I go to complete my substitute teacher orientation.  Assuming all goes well, I’ll be registered to substitute at the schools in my county during this school year.  This gets me one step closer to both of those goals.

I’ve never wanted teaching to be limited to the inside of a classroom, so I thought, if any of you guys were interested, that I would teach something via YouTube as a part of Pwning Life.  I’d upload the videos there and then put a post here to go with it.  I’ve come up with:

So I’ll let you guys choose out of those three.  They’re the things I feel most qualified to teach you.

That’ll be my focus for this week.  I’m going video my orientation excursion tomorrow, so look for that to be posted soon!

Keep it phresh

Edit 2:  After reading this post I felt I should share that I laughed for about 10 straight minutes at my choice of the phrase “promptly getting it up.”  I may need to add ‘be more mature’ to the list

Edit:  Sorry for the delay in this post. A lot of things have been happened this week that have prevented me from promptly getting it up.

Greetings all!

So throughout the past week (and a half really) I have undertaken the task of revamping my goal list to be more specific, and with the help of miltownkid and Tyler, I’ve changed the list into a 30 specific things I want to have, do, and be.

Have

1.  A job I like

2.  A Master’s Degree

3.  $1,000,000

4. Playstation 3 (or 4 or whatever is out when I can get it)

5.  Big Screen HDTV

6. Custom Built House

7. Recording Studio in my home

8. Tom Delonge Signature Guitar

9. Library in my home

10. iPhone

11. Car that gets 30+ mpg

12. A 6 pack

13. A YouTube Channel with 1000+ subscribers

14. A widely popular blog

15. An Apartment

16. A Record Deal

17. A Tattoo

18. Wireless internet

19. A TV Show

20. All the seasons of House on DVD

21. Dao Dejing

22. The Qu’ran

23. An entourage on the level of Diddy’s

24. All the PS 1 Final Fantasy games

25. A Nintendo DS

26. A new guitar amplifier

27. A Bass Guitar

28. A Keyboard/Synthesizer with weighted keys

29. A piercing

30. The cutest little kitten you’ve ever seen

Do

1.  Perform my own music in front of a real audience.

2.  Write a book about my spiritual, political, and life views.

3.  Go to a Denver Broncos football game.

4.  Meet blink-182

5.  Meet Angels and Airwaves

6.  Act in a movie

7.  Learn to Mod my xbox 360

8.  Exercise Everyday

9.  Record an album I wrote

10. Move into my own place within the next year

11.  Get married

12.  Graduate from college

13.  Move out of Clintwood, VA

14.  Become a teacher

15.  Reform Education

16.  Lecture on the book(s) I write

17.  Experience 0 G’s

18.  Visit a foreign country

19.  Piss on the San Deigo Chargers stadium

20.  Substitute Teach

21.  Find a spiritual balance

22.  Run more than a mile at a time

23.  Be on an awards show

24.  Give a speech remembered by people for ages to come

25.  Show up Martin Luther King, Jr. and George Bush in said speech.

26.  Learn a martial art

27.  Write, Film, and Direct my own movie, tv show, or web show

28. Skydive

29. Shake hands with Dennis Kucinich

30.  Expose our neoconservative unilateral terrorist government for what it is

Be

1.  An educator

2.  A Writer

3.  A singer/songwriter

4.  A pimp

5. An actor (I’ll upload the play I was recently in sometime haha)

6. A professional musician

7.  A journalist

8.  A political pundit

9.  A comedian

10. A Husband

11. A Doctor of Philosophy

12. Famous for my music, writings, and outspoken opinions

13. Fulfilled

14. In love

15.  Respected

16.  Intelligent and informed

17.  A Wine Enthusiast

18.  Anything but a dancer for Miley Cyrus

19.  Ripped

20.  Funny

21.  An Entrepreneur

22.  Healthy

23.  An advocate for truth

24.  Rich

25. Thugnificent

26. In love

27. A Chef (or at least a good cook)

28. An Attorney

29. A Forensics, Drama, or Mock Trial coach

30. Successful Blogger

I sat down and listed all of the things that were important to me (with the exception of a few jokes) in each section.  Some I had already completed so I went ahead and marked them off.  Any time I reach a goal I’ll post what it was and mark it out in this post.

Since my last update, I’ve been exercising every day.  Though I haven’t been running everyday yet, I have been doing strength training.  I’m up to 3 sets of 50 pushups every other day, with running kind of randomly in between.  I still need to motivate myself to run regularly.

I’ve also been reading at least something every day.  I’m almost done with Quantum Enigma, which I’ll review soon.  And I’ve been journaling everyday.  Of the three goals I was focusing on the most in the past week or so, I’ve completed each one on a daily basis, albeit not with as much finesse as I’d like.

With that in mind, I’ll still be focusing on these same three goals in the coming week, but adding a couple other things.  I’ve found myself wanting to write songs recently, so I’m going to challenge myself to write at least one good song a month.  If the creative juices really get flowing maybe I can increase the amount.

