Joyful Jubilant Learning

Change it up!

When my kids were younger I was quite a sucker for Disney movies, for besides being pretty good TV for my children (other than the occasional miss), they proved to be a goldmine for complementary management lessons I could take to work. Carefully chosen video clips are great for spicing up an otherwise run-of-the-mill staff meeting.

A favorite scene for me was in the Mighty Ducks movie about a group of young misfits finding camaraderie and their youthful purpose as an emerging hockey team. In this particular scene their errant coach is m.i.a. for a crucial game, and they convince their school-assigned tutor to pretend she is their coach so they won’t have to forfeit the game.

As you might imagine, she has no clue about hockey and just slightly more about coaching them, but she recognizes a downhill slide when she sees it, and gestures helplessly as the game deteriorates.

“This is not working! What do we do?” she asks a benched team captain in desperation, and he replies, “Just stand up there where they can see and hear you, and yell, ‘Change it up!’”

She looks at him as if to say, yeah right, that will help, but not having any better ideas she fills her lungs and screams, “Change it up!”

Almost instantly, players scramble to change positions and try a different play sequence. The tutor still doesn’t really understand what’s going on, but she’d mustered the momentary confidence to direct them, and in fearlessly changing course, trusting in her direction, the players snap out of the auto-pilot of their losing streak’s grip. The game starts to turn in their favor, and soon victory is theirs.

As the saying goes, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” If you want more, or you want different, you’ve got to “Change it up!”

Describing the scene has become a favorite way for me to explain to managers about the positives that can come with change. The movie was pretty popular, for heads would nod and there would be smiles in remembrance as Disney would deliver a great analogy for me time and time again. The best way to look at change is with that expectancy of shift; change makes things happen. The change itself is rarely good or bad; what makes it appear one way or the other is the way we humans handle it.

There’s two kinds of change

There’s bad change, and there’s good change. Here’s the rub: The exact same change can be either one or the other depending on our point of view about it. Normally it seems to work something like this:

When change happens TO us, and gets imposed on us, causing us to be reactive, we think of it as bad change. It shakes up our sense of security, and makes things unpredictable. We scramble to do the best we can, but it’s pretty stressful.

On the other hand, good change is change we intentionally and deliberately CHOOSE; we use it for the catalyst it has the potential to be, so we can get more than we’ve gotten before. We “Change it up!” on purpose. The phrase we usually use for this good change? Strategic Initiatives. Initiative.

Bad change is imposed and involuntary. Good change is initiated and championed.

With bad change people react as victims. With good change, they take actions they choose as leaders.

Change is going to happen one way or another. So choose it. Design it. Plan it. Execute it.

Ho‘o — make things happen.

Ho‘ohana — make things work, and make ‘em work your way.

If the Mighty Ducks could do it playing a seemingly hopeless hockey game, so can you.
~ Rosa Say

Postscript: This posting has been newly edited from another which originally appeared at Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching. You can click over there to read comments and a trackback by JJLers Chris Owen and Dean Boyer.

What have you learned from the movies? You can get published on Joyful Jubilant Learning too! ~~~ May Details here

Post author Rosa Say is the author of Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawaii's Universal Values to the Art of Business, and she currently writes for Managing with Aloha Coaching, Value your Month, Value your Life.

Rosa also serves as the managing editor of Joyful Jubilant Learning; her letter for 2008 can be found on our About Page.

For all of Rosa's writing aggregated in just one place, visit her Tumblr, Ho‘ohana Aloha.

Digital Learning and Choosing Your Learning Communities

Our April theme of Digital Learning has illustrated something quite clearly for me:

Whatever Digital Learning we choose will also determine the conversations we have with our globally scattered friends and neighbors, and how we have them.

Conversely, you may choose a virtual community (like this one, our Ho‘ohana Community on JJL) or a social media network first (such as Twitter or LinkedIn). However in making that choice, you will have to learn whatever it takes to communicate with everyone there if you are to fully engage with them (and they with you) in the best possible way.

Pure and simple: We choose how and if we engage

What is that “best possible way?” Well, “best” is pretty relative to each of us individually, and there’s the rub: Best for you may not be perceived as best for the rest of the community.

