The Daily Mile and Other Random 7am Things

I have a couple of posts of things I found cool or horrifying or interesting on my trip...mostly to keep track of them myself. I TRIED to journal while I was there, I swear I did. I faithfully brought one with me and even made 1/4 of an entry on day 1...and then I fell off the wagon altogether. Some writer, I know. But I do have loads of pictures and a couple pages of phone notes of odd stuff, like the City of the Dead in Edinburgh and the fairy tree in Ireland. Sadly, I have a desktop computer about a decade old, and I'm having some technical difficulty loading pictures from my phone.

In the meantime, while in the UK a particular news story caught my attention, because if this isn't happening here in the states it really should be. For background, this post is not being written by your usual lazy sleep-in-Jess, but by the alien pod replacement who took over Jess's body somewhere in Ireland or Scotland and suddenly is WIDE AWAKE at 6am with no prompting from an alarm and gets up to walk the dog instead of rolling over with a grunt and sleeping until 7:59. Also, apologies for the horrendous run on sentence. Feel free to blame my lack of practice with your oddly archaic human language that uses punctuation and dangling participles instead of easier routes of communication, like telepathy or color coded fruit loops.

So, one of the BBC channels, which are conveniently numbered BBC1, BBC2, BBC4, and DAVE (Yes, there is indeed a DAVE channel in the UK. I was baffled too.) had a story about a Scottish teacher who had an idea to help her students get better grades. She started in her school, then her district, then her country, and ultimately internationally, including some schools in the US according to the website. She calls it The Daily Mile, and it's possibly the easiest thing to give children of school age to help them learn, get fit, and focus: outside walk/run every morning for 15 minutes. This little thing she started has had such an effect on kids she's been recognized for awards and is invited to the royal wedding next week. For adults, walking a mile every day gives us more energy...I think sometimes we forget kids already have tons of energy and need to burn some of it off in order to focus and learn better.

I may not have any spawn myself, but I'm one of those people who think a good education is one of the most important things we can give kids, which is why I never bitch about school levies on my property taxes and thoroughly believe teachers should make more money and have better benefits and support.

Anyway, if you're a teacher or parent or (like me) an aunt/uncle or otherwise have kiddos in your life and want to know more, the link is here: The Daily Mile.