Mike Johnson
Bio
Stories (18/0)
One Last Job
Pitch black. That was the night I met Jimmy Brighton, a six-five-two-ninety hulk, who had just been released from prison. Leaning against a light post smoking a cigarette, he looked up as I approached. “You’re late,” he said and stamped out his cigarette. “C’mon. We have work to do.”
By Mike Johnson3 years ago in Poets
Zoom Breakout Rooms
If you love being in the classroom teaching as much as I do, then this past year has been quite an adjustment for us both. Back in March of 2020, the face of education changed, and this made a lot of teachers uncomfortable. I know I was asking myself how I was going to deliver the same material the same way I always had. My “go-to” in class was groupwork and changing over to Zoom seemed like it was going to throw a wrench in the works, so to speak. I had never used Zoom before, and the small crash course my college gave didn’t really prepare me for what I was getting into. How was I going to have my students work together? Could I achieve the same results virtually that I did face to face? Then, I learned the breakout room feature, and I realized I could have my students work with each other just as if we were in class. So, I used some of the group activities that I had used face to face, and one of my favorites is the activity on logos, pathos, and ethos.
By Mike Johnson3 years ago in Education
Great Expectations
Like most of us, when I was growing up, my parents had certain high expectations for me. I had to do well in sports, academics, work, you name it. I had to be good at it. The truth of the matter is, I didn’t like any of those things, so I may not have tried as hard as I could to be good at them. In fact, I became something of a class clown, always getting my friends to cause disturbances in the classroom. This got me in trouble more times than I can count, and I began to develop a reputation as a troublemaker. The thing is, I knew what I was doing was wrong because it was disrespectful; however, it was my way of rebelling against my parents’ expectations of me. I figured I couldn’t meet those expectations, so I shouldn’t even try. Eventually, I quit sports (I wasn’t good at baseball anyway) and dropped out of high school to work full time.
By Mike Johnson3 years ago in Motivation
Purposeful Speech
There is a saying that goes, “What you say can be forgiven, but it can never be forgotten.” There is much truth to this, and it is evident in our relationships with others that communication is never quite the same after we have, for lack of a better phrase, stuck our foot in our mouth. So, what can one do to ensure that our communication with others continues productively? We need purposeful speech. We have always been told to think about what we say before we say it, and that can’t be more accurate. While about 80% of our communication with others in non-verbal, what we say to others has a massive impact on how they perceive us and how they react to us.
By Mike Johnson3 years ago in Motivation