And there is another truism which frequently emerges: What happens more times than not, is that whatever is easiest for you isn’t necessarily deemed best for everyone else too: Getting to what is optimal for both of you takes some work. Sometimes, it even means building new habits. At some point, people make decisions about what is good enough and they give up on the pursuit of optimal.

That’s life. We all have to arrive at our own reasonable balance.

Marketing guru Seth Godin became an example of this recently when he received some criticism for his decision to write about Twitter. Just one problem: He doesn’t use it. What he wrote was positive, but as someone who is not engaged with the Twitter community he lost some of his credibility with those who are, and feel they are more devoted and fully engaged.

As a Twitter newbie myself, about a week short of a full month’s engagement, I have learned much about the cultural norms there, and feel like I am learning how to speak a completely brand new language, just 140 characters at a time. When do I choose updates that are publicly broadcast, @directed, @included or direct-messaged? Which is the best way to reply to each? Why can’t I get just one stretched picture on my profile page versus the tiled one like others can? When does link-sharing deteriorate to anything less than sincerely appreciated or loved by your followers? When are you perceived as gregarious and generous versus strictly self-promoting and spammy?

And most of all: Why bother learning?

Twitter has taught me an awful lot this month, and I have come to realize that it does take time to learn enough to make a reasonably intelligent stab at answering that “Why bother?” question. It takes time, transparency, and vulnerability: While you are learning you have to engage; there really isn’t any other way.

Further, the community sets the rules of engagement, not you.

When you choose some kind of digital learning you are often choosing a community too, and you are rarely learning alone.

Even when you use something like Del.icio.us, normally entered into strictly for individual book-marking, it turns out to have some kind of social component to it. After I had been using my Del.icio.us toolbar bookmarklet for all my link tagging over quite an extended amount of time, I remember being so surprised the day I went back into my account again to learn how to bundle my tags, and discovered that I actually had a network and fans there –how had that happened? Who were they? Where did they come from? Was I expected to communicate back with them or reciprocate in some way? I went into this mini panic worrying about how unintentionally rude I may have appeared until I learned more about the way that networking happened there.

With Twitter, I am conversing regularly (that is, “tweeting”) with people across the globe who seem to have no interest in anything else I write over and above those 140-character updates. In the beginning, it floored me that those tweets were enough value for my new twitter-friends, jumping into conversations with me just as easily as my older friends established elsewhere did. They click my blog link at my bio to quickly check me out, but even if they choose to follow me (adding me to their chosen Twitter village) they may never read one of my blog posts again (much less my book and about my mission), and have no interest whatsoever in an RSS or email subscription. Twitter is an instant community of sharing humanity in real time, not in experience-driven stories or bloggy thesis presentation. Your Twitter connection can become more as links are followed (and as you choose who you will follow), but not necessarily.

Social has become a pretty literal word.

There has been some rapid and totally unexpected spill-over for me as I surrender my “Why bother?” learning time. I have noticed that my blog posts are getting shorter and less frequent (finally!) for now that I “get” Tumblr and Twitter I more fully understand how short attention span has become no matter how much people may love or admire you. It ain’t personal: When they choose new learning of their own, some time may be stolen from old-style conversations. Our capacity for life has this wondrous yet annoying way of stretching much larger than the time we manage to stay awake and function well! Twitter (and the books I purchased after A Love Affair With Books) has had a pretty dramatic effect on my own RSS feed-reading: Blogs that were “on probation” now have a much shorter time in which to make the cut with me. Am I being more efficient, or less patient?

And the duplicity of reciprocation and paying it forward is not lost on me: I am completely aware of how I may be in the same boat with someone else judging my citizen publishing – and me as publisher.

Let’s bring this back to Joyful Jubilant Learning

What more can we learn from the aha! moments we experience within our Digital Learning here and elsewhere? Most, if not all of us participate in several virtual communities: What experiences can we bring back to this one here at JJL, evolving in our best possible way? How is our own Ho‘ohana Community to get better within the conversations had here, and more supportive of the learning initiatives of all who wish to engage with us?

Please share your ideas, for I am quite positive that every single author here would love to hear them.

~ Rosa Say

Earlier this month: Talking Story and a JJL Twitter Soiree

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Post author Rosa Say is the author of Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawaii's Universal Values to the Art of Business, and she currently writes for Managing with Aloha Coaching, Value your Month, Value your Life.

