[Links]
[links] Link salad wakes up and falls into a dream
‘Kaikidan Ekotoba’ monster scroll — Cool Japanese Forteana. (Via @mattstaggs.)
Vintage ads featuring women with stuff on their heads — Found in Mom’s Basement with an irresistible headline.
Spanking your kid could hatch a bully — Why is this news? Teaching a kid that force trumps a situation teaches a kid that force trumps a situation. Duh.
Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School? — Hmm. (Thanks to
Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole? — More wow. Maybe total BS, but fun to think about.
‘Potato Radius’ To Define Dwarf Planets —Astronomers propose the first objective definition of a planet that separates potato-like objects from spherical ones. Poor Pluto. And what about French fry objects?
Brain Parts Found in Ancient Human Ancestor — Electromagnetic radiation revealed parts of the 1.9-million-year-old brain, as well as eggs of insects that fed on it. Wow. Just wow.
Coffee Conservatives — (Via
Frightening GOP Behavior — The idea that the minority party represents the “will of the people” (not some of the people, but “the people”) is the seedling of a totalitarian mindset. (Via
Why More Immigrants Are An Answer to the Coming Boomer Entitlement Mess — I have never understood conservative anti-immigrant fervor as anything but prejudice. Furthermore, unless you’re a First Nations person, you’re an immigrant, too. That door was once open to your people.
?otD: What’s the best book you’ve ever read?
4/13/2010
Writing time yesterday: n/a (chemo)
Body movement: 30 minutes on stationary bike
Hours slept: 7.5 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 4/10 (fatigue)
Currently reading: [between books]
Related Posts
Posted: 3:26 am Tue April 13 2010 |
Comments
« [cancer] Wrapup on infusion seven | [photos] Your Tuesday moment of zen »
While I’m not against immigration reform and a path to citizenship for illegals who are contributing to our economy (and ought to be contributing to our tax coffers), I have to say I disagree with Reich’s analysis on immigration and social security/medicare/aid.
It strikes me as an unsustainable model for growth: whenever our programs become short-funded, bring in more immigrants to help fund the mandate until our population reaches the breaking point and our country implodes and collapses into a super-dense ball of matter and consumes the universe. I’m over-dramatizing (badly) but the point is that any model that is predicated on an ever-increasing younger population and an older population that would die younger if it knew what’s good for it is a model that’s doomed to failure.
I found this analysis to be a bit more cogent:
http://www.salon.com/news/immigration/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2010/04/13/immigration_not_answer_entitlement_reform
There are fixes to social security (they’re not politically palatable fixes, but they’re fixes). A few simple things like a very small reduction in benefits and an increase in the retirement age. (Did you know, for instance, that when SS was first enacted, the retirement age was actually higher than the mean life expectancy of the population as a whole? Since then, the life expectancy has increased dramatically, but the retirement age has barely moved. I don’t advocate your average person dying before enjoying retirement benefits, but even a small shift in SS retirement age can have a dramatic effect on the long-term viability of SS.)
Medicare, as the article suggests, is a more complicated animal: the explosion there has more to do with the explosion in healthcare costs, generally.
P.S. Those issues addressed… I think immigration reform ought next to be on the agenda.
As you say: once the ancestors of us all were immigrants (and, yes, even the First Nations, whose ancestors once came from somewhere else, too, even if that time is lost to myth, memory, and history; I say that with my barely noticeable quantile of cherokee ancestry).
As a child of 4 or 5, I showed very little inclination to do or learn the things that “normal children” did, rollerskating, ice-skating, riding a bike, swimming, etc… I did not want to do these things, I did not enjoy them and I did not see the point – I’d much rather invent elaborate role plays with my toys. So as an incentive, my parents promised me money (I think it was one or two marks per activity) if I learned rollerskating, ice-skating, riding a bike, swimming, whatever. And so I learned to do all those things in very rapid succession, took the money and saved it to buy a smurf house, then the height of my aspirations, and promptly never used the rollerskates or ice-skates again (my parents still gripe about all those stuff they bought me that I never used, because I never wanted it), though I did enjoy swimming and you can’t really get through your teens in rural Germany without bicycles.
