Advice I Never Got

Why didn't anyone ever tell me that money, and managing money, is such an important part of living a full and rewarding life?  No one ever told me that one day I would be 74 and arguing with my 76 year old husband about whether we could attend his nephew's funeral because we have no money.

That's not actually true.  We each have our Social Security checks coming in each month.  That's a total of $1925.  Our expenses are $65.00 more than that each month.  And, believe me, we do not live lavishly.  He makes redwood Adirondack chairs which sell for $100 each, when they sell, and I have an Etsy shop which brings in an average of $200 per month.  I also do some baby-sitting and dog-sitting for extra money.  We have some savings, but according to the Social Security folks, it's got to last us another 20 years.  

I just wish my parents had seen fit to educate me about investing money when I was 17, that they had shown me the numbers.  But it's my experience that kids don't really understand the numbers until they start buying diapers and paying for pediatrician visits.  I don't know what I was thinking back then, or even when I had three kids and was working full-time to pay the bills.  I argued then that there simply was no money left over to save, but, of course, there was.  I just didn't choose to do it.

Here's what I am going to do for my grandson: make a picture book showing (a) the car you can have if you have money, and (b) the car you have if you don't; the trips you can take if you save money, and (b) the road trip to Wally World if you don't; (a) the house you can give your family with a college degree, and (b) the low-rent apartment you'll have with a GED.  You get the idea, right?  Maybe that will work better than talking numbers.  

But how do you tell them that the working years go by so fast and in a blink, you're 74 and arguing about money.

Another TED Talk from Ken Robinson

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Not Quite Ready for College - Here's an Idea

I am fully aware of how much my travel experiences have changed me (and for the better, I might add) and helped me understand so much more about the world.  At home it has helped, too, because I learned that there is not just one way to do things.  I no longer insist that my way is the best way.  I know that those who volunteer with the Peace Corps value that experience for the rest of their lives, and I believe that taking a Gap Year might also be a life-long benefit.  See what you think.  This article appeared in Slate.

This article originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed.

Over the next few weeks, students around the country will receive offers of admission to colleges and universities. But before students jump online and accept an offer, I have one piece of advice for them: They might be better off not going to college next year.

Instead, they should think about taking a gap year, to defer college for a year to live and volunteer in a developing country.

In the traditional sort of gap year, students immerse themselves in a developing community to volunteer with a nonprofit organization by teaching, working with local youth, or assuming some other community role.

Gap years have been rising in popularity in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere. I’ve spent the last few years researching what happens to young people when they have such an immersive experience in a community radically different from their own.

The answer, in short, is that gap years can help change students in ways the world needs.

The challenges of our time demand an educational system that can help young people become citizens of the world. We need our students to be smart, critical, and innovative thinkers but also people of character who use their talents to help others. Gap years help young adults understand themselves, their relationships, and the world around them, which deepens capacities and perspectives crucial for effective citizenship. They help students become better thinkers and scholars, filled with passion, purpose, and perspective.

How do people learn from gap years?

One principal lesson is clear: We often develop most when our understandings of ourselves and the world around us are challenged—when we engage with people and ideas that are different. Despite this insight, we often prioritize comfort and self-segregate into groups of sameness. We tend to surround ourselves with people who think, talk, and look similar to us.

The treadmill from high school to college makes it hard for students to see alternative paths.

Taking a gap year speeds our development by upsetting these patterns. Trying to occupy another person's way of life in a different culture—living with a new family, speaking the language, integrating into a community, perhaps working with local youth, for instance—these are valuable experiences that help young people understand themselves, develop empathy and virtue, and expand their capacity to see the world from others' perspectives.

Traditionally, U.S. higher education has championed the idea of liberal arts as a way of getting students to engage with difference, to expand their worldview beyond their known universe by (in the words of a Harvard research committee on education) “questioning assumptions, by inducing self-reflection … by encounters with radically different historical moments and cultural formations.”