Rosa also serves as the managing editor of Joyful Jubilant Learning; her letter for 2008 can be found on our About Page.

For all of Rosa's writing aggregated in just one place, visit her Tumblr, Ho‘ohana Aloha.

Who are the Digerati?

In Google-searching through some of my curiosities about Digital Learning this month I stumbled across www.edge.org and this page in particular that asks (and then tells us) “Who are the Digerati?” I found it fascinating, and thought that perhaps you might too:

Who are the "digerati" and why are they "the cyber elite"? They are the doers, thinkers, and writers who have tremendous influence on the emerging communication revolution. They are not on the frontier, they are the frontier.

The digerati evangelize, connect people, adapt quickly. They like to talk with their peers because it forces them to go to the top of their form and explain their most interesting new ideas. They give each other permission to be great. That's who they want to talk to about the things they are excited about because they want to see if it plays. They ask each other the questions they are asking themselves, and that's part of what makes this cyber elite work.

You will find links to the stories of forty different web evangelists, fondly referred to by nicknames such as The Impresario, The Saint, The Gadfly, The Buccaneer, and The Citizen (whom I was initially seeking to learn more about when I found this page.)

Enjoy.

“I resent the shallowness of the critics who say that if you sit in front of a computer and participate in online conversations worldwide you are not leading an authentic life. I question the premise that one person can judge the authenticity of another person's life. Millions of people passively watch television all day long. Don't tell me that having an email relationship with someone on the other side of the world is less authentic than sitting alone and watching the tube. For many people, this new medium is a way of breaking out of the virtual world they already live in.”
---Howard Rheingold (howard rheingold pic: Justin Hall & Robin Good)

Post author: Rosa Say

Talking Story and a JJL Twitter Soiree

Okay, I cannot write about talking story in a short post.

It’s Saturday: You’ve got some time, right?

Got a tweet from the ever-traveling Starbucker yesterday:

“@rosasay, I gather you are liking this Twitter thing - that makes two of us!”

Yes, I’ve become all a-Twitter too. I do like it. I’ve begun to think of Twitter as the digital, global way to “talk story.” For me, Twitter-lingo “tweets” are like pidgin; the local vernacular (more slang) of the islands.

First “talking story” (Then I’ll get to the JJL Twitter Soiree)

Talking story is a big part of the local Hawai‘i culture. At its purest form, to talk story is to shoot the breeze with someone because you have some laid-back, easy-going, relaxing time to do nothing but swap stories with each other about everything that is personal but light and joyful with you. You talk with someone like you have known them forever; you are direct and to the point, no posturing or pretense, and asking questions freely, but never crossing that line of intimacy that even the best of friends would never cross without invitation. You don’t need much context in way of introduction; you just jump in and talk to someone just because they are there smiling at you, and you have this positive expectancy that aloha lives and breathes within them. What more do you need to know?

There is so much in life that is happily light-hearted, and that’s what talking story celebrates. The less serious the better; talking story is best when there is tons of smiling, laughter and kidding around about stuff that is pure nonsense. You laugh with each other, and at the silliness and yes, even the stupidity of life. Then, when the talking story is over, it is over. Goodbyes are said with hugs and aloha. No promises made, no commitments to be honored, no follow-up calendared (unless it’s for a party somewhere) —you just go merrily on your way again as carefree as a mynah bird.

Talking story happens in the workplace too; there it’s kind of a warm-up exercise that opens people up for when they need to roll up their sleeves and get into more serious matters. However you don’t get into those serious matters of work that will surely mix personal and professional into a people-pungent stew-and-rice mixed plate (come on now, it’s to be expected after all), unless you have a talking story relationship with all those people first, one that has been built on aloha.

Then there is the talking story of community, which is kind of an ebb and flow of everything, depending on what kind of neighborhood or community it is… sort of like JJL: Lots of ebbing and flowing (and honking), lots of talking story, lots of aloha-built relationships, lots of people passing on virtual “streets” we call comment conversations, and now, voice threads!

So what were we talking about? (You tend to lose your place a lot in talking story and just keep going…) Oh yeah, Twitter!

About a week before April started I began to deliberate in earnest about our JJL theme-to-come of digital learning, wondering what I’d write about when it came to be my turn to pitch in for the month. There are several digital tools I use on a regular basis (truth is, I am geeking out more and more these days), but I wanted to really concentrate on the learning part over and above the digital part, so I wondered what I could jump into that would be new for me: What could I share with you having just a mere beginning of some learning?