I also got money for good marks in school. I think I got two deutschmarks for an A, one for a B (and I think 50 pence for a C, but I never had Cs) in a test and ten, later twenty deutschmarks for a report card. Because I did well at school, I viewed this money more or less as a regular source of income.
The parents of a good friend of mine had a similar arrangement. As an incentive for her older brother, who did pretty badly at school, they promised him the then exorbitant sum of ten deutschmarks for an A. It was safe to promise that, because he never got As, the aim was to get him from D to C level. But his sister, my friend, did well at school and got As on occasion, so her parents had to pay her what they promised her brother. Needless to say she was very happy about that arrangement.
As an adult and a teacher I view that sort of bribery far more critically (and when my parents tried the old bribery game with regards to getting my PhD, I more or less threw the promised bribe – which was a lot more than the few coins of old – into their faces). Not that I haven’t used the occasional non-material bribe in the classroom (e.g. “If you do the required work now, we’ll watch a movie next session.”), but I’m not a fan. I know some schools use it – a kid from the neighbourhood won a cinema gift card from his school for always doing his homework and other good behaviour. But many reward schemes tend to reward the kids who are already clever and/or ambitious, not the ones who really need it. Plus, there’s the danger of the smurf house effect, i.e. kids only learning for the reward and not for the subject itself, as I learned rollerskating to get a smurf house, but still didn’t care about the rollerskates. I’d prefer getting the kids to enjoy or at least acknowledge the value of the (metaphorical) rollerskates instead of just doing it for the smurf house.
Interesting.
What is the “reward” were more intrinsically related to the desired activity? I know that may be a bit impractical, but what if we could tie some immediate reward to doing well in school that was inextricably linked to the act of doing well in school, such that children would naturally come to associate that reward with the act itself.
I ask, because I think you hit on something in your reply: “many reward schemes tend to reward the kids who are already clever and/or ambitious, not the ones who really need it.” Or, in other words, some kids seem to derive a natural reward from doing well in school that others lack, and adding further rewards only rewards them for doing what comes naturally.
Thinking back to my own childhood, that’s the way it was for me. Sure, there was a pizza parlor that offered free pizzas for getting A’s on your report card… but I would’ve pursued A’s regardless of that external incentive, because there was something inherrent in getting A’s that gave me a sense of pride and accomplishment.
Kids (and adults, too, for that matter) generally learn better if they see a reason for learning. If they’re just asked to learn something without seeing the point, they will simply memorize the relevant facts and forget them just as quickly. Cue foot-stomping 6th-grader: “This is not fair. I only memorized the English irregular verb forms for the test, you can’t expect me to remember them now.”
Of course, there are subjects that are very difficult to make relevant, e.g. very few kids see the point of maths, unless they have a natural aptitude (and sometimes not even then). I didn’t see the point of the linguistics classes I was forced to take at university, which bit me in the arse when I found myself teaching linguistics to English freshmen a couple of years later.
I probably learned more English from SF paperbacks and comic books than from much of what we did at school, because I actually wanted to understand the SF novels/comics. On the downside, I started include the typical old style Marvel comics slang into my English (mistaking it for “the way American people really speak”) which mightily confused my teachers. Now, as a teacher myself, I try to hook into the kids’ interests to get them to learn, e.g. I’ve done grammar exercises based on soccer, Star Wars, current celebrities, etc…
I also have occasional film session (sometimes as a reward for good class behaviour) where I show English language films and TV episodes (films are often too long for the available time) to my ESL students. Nothing overly educational but recent popcorn TV (the TV show Chuck works very well for this). Because if they are actually interested in the film/TV show, they try hard to follow the dialogue. After all, the aim is to improve listening comprehension, and they listen much harder if they want to follow the plot of a goofy action show rather than some dull but educational program.
Agreed, it’s really hard to make some subjects seem relevant and interesting and meaningful to students.
But that’s clever on the ESL classes, etc!
Erk… I need to proofread. Opening sentence should read: “What if the “reward”…” not “What is…”