However, formal classroom education alone cannot accomplish this aim. The classroom is limited in its ability to engage students with difference and contribute to their development as able citizens. We also need new experiences that inspire critical self-reflection to cultivate the right moral feelings and dispositions.

What’s important here is the productive dissonance that these long-term, immersive gap year experiences provide. It's unlikely that a young person staying in America—or even traveling overseas for a short time—would have assumptions about herself and the world around her challenged with the same intensity, frequency, and breadth as in a gap year in a developing community.

It's interesting that spending time in developing communities can help young people appreciate ways of living that we need more of—such as a more active and intimate sense of community. Going overseas also helps cultivate a type of independence and self-confidence that staying close to home in a familiar environment probably does not.

Furthermore, taking the traditional kind of gap year after high school helps students take full advantage of their time in college. One telling observation is that many students who take gap years end up changing their intended major after returning. During college, their gap year experiences enrich their courses, strengthen co-curricular endeavors, and animate undergraduate research and creative projects.

To be clear: Though these gap year students are working in partnership with a community organization and aim to make some positive impact, the students typically, at least in the short term, gain more than they are able to give. But this empowers them to bring new perspectives to bear in other personal, professional, and civic efforts. Gap years, borrowing a line from the Rhodes Scholarship Trust, can help create leaders for the world’s future.

Despite the benefits of these kinds of gap year experiences, too few Americans take gap years and too few colleges encourage them. The treadmill from high school to college makes it hard for students to see alternative paths. But that is changing. More people and organizations are beginning to see gap years for the formative experiences they can be, given with the proper training, support, and community work. In fact, all the Ivy League universities now endorse gap years for interested students. And they’re right to do so.

Many parents and students are nervous about the idea of spending an extended period in a developing country. But these experiences, especially through structured gap year programs like Global Citizen Year, are generally very safe and supported. Are there some risks? Of course, there are risks with any travel or change—but the risks are worth taking. The investment in taking a gap year will pay dividends throughout one’s college career and beyond as society and one’s life are enriched.

However, one central challenge that remains is how to finance gap years for students from lower-income families. This is also beginning to change. The University of North Carolina and Princeton University, for instance, have both begun to subsidize gap years for incoming students. Other organizations, such as Omprakash, now offer low-cost volunteer placements as well as scholarships to those with need. And with the help of crowdfunding sites, students are able to raise money for these experiences with greater ease. Despite these efforts, if gap years are to really expand, we’ll need more institutions or governments to offset the costs.

Higher education is society’s last mass effort to really shape the character and trajectories of our young people. Let’s help them take more advantage of the precious time in college by taking a gap year beforehand.

Joe O'Shea is the author of Gap Year: How Delaying College Changes People in Ways the World Needs.

Is American Culture to Blame for Failing Schools?

December 18, 2013

Is American Culture to Blame for Failing Schools?

By DAVID FIRESTONE


“Americans do not support an egalitarian society.”

That was the response of one reader, Jay David of New Mexico, to the final editorial in our series on science and math education, and in many ways it summed up the bitterness that many others expressed when the American school system was compared to those of other countries.

The editorial looked at some of the reasons students in Finland, Canada and Shanghai do much better in science and math than American students, and concluded that those places care more about preparing teachers and elevating the cultural position of education, while ensuring that more resources go to the neediest schools. In this country, teachers are poorly paid, poorly prepared and generally disdained, while the richest schools and students get by far the most money.

Scores of readers blamed that disparity on this country’s more libertarian culture, and on an outlook toward learning that if not overtly anti-intellectual is at least non-intellectual.

“Canadians’ acceptance and indeed pride in their more egalitarian society contrast with Americans’ acceptance of having an underclass,” wrote Blair P., of Palm Desert, Calif. “It’s an Ayn Rand philosophy.”

Several of the biggest Canadian provinces distribute school funds far more equitably than American states, which tend to let school districts fend for themselves based on the wealth of their property-tax base (or lack of it). Equity is a “laughable” idea in a country that lets low-income cancer victims die, wrote Jonathan Broder of New York, and Republicans “would never in a million years allow this type of socialist funds distribution system.”