I was ripe for the Twitter-picking

I was in the mood for some experimenting.

That might have been part of the reason, but in every talk story I’m likely to have about it, I will probably blame my Twitter leap on my friend Todd Storch (and thinking of Todd always brings such great stories to mind for me). Todd and I had become blog-buddies, and when he stopped blogging I made sure I always reached out to him one sure-fire way: on his birthday. (I like celebrating birthdays.) Todd would answer my email, and I’d look at his signature in the hope he’d fired up his blog again. This year, there was only one line under his name, and it said:

Follow me at Twitter: http://twitter.com/ktoddstorch

I sent my first tweet as his birthday present. Now my Twitter anniversary will be the same day as Todd’s birthday; March 28th.

So here I am, about two weeks and 120 tweets later. You’ll find blog posts all over the place by people more articulate about it than I am as to the reasons why. I’ve already told you my biggest reason; it’s like a global version of talking story, and I LOVE talking story.

I think Twitter is one of those things you have to jump in and just try to “get it.” So, to follow Todd’s lead…

Follow me at Twitter: http://twitter.com/rosasay

Try it: Just like we’ve been trying the Voice Thread with Joanna.

Here’s the JJL Twitter Soiree part

If you’re around, let’s have a JJL Twitter Soiree this weekend! Go to http://twitter.com and set up your account – it’s easy, and you JJLers are smart!

Jump in and tweet a message, and get a bunch of us JJLers to follow you: We’ll talk story.

“Following” is a way of connecting up; if you are not yet on Twitter you might be familiar with following from Tumblr or another micro-blogging lifestream app (I LOVE my tumblr… another talk story another day). The whole concept of following people with these newer social media apps is fascinating to me, and I wish there was a way to add following to all of my blogs too (not just Twitter folk, but ALL readers): Any true techie out there know if it can be done? Leah? Adam?
 

Your friends follow you —“friends” being people you know— but readers you don’t yet know follow you too; the way I look at it, it takes blog-lurking to a higher place. Followers you don’t personally know yet are kind of telling you “I’m lurking, but since it is so one-click easy to tell you I’m lurking, I will… I don’t even mind that you’ll be able to see my avatar and short bio stuff too.”

But again, to tweet, is to talk story! When you tweet, you are saying, “Hey there! I have a minute to talk story: Do you?”

If I am not yet following you on Twitter, as one of your tweets (your update-messages), type this in so I can find you there, and will know you’ve decided to JJL Soiree too:

Aloha! A JJL tweet to @rosasay, @________________
fill in the blank using as many other JJLer addresses as you can fit into those first 140 characters.

I was not the earliest adopter! To find more JJL Twitterers, just move your curser over the avatars you will see on my page – you will recognize the names and faces.

If you are already there and I have missed you, tweet me! Let’s talk story.

Just one thing: This will post when I'm asleep as so many of you start your day in earlier time zones than I do, but not to worry, I'll catch up with you in the morning.

And I am sure the other JJLers will be welcoming you too... there are some things I am pretty sure of :)

As Karen said, we Reach out and touch somebody... learning the high-touch way

As Steve said,

“JJL is a glorious place for making connections! One of the best tools anyone can get for free!”

Twitter (In Plain English) from The Common Craft Show.
Love how Lee LeFever does these: Less than 3 minutes to watch it.

If you have more Twitter tips for all of us, add them to the comments (told you I am just a two-week tweeter too), or give us your own Follow me at Twitter message!

Why are you tweeting, hmm?

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Post author Rosa Say is the author of Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawaii's Universal Values to the Art of Business, and she currently writes for Managing with Aloha Coaching, Value your Month, Value your Life.

For all of Rosa's writing aggregated in just one place, visit her Tumblr, Ho‘ohana Aloha.

This picture is the avatar you will find for Rosa on Twitter. Tweet to you soon!

Are you ready to Trade Up?

Just like people, books can come to us in a number of different ways. Sometimes, you get both books and people at the same time. Throw in a three-day immersion retreat type of conference with the author and about twenty other women, and that was my story with Trade Up! Five Steps for Redesigning Your Leadership and Life from the Inside Out by Rayona Sharpnack.