Two other goals I’m working toward at present are becoming a teacher/educator and getting a job I like.  I recently became a substitute teacher and I also got a call from a place I applied and I may be working there in a couple of weeks.

Keep it phresh.

Edit: After taking miltownkid’s advice, the blog will be update once a week instead of once a day.  I will be journaling the old fashioned way (pen and paper) throughout the week and then post a weekly update with a video to the blog.

So after a couple of days of organizing and revamping my list (updated list of goals will be posted soon), I thought I’d give you guys an update on my progress.  Though I haven’t done much out of the organizational stage yet, I’m starting to get serious about pwning life tomorrow by actually doing something.

I followed miltownkid’s advice and chose one (read:  3) things that would affect my life the most right now, speaking in terms of my immediate goals.  I chose the following things to do every day, and I’ll give a brief explanation of why.

Exercise Every Day

I chose this one because exercising every day is a good habit to get into for anyone at any age.  I figure there are more advantages to starting young before I’m totally and completely out of shape.  I’m certainly not fat or anything (I only weigh 108 pounds), but my strength and stamina do need a lot of work.  I’ve been doing a little strength training (push ups mostly) and doing about a mile of cardio off and on for a few weeks now, and I’m not where I need to be physically.  So here’s to reaching a healthier weight with more strength and stamina.

I created this schedule based on the idea that I wanted to choose an effective workout that was challenging, but not too overbearing.  I’ll alternate every other day doing cardio and strength training.  I’ll be starting out running a mile every other day, and in between doing strength training with the help of The Perfect Pushup®, which has a workout guide that revolves around your MAX push ups.

Depending on how this week of working out goes, I hope to increase my running distance next week, and I eventually want to run every day.  The push up workout guide works on a 3 week schedule, so unless I improve faster than the workout schedule assumes, that area of my workout will not change until the end of that cycle, but I’ll be sure to update you guys on my max is and how I’m doing.

Reading Every Day

The second thing I am doing every day is reading.  Though it doesn’t sound like something that affects one’s life in a big way, I’m a lover of knowledge, especially in science, math, and politics.  The reason I chose this is because reading and gaining knowledge can move me towards reaching some of my other goals, such as mastering Calculus, reaching spiritual healthiness, writing a book, etc.  It’s always important to arm oneself with knowledge, and I think reading every day, even if it’s just a few pages in a book, is something everyone should consider doing.

I started reading Quantum Enigma:  Physics Encounters Consciousness by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner.  For dorks like me into math and physics, this book is a great read.  It gives an intro to the weird connection between Quantum Physics and our own personal consciousness, and it does so for the laymen, giving all the prerequisite knowledge to understand their text in the book itself.  It’s definitely worth checking out.  I’ll do a book review when I finish it; I digress though.

Blogging Every Day

The last thing I chose to do was blog everyday.  I figure since blogging is such an essential part of the pwning life project, using it as one of my goals to work on immediately made sense.  It also helps usher me into using Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. more often and more effectively.

I plan to update this blog every day and update my other blog, Logical Science, at least once a week.  The posts I make here each day will probably just be small updates on how my workout went, what I’m reading, etc.  I also plan to do at least one video a week–a weekly recap of all the footage I took of the things I did during the week, along with a blog post that covers the same topics and what I’ll be doing in the coming week.

So that’s where I stand now.  Any feedback is welcome of course.  Until my next post.  Keep it phresh.

My Goals

I started using the “Conversation with God” technique in order spawn ideas for a list of goals, but I found it easier and less distracting to simply ask myself “What do you wanna do?”  The answers to that question started coming much faster, and this is what I came up with for now.  I divided the goals into a short term and long term column.

Short Term Goals

• Maintain a 4.0 in my first semester of college
• Exercise every day, increasing strength and cardio health
• Eat Better Stop eating out and eat healthy foods regularly
• Blog at least once a week (check out my other blog Logical Science)
• Promote my political beliefs/causes
• Explore meditation
• Read every day
• Get rid of my junk
• Become active in social networking (facebook, twitter, YouTube), at least one blog post a week, daily tweets
• Make quality comedy videos with my friends

Long Term Goals

• Improve my singing abilities
• Write 10 good songs
• Record and share those 10 songs with the public
• Make enough money to pay my bills and spend comfortably
• Budget my money well enough to move into my own place
• Master Calculus
• Earn money online
• Reach a state of spiritual healthiness
• Write a book covering government, politics, science, and life
• Reform education through teaching in a unique and fun way

I plan to spend the next few days organizing and adding new goals and writing out the best way to approach reaching each goal.  I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t want some feedback from those of you reading this, especially if you are involved with the project as well.  I think my next video will be in a week or so, but keep looking back for a blog post.  So until then, you can get at me on here, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.  Keep it phresh.