Allan Dobbins, of Birmingham, Ala., said that he attended a small public high school in a poor working-class Canadian town in the 1970s where there were no frills but solid math, science, and language courses. The school produced a number of Ph.D.’s and physicians. “I believe the situation is quite different in the U.S. and in particular here in the South,” he wrote, “where the broad distribution of funding and quality means some schools have unqualified math and science teachers, or no physics courses at all.”
As Paul Karrer, of Monterey, Calif., put it: “Canada has the gentle hand of government guiding it. The citizens accept and want government. They have a general view of ‘we.’ Not so in the USA.”

The Finnish tradition of strong preparation and respect for teachers was similarly admired by many commenters, who nonetheless remain convinced it cannot be duplicated here.

“Show me a profession that has been vilified more than teaching in the US,” wrote Peter S. of Portland, Ore. “Real-estate agents and used-car dealers have more status and make more money.” He added: “Our best minds in the US go into hedge funds and high finance, where they figure out how de-fund education. No wonder our schools are places no one wants to be.”

David Meyerholz of Virginia Beach, who has taught in a public high school for 33 years, blamed a culture that doesn’t encourage students to strive for knowledge. “We have never been a nation of highly educated people,” he said. “Just because the modern world dictates that we now have to be, doesn’t mean it will happen unless we swim upstream against a current of dumb popular culture.”

Caring about teaching is expensive, but much more than money is involved. Too many lawmakers regard teachers as “a drag on public finances,” as Ole Holsti of Salt Lake City put it, or resent that many are unionized, or disagree even with the idea of a liberal education. The pessimistic tone of many of the comments suggested that few believe the situation is likely to change anytime soon.

“Our backwards system of ‘local’ control and insistence on short-term thinking like keeping costs down will work against this for some time in actual hiring practices,” wrote Tina B. of St. Petersburg, Fla. “It will take at least another generation to make a difference. But it would be worth it.”

Why Don't Our Kids Do Better Than the Kids in Other Countries?

There have been several articles lately in the news about education.  I am assuming that all of you will find this information interesting: either you have children or grandchildren in the school system, or you are working in an industry where you see first-hand the results of our school system.  If you are an entrepreneur, you are looking for well-educated employees.  I believe that we must all take charge of our own learning to some extent.  Parents must educate their children and expose them to as much as possible.  Read to them, teach them to use the internet, take them to the symphony, the ballet, the museum.  And travel, travel, travel.  Make sure that your children, by the time they graduate from high school are aware that there is a big, wide, wonderful world out there, and they are not the center of it.

Why Other Countries Teach Better

Three Reasons Students Do Better Overseas

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: December 17, 2013

Millions of laid-off American factory workers were the first to realize that they were competing against job seekers around the globe with comparable skills but far smaller paychecks. But a similar fate also awaits workers who aspire to high-skilled, high-paying jobs in engineering and technical fields unless this country learns to prepare them to compete for the challenging work that the new global economy requires.

The American work force has some of the weakest mathematical and problem-solving skills in the developed world. In a recent survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a global policy organization, adults in the United States scored far below average and better than only two of 12 other developed comparison countries, Italy and Spain. Worse still, the United States is losing ground in worker training to countries in Europe and Asia whose schools are not just superior to ours but getting steadily better.

The lessons from those high-performing countries can no longer be ignored by the United States if it hopes to remain competitive.

Finland: Teacher Training

Though it dropped several rankings in last year’s tests, Finland has for years been in the highest global ranks in literacy and mathematical skills. The reason dates to the postwar period, when Finns first began to consider creating comprehensive schools that would provide a quality, high-level education for poor and wealthy alike. These schools stand out in several ways, providing daily hot meals; health and dental services; psychological counseling; and an array of services for families and children in need. None of the services are means tested. Moreover, all high school students must take one of the most rigorous required curriculums in the world, including physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, music and at least two foreign languages.

