MSI Press Blog

Slugging though a 5-year period of preparation has moments of high motivation and moments of wondering if the bridge is just too far. I was wondering that today after gaining (not losing) two pounds (still beating around the overweight-obese divide) and thinking maybe commonsense is the better part of valor when I saw this quote from Thomas Merton: "The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little," OK - rock climbing, yoga, it's still on! Judo in January!! And back to more sit-ups, more push-ups, trying to really do a pull up. Strong Fitness challenges -- I'm all in!

Released today! This book encompasses traditional tips that have worked for most people and then goes way beyond them. adjusting them to individual learners and teaching the learners to develop their own heuristics for rapid and successful language learning.  Within these pages, the reader can find a trove of treasure, such as strategies and tactics reading, listening, writing, and speaking mental management ways to manage cognitive dissonance ways to control emotional reasoning the connection between health and language learning understanding and improving memory knowing how personality type and cognitive style affect learning successfully preparing for tests

Anne Laforge interviews Brittany and her husband Holden for National Women's Health and Fitness Day 2019. Listen to the podcast here .

For National Women's Health and Fitness Day, Julie (author of 108 Yoga and Self-Care Practices for Busy Mamas) provided us the following guest post. My 3-year-old does Downward-Facing Dog and Tree Pose. Even at her age, she’s learning how simple and fun it can be to fit in exercise and that exercise is integral to mind-body wellness.   Since she and her brother were newborns, they’ve seen mama stretch, run, walk and lift weights. And some days they exercise with me. The message they’re getting about exercise is: “Fitness is fun and it helps keep us healthy!” As they grow, they’ll know exercise is just as much a part of their day as brushing their teeth and washing their hands. I wake up knowing when I’m going to workout. Fitness fits in the nooks and crannies of almost every day. Sometimes it’s a 20-minute yoga video before breakfast; other times it’s a 30-minute walk outside with the family after dinner. Scheduling time for exercise

SASKATCHEWAN  “Between the blush at dawn and dusk the long kiss of land and sky, bare against each other.”  From “The Prairie” in This Land by Ken Odland  The sun shown brightly as we crossed the border into the neighbouring province of Saskatchewan. Temperatures approached 30° Celsius, about 10 degrees above normal for September. Immediate impressions, as seen from the highway, were checkerboard fields of amber, ochre, and green. Fall is harvest time in the prairies and many farmers were taking advantage of the fine weather to collect their crops. On distant horizons, columns of dust rose behind tractors pulling reaping machines. Grain elevators, always beside railroad tracks, were prominent landmarks in most small towns.  British Columbia’s landscape is mostly mountainous; Alberta has mountains to the west and prairie to the east; Saskatchewan, at least the southern section, is endless flat prairie. Two tongue-in-cheek sayings that capture the essence of this fla

The long slog through five years of preparing to be able to take on a set of ninja obstacles can get discouraging. Little improvements are not exciting. Moreover, little improvements are rarely seen. It is like climbing a mountain. You climb and climb or hike and hike, and the top still seems pretty far away. But, if you stop and look down, you can often rejuvenate your enthusiasm not because the top of the mountain is close but because the bottom of the mountain is now visibly farther away. Small progress...great injection of motivation. So, too, this week I passed a goal I did not even know I had. After all, who has a goal that the bottom of the mountain will be X amount of distance away? It was a goal that became a goal only after it was achieved. As I was going my homework--and adding repetitions to it--I realized that I had surpassed the number of push-ups, sit-ups, and planks that I was able to do when I was in the Army years ago. Yes, finally, something!! And to mark th

Released today! An in-depth guide for teachers seeking to understand dysfunctional classrooms and create a mathemagenic experience. A unique resource, based on experience with thousands of language learners. Based on Jungian psychology, using MBTI categories (with a passing reference to equivalents in Socionics), this book presents an explanation behind dysfunctional language classrooms (though much could apply to any K-16 classroom) and provides a heuristic for managing the classroom successfully. For each MBTI type, there is a section posing a teacher of that type and a classroom of randomly gathered types (as in real life). A discussion follows as to the source of any dysfunction, the way to accommodate all learners, an exploration of the probable comfort level of that teacher, and a posed question as to what would be the case if the class were the same but the teacher the polar opposite. Meant for application by teachers and for use in faculty development, it is a book that t