Academic Aesthetic Podcast 71

In my 71st podcast I begin going over my summer listening list.

Teachers (at least the good ones) give it their all during the school year. For 180 days, not including weekends and holidays, we grade tests, write lesson plans, and brave rooms full of thirty screaming children armed with only a collection of mismatched paintbrushes, watercolors, and enough blank paper for every kid to have one sheet.

Then summer hits, and we crawl into our dens to hibernate through the warm summer months until the first cries of back to school sales wake us from our slumber.

Ok, maybe we don't spend the whole time sleeping, but I would be lying if I said I missed getting up before the sun every day. As someone who gets most of his work done in the morning, this means that my productivity has taken a huge downturn of late.

I'm not alone in this - my usual edu-blogs and edu-podcasts have had a marked decline in postings. I'm not shocked by this - after all, it's summer. We're on vacation, aren't we?

Lucky for me, there are still plenty of podcasts out there that are educational, yet aren't done by teachers who have chosen to hibernate. (That's one way of saying that they still update regularly.)

So, for my next few podcasts I think I'll share some of my other favorites with you. Think of this as my summer listening list.

First up is one of my all time favorite podcasts: History According to Bob is the brain child of a history teacher named ... Bob. Six days a week (sometimes seven, if he has something special like a video) Bob graces the internet with a 5-20 minute segment on a history topic, from Austria to the Zoroastrians.

I've been a history buff since I was little, and I just love learning new things about all kinds of topics. You'd also be surprised at how many times I've used the things he's podcasted in an art lesson.

My only complaint is that he doesn't leave his podcasts up forever. Once he has a bunch of them on his site, he takes them down and combines them into a CD that you can purchase. This is a neat way to earn revenue, I'm sure, but when I decide on the spur of the moment that I want to hear is podcast on the life of Benjamin Franklin I really don't want to have to wait for it to be shipped.