web analytics
The Downtown Kid
  • Day 5: Letter to Myself

    Today’s challenge is to write a letter to myself explaining to future me where I’ll be in a year. It’s kinda like a written vision board. What’s cool about today’s challenge is that I actually do a similar assignment like this with my students every year. They have certain prompts that they respond to, but the letter is a composition all their own. We seal them in envelopes and I lock them in a filing cabinet. They basically forget about them, and then I give them back out on the last day of school. The kids will leave themselves all kinds of neat things in these letters, too. Sometimes, they’ll…

  • Day 2: To Resolution or Not to Resolution

    For Day 2 of my January blogging challenge, I’ve been tasked with talking about New Year’s Resolutions. I kinda touched on this already on the way out the door of 2018, but let’s take a deeper look at the nature of resolutions. Are they right for you? Why Do This To Ourselves? Historically, new year’s resolutions can be traced back to the Babylonians who were trying to get right with their gods (even though the calendar wasn’t quite the same then and they were setting new goals with the spring equinox). Once the ancient Romans worked out the Julian calendar, it all fell more in line with our current practices.…

  • Day 1: Setting SMART Goals

    Blogging challenges. Like any other “challenge” you sign on to, they’re designed to, well, challenge you to achieve, do new things, push yourself in something. As you’ve probably noticed, social media is full of challenges to quit a bad habit or start a side hustle or get a firmer booty, especially this time of year. They’re all thrown out there in the hopes that we’ll find some growth, create good habits, or just have fun with a new group of folks. In my case, this blogging challenge thing forces me to sit down and think about this project every day, to actually create something of value for 31 days solid.…