When I start my coaching work with new clients, I ask them about people they consider to be their mentors: Knowing who they are and why they are esteemed as a mentor will provide me with significant clues to the present-day state of my prospective client’s thinking. Invariably, much conversation also ensues about the kind of relationship they thrive in with a coach or mentor.

In one of these conversations about a year ago Rayona Sharpnack’s name came up. My client had read an interview that Rayona gave to Fast Company back in November of 2000. This was the tagline of the article:

Natural Leader

By: Cheryl Dahle

Rayona Sharpnack is a teacher and a mentor to some of the most powerful women in some of the most important companies around. Her message: Don't worry so much about what you need to know. Instead, figure out who you need to be.

In short, that was just the message my client needed at just the right time. Impulsively she searched for the phone number to Rayona’s company, dialed it, and was floored when Rayona answered it herself. They now have a friendship which continues to flourish in its seventh year, and will likely be co-mentoring each other for a long time to come.

I share the FC tagline and article with you, because I think it nicely sums up what Trade Up! and Rayona’s coaching with Redesigning Your Leadership and Life from the Inside Out is all about. I read Rayona’s book in-between the time that I signed up for her three-day seminar and actually attended it (just recently; it was held the last week of February). With a fast read of her book as my background preparation, I was to discover how the person I had grown up to be inside was affecting so many of my daily decisions without my even being aware of it.

By the way, Happy Easter

And no, I am not switching gears on you. As we finalized our editorial calendar for JJL and this, our annual Love Affair with Books, Easter seemed to be the perfect day for this book review. Similar to the rebirth this holiday celebrates for Christians everywhere, Trade Up! invites you to have new conversations with yourself, reborn for the possibilities you can begin to manifest in your life: You redesign your leadership of others by starting with the context you dwell within that determines how you are leading yourself.

I would discover that "context" is Rayona’s favorite word. Trade Up! is about "contextual leadership."

These are the five steps the book outlines and explains, "to help leaders gain awareness of these assumptions and trade up from limiting beliefs and behaviors to those that will help them change the world.":

What do you look for in a Book Review?---Redux

re·dux (rē-dŭks') ~ adj.
Brought back; returned. Used postpositively

What do you look for in a Book Review? was a posting I had done for us here at JJL about a year ago as we prepared for A Love Affair with Books then. My intention was to help our contributing authors write the best review possible for you, our JJL readers.

You were wonderful about responding, and your comments there stimulated great conversation among us both on the blog and behind the scenes. The authors truly appreciated it, and so I'd like to ask you if now, a year later, we could add to the discussion.

I am going to close the comments on this posting and point you there in the archives, so we can continue there with the benefit of what was already shared: There was some priceless stuff there, starting right off the bat with Rich G. Please add your thoughts. Comment there, and...

Tell us: What do you look for in a Book Review?

 

By the way, it is not too late to sign up and be one of our ALAWB 2008 reviewers!

Get the details here; Review a book, Win a book! and share your aloha within your love of reading.

~ Rosa Say for Joyful Jubilant Learning

February Ho‘ohana: A love affair with books 2005 ~ 2008

Dear Readers of the Joyful Jubilant Learning Ho‘ohana Community,

I hope you have been clicking directly in to our JJL site lately, for the comments we are getting right now are not to be missed.

And you know what? I am not in the least bit surprised. We have been looking back this month at what the books of our lives have meant to us.

We are finding that the words just tumble out in our passion to explain, yet as readily as these words flow, they somehow cannot describe our love affair with books adequately; there is simply so much to be conveyed. So much joy and reverence to be shared.

Books create extraordinary learning experiences. In the conversation that resulted from his posting, How To Read An Unfinished Book, Tim Milburn called what commenters have attempted to describe “Full Contact Reading.” He made me laugh out loud when I first read the phrase, but then I found I kept thinking, How absolutely true! If you have not yet read Tim's post, and the conversation he tipped off, believe me — you must.

If you have clicked in since yesterday, you will also have seen this wonderful art that Tim created for us, for what we are leading up to, and warming up for this month, is what is surely the highlight of our year at Joyful Jubilant Learning, our annual A Love Affair with Books (ALAWB) now held each March: A new book review published every single day. 31 days, 31 books, 31 authors.

