The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids What do we make of a boy like Thomas? Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. Since Thomas could walk, he has heard constantly that he’s smart. But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn’t very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges? Thomas is not alone.
Why I’m teaching prisoners to code Six years ago, I entered San Quentin State Prison for the first time. I had never been in a prison before, especially one with as ominous a reputation as San Quentin. When I arrived, I was escorted through a series of gates that eventually led to the main courtyard. On my left was the adjustment center that houses death-row inmates, some of the notorious criminals in California. On my right was the Catholic Chapel, surrounded by a well-manicured garden. I was, as they say at San Quentin, at the gate between heaven and hell. As the sun was setting, I was led down a paved road, past the guard towers into the lower yard where hundreds of men in blue were exercising, playing chess or just milling around. Frankly, at that point, I was questioning my decision to come there. These men were committed to learning how they could create a better life after they served their time. I was taken to a small classroom where I was scheduled to speak to a group of men about business and entrepreneurship.
How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months The Okano Isao judo textbook I used to learn Japanese grammar. Post reading time: 15 minutes. Language learning need not be complicated. Principles of cognitive neuroscience and time management can be applied to attain conversational fluency (here defined as 95%+ comprehension and 100% expressive abilities) in 1-3 months. Some background on my language obsession, from an earlier post on learning outside of classes: From the academic environments of Princeton University (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian) and the Middlebury Language Schools (Japanese), to the disappointing results observed as a curriculum designer at Berlitz International (Japanese, English), I have sought for more than 10 years to answer a simple question: why do most language classes simply not work? The ideal system — and progression — is based on three elements in this order… 1. Effectiveness, adherence, and efficiency refer to the “what”, “why”, and “how” of learning a target language, respectively. Ganbare!
Role Models My 16 year old daughter (in the orange sweater with a player on her lap in the photo) and her friend got up at 9:15am this morning, about three hours earlier than they'd ordinarily get up on a saturday morning, and headed over to the local public school to be assistant coaches in the Greenwich Village girls basketball league. Both of my girls played in this league in their middle school years and then assistant coached in it during their high school years. The skills and experience they developed playing in this league allowed them to be leaders and top players on their high school team. Earlier this week, when I showed up at my daughter's high school game, I saw one of the younger girls on her Greenwich Village team in the stands cheering her on. As I sat there this morning watching these little girls play basketball, I was thinking about role models. I talked a bit about role models in the Fast Company interview I did last month. Role models are so important.
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5 Worries Parents Should Drop, And 5 They Shouldn't : Shots - Health News Blog hide captionWorry less about the problems that are rare and more about the commonplace risks that can lead to real harm. iStockphoto Shoomp shoomp shoomp. Hear that? That’s the sound of helicopter parents hovering over their children, worrying every second of the day that terrorists could strike Johnny's school or a stranger will snatch Jane from the bus stop. Scary stuff. "These worries that we have are so rare," says Christie Barnes, mother of four and author of The Paranoid Parents Guide. Based on surveys Barnes collected, the top five worries of parents are, in order: Kidnapping School snipers Terrorists Dangerous strangers Drugs But how do children really get hurt or killed? Car accidents Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger) Abuse Suicide Drowning Why such a big discrepancy between worries and reality? This unnecessary worrying, she argues, is detrimental to parents. So, what’s a worried parent to do?
City Brights: Howard Rheingold : Crap Detection 101 “Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him.” Ernest Hemingway, 1954 The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge – the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part – the part a machine can do. Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. The first thing we all need to know about information online is how to detect crap, a technical term I use for information tainted by ignorance, inept communication, or deliberate deception. “Ask a few questions and use available tools to see if you can find answers,” is what I told her when she asked me how to go about investigating.
The death of computing : Articles : Future of Computing : BCS Neil McBride says computer science was populated by mathematicians and physicists but now virtual robots can be created by eight-year olds without needing programming, logic or discrete mathematics skills. Does that mean we have a dying discipline? We all know there's a crisis in university computer science departments. Student numbers are dwindling - down 115 just last year. At the same time the computing unit of funding has fallen. And the onset of fees has made students think twice about joining a profession where the plethora of new jobs in the 1990s has reduced to a trickle and it's only just looking as if employment prospects may be on the upturn. Dropping numbers of A Level students, a view that IT is a job for geeks and social misfits and a perception that there’s nothing interesting in computer science doesn’t help. And the problem's global. As the ship sinks, we computer scientists fiddle on the deck hoping to avoid the icy waters. Something significant has changed.
No One Knows What the F*** They're Doing (or "The 3 Types of Knowledge") Be sure to check out my follow-up to this post, clarifying and addressing a few misinterpretations that have been making their way around the internet. Feeling Like a Fraud Have you ever received praise, or even an award, for being great at something despite having no clue what you’re doing? Do you feel like a fraud, wondering what sort of voodoo you’ve unwittingly conjured up to make people think you know what you’re doing, when the reality is quite the contrary? I recently had a conversation with my girlfriend (going to school for her nursing degree) when she expressed her confusion with some praise she had received from her professor. Her professor had told her that she was the best nursing student she had had in years. I could see she was distressed. How could I win such an award, being in a room with so many great entrepreneurs and so many exciting companies and business ideas? The answer to that question is the title of this post. The 3 Types of Knowledge Here’s the secret though.
TEFL Course - TESOL Certification - Teaching english as a foreign language e-learning 2.0 - how Web technologies are shaping education Written by Steve O'Hear and edited by Richard MacManus. This is a two-part series in which Steve will explore how Web technologies are being used in education. In Part 2 he will profile Elgg, social network software for education, and interview its founders. Much has been written on Read/WriteWeb (and elsewhere) about the effect that web technologies are having on commerce, media, and business in general. As I wrote in The Guardian last year: "Like the web itself, the early promise of e-learning - that of empowerment - has not been fully realized. The traditional approach to e-learning has been to employ the use of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), software that is often cumbersome and expensive - and which tends to be structured around courses, timetables, and testing. Blogging Students use of blogs are far ranging. From the Secret Life of Bees Study Guide More edu-blogging examples School children in the UK are proof that you're never too young to start edu-blogging. Teacher's TV