History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
~ David C. McCullough

Although we just celebrated our first site birthday this past October 1st on Joyful Jubilant Learning, ALAWB will enjoy its fourth annual appearance next month. It originally appeared on my first blog, a site I still write for called Talking Story, where I invited our growing community of readers and learners, respectfully dubbed the Ho‘ohana Community, to write book reviews for me. Could it possibly be they were as nuts about books as I was?

Little did I realize how like-minded a community we were.

“Write a book review about a book I have loved? No problem Rosa! Umm, just one?”

ALAWB took off like an unstoppable army of Cupids, all with an unending supply of book-branded love-arrows in their quivers. Writing the book review was easy; choosing the book to write a review for was quite another challenge when so many were so madly and unapologetically loved. Yes, madly. There is absolutely no doubt about it; none: We the joyful and jubilant learners of the Ho‘ohana Community are Book People.

As February 2008 continues, we are working behind the scenes to prepare for ALAWB in March. With each new year, we are sure ALAWB will be the best ever, and this year we couldn't even wait for March to start talking about what our books have meant to us. Be sure to keep checking your feed readers, and watch for an announcement before the month ends where we'll be inviting you to participate too. (Could we possibly go for two books reviews a day?!?! It will be up to you :)

For today, I would like to bring back the first essay I had ever wrote about ALAWB if I may. A few of our newer contributing authors have asked me where the name “A Love Affair with Books” came from. Therefore, what follows is a reprint of the first time I published the phrase on February 1st, 2005.

Indulge your love affair too. Keep reading and discover how books will love you back, as will the people you choose to discuss them with. That learning experience you feel is that oh so sweet pinching of Cupid's arrow.
~ Rosa Say

February Ho‘ohana: A love affair with books

This is the month normally associated with Valentine’s Day, and if I could, I’d send a valentine to every author who has stolen my heart. I am continually amazed at the power of influence a book can have on me, and its ability to have me fall in love with ideas, with stories, and with characters.

Recently I’ve gone through a bit of a dry spell in my reading of books, partly due to the events surrounding my own book and keeping up with things on Talking Story, and partly due to reading so many blogs instead. Choosing a well-written blog is in some ways like choosing a good book, so it’s a good thing too, but the two are so different in the experiences they create for me. I’ve written a good deal about blogs lately, and this month I want to go back to being the book crusader I love being. There is something very special about books.

Meet Poet Laureate Billy Collins and learn poetry with me?

I need to share with you what being part of the JJL Ho‘ohana Community can mean to me, and in doing so, hopefully explain what it can mean to you in your learning collaboration with others... you can conspire in Aloha in the best way without even knowing you do.

Part one. January 31.

HCer Dan Oestreich has started a special set of pages to collect leadership poems for his customers, and he writes, inviting me to participate. I arrive at his site, Unfolding Leadership, and find that HCer David Zinger has a page there too (how is that man managing to do so much these days?)

Part two. February 2, 3 and 4.

I had to honestly admit to Dan that of all the writing arts, poetry is something I have never been able to find my groove with. Have tried, but it hasn't clicked with me. Dan, in the wonderful way that he does just about everything he does, offered to help me find my way into some connection with poetry. I can't believe I am actually doing so, and I start a draft of my own poetry ... a very, very, very rough draft. But it is there.

Part three. February 5.

Dan had told me about poet Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award winner, and remarkable human being Mary Oliver.

Kung Hee Fat Choy! What I Learned from Clara

Happy Chinese New Year! According to the Chinese lunisolar calendar, this is the first day of the new year containing a new moon, and thus the year begins today, February 07, 2008.

Today also kicks off the Year of the Rat, and you have to admire the Chinese for being among the very few to honor this rodent which makes most of us squirm so uncomfortably... not only do they honor the Rat, they have given him the distinction of being the very first of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac. The others are the Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog and Pig.
Photo credit: Twin Lions on Flickr, Yufo Temple, Shanghai, China by think cink.

No offense guys, but I keep thinking of the Rat Master Splinter for the Teenage Mutant Turtles for some reason, and rat just naturally comes out as a "him" for me. However in the spirit of full disclosure, my daughter was born in the Year of the Rat; she's a Wood Rat. Alongside the 12-year cycle of the animal zodiac there is a 10-year cycle of heavenly stems. Each of the ten heavenly stems is associated with one of the five elements of Chinese astrology, namely: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. The elements are rotated every two years while a yin and yang association alternates every year. The elements are thus distinguished: Yang Wood, Yin Wood, Yang Fire, Yin Fire, etc... 2008 is the Chinese Year of the Yang Earth Rat. (Wikipedia is a goldmine of information about all of this by the way; take any of these links and you'll find a bunch more. If you want to find out your year, element, and yin or yang, this is a good page.)

And hey guys, after you read what the Chinese think about the attributes of the noble rat, you may be okay with my gender liberties...

Being the first sign of the Chinese zodiacs, rats are leaders, pioneers and conquerors. They are charming, passionate, charismatic, practical and hardworking. Rat people are endowed with great leadership skills and are the most highly organized, meticulous, and systematic of the twelve signs. Intelligent and cunning at the same time, rats are highly ambitious and strong-willed people who are keen and unapologetic promoters of their own agendas, which often include money and power. They are energetic and versatile and can usually find their way around obstacles, and adapt to various environments easily. A rat's natural charm and sharp demeanor make it an appealing friend for almost anyone, but rats are usually highly exclusive and selective when choosing friends and so often have only a few very close friends whom they trust.

Yes, there is another side to the Rat's character, but why go there, right?

Now me, I'm a Wood Horse, and they say that traditionally, Rats should avoid Horses, but other than a period of time when she was in the 6th grade that we both prefer not to remember, my daughter and I have gotten along just fine, so who knows... maybe we got the yin and yang part right!

So how is it that someone best known for teaching Hawaiian values has the authority with which to write our Joyful Jubilant Learning entry welcoming in the Chinese New Year?

100 Books Every Child Should Read, UK-style

A book-buying pointer: Saw this via Heidi at Omnivoracious, Hungry for the next good book, which I read via my Amazon Daily feed.

In mid-January, Telegraph.co.uk published a list of the "100 books every child should read." Like many must-read lists, it includes expected stalwarts such as Where the Wild Things Are, Charlotte's Web, The Chronicles of Narnia, and To Kill a Mockingbird. But this Brit list focuses on stories that are exciting to read (vs. books that teach you things you ought to know) and it actually has some titles I haven't seen on American recommended book lists.

Imaginative: Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

This was a find for me, for while I remember certain books that my own children adored, purchasing the right book for the right age is quite a task when you gift them. When you click into Telegraph.co.uk, you will find the books are listed this way with succinct, fun reviews:

• 100 books every child should read - Part 1: Early years
• 100 books every child should read - Part 2: Middle years
• 100 books every child should read - Part 3: Early teens

Want to play a short match game? See if you can guess which book goes with which review (before you click any of those links above, of course:)

1. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll
2. The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, by Beatrix Potter
3. The Tiger Who Came To Tea, by Judith Kerr
4. Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling
5. The Borrowers, by Mary Norton

a) Tom Kitten learnt nothing from his parents about the consequences of curiosity. Abducted by a psychotic rat, he comes within a whisker of being turned into a pudding. Nightmares guaranteed.

b) Newsnight's Emily Maitlis has a theory that this book is an allegory about sex. Most children understand it as the story of a tiger that eats its hosts out of house and home. Debate continues.

c) Never was mathematical and philosophical playfulness given such entertaining shape.

d) Learn how the leopard got his spots and the camel his hump. And remember "The Elephant's Child" - whose "satiable suriosity" turns his "bulgy nose" into a trunk?

e) First published in 1953, this remains a deserved favourite. The Clock family live beneath a floorboard, making do with what "human beans" drop, until one day one of them allows herself to be seen…

There was once a boy brought up with books all around him. There were no walls in the house: just books, it seemed. At bedtime his mother would sit on the bed and read to him - Masefield, Kipling, Lear, De la Mare, Shakespeare - and the boy loved it because his mother loved it. He could hear it in her voice, in her laugh, in the tears in her eyes. He loved the fun, shared the sadness. He loved the music in the words. He never wanted storytime to end...
~ 100 books every child should read - An introduction by Michael Morpurgo, who believes that "If children are to become readers for life, they must first love stories."

Is there a children's classic you feel should be on the list?

~ Rosa Say, JJL Contributor, and author of Managing with Aloha Coaching.