But the most important effort has been in the training of teachers, where the country leads most of the world, including the United States, thanks to a national decision made in 1979. The country decided to move preparation out of teachers’ colleges and into the universities, where it became more rigorous. By professionalizing the teacher corps and raising its value in society, the Finns have made teaching the country’s most popular occupation for the young. These programs recruit from the top quarter of the graduating high school class, demonstrating that such training has a prestige lacking in the United States. In 2010, for example, 6,600 applicants competed for 660 available primary school preparation slots in the eight Finnish universities that educate teachers.

The teacher training system in this country is abysmal by comparison. A recent report by the National Council on Teacher Quality called teacher preparation programs “an industry of mediocrity,” rating only 10 percent of more than 1,200 of them as high quality. Most have low or no academic standards for entry. Admission requirements for teaching programs at the State University of New York were raised in September, but only a handful of other states have taken similar steps.

Finnish teachers are not drawn to the profession by money; they earn only slightly more than the national average salary. But their salaries go up by about a third in the first 15 years, several percentage points higher than those of their American counterparts. Finland also requires stronger academic credentials for its junior high and high school teachers and rewards them with higher salaries.

Canada: School funding

Canada also has a more rigorous and selective teacher preparation system than the United States, but the most striking difference between the countries is how they pay for their schools.

American school districts rely far too heavily on property taxes, which means districts in wealthy areas bring in more money than those in poor ones. State tax money to make up the gap usually falls far short of the need in districts where poverty and other challenges are greatest.

Americans tend to see such inequalities as the natural order of things. Canadians do not. In recent decades, for example, three of Canada’s largest and best-performing provinces — Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario — have each addressed the inequity issue by moving to province-level funding formulas. As a recent report by the Center for American Progress notes, these formulas allow the provinces to determine how much money each district will receive, based on each district’s size and needs. The systems even out the tax base and help ensure that resources are distributed equitably, not clustered in wealthy districts.

These were not boutique experiments. The Ontario system has more than two million public school students — more than in 45 American states and the District of Columbia. But the contrast to the American system could not be more clear. Ontario, for example, strives to eliminate or at least minimize the funding inequality that would otherwise exist between poor and wealthy districts. In most American states, however, the wealthiest, highest-spending districts spend about twice as much per pupil as the lowest-spending districts, according to a federal advisory commission report. In some states, including California, the ratio is more than three to one.

This has left 40 percent of American public school students in districts of “concentrated student poverty,” the commission’s report said.

Shanghai: Fighting Elitism

China’s educational system was largely destroyed during Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution,” which devalued intellectual pursuits and demonized academics. Since shortly after Mao’s death in 1976, the country has been rebuilding its education system at lightning speed, led by Shanghai, the nation’s largest and most internationalized city. Shanghai, of course, has powerful tools at its disposal, including the might of the authoritarian state and the nation’s centuries-old reverence for scholarship and education. It has had little difficulty advancing a potent succession of reforms that allowed it to achieve universal enrollment rapidly. The real proof is that its students were first in the world in math, science and literacy on last year’s international exams.

One of its strengths is that the city has mainly moved away from an elitist system in which greater resources and elite instructors were given to favored schools, and toward a more egalitarian, neighborhood attendance system in which students of diverse backgrounds and abilities are educated under the same roof. The city has focused on bringing the once-shunned children of migrant workers into the school system. In the words of the O.E.C.D, Shanghai has embraced the notion that migrant children are also “our children” — meaning that city’s future depends in part on them and that they, too, should be included in the educational process. Shanghai has taken several approaches to repairing the disparity between strong schools and weak ones, as measured by infrastructure and educational quality. Some poor schools were closed, reorganized, or merged with higher-level schools. Money was transferred to poor, rural schools to construct new buildings or update old ones. Teachers were transferred from cities to rural areas and vice versa. Stronger urban schools were paired with rural schools with the aim of improving teaching methods. And under a more recent strategy, strong schools took over the administration of weak ones. The Chinese are betting that the ethos, management style and teaching used in the strong schools will be transferable.

America’s stature as an economic power is being threatened by societies above us and below us on the achievement scale. Wealthy nations with high-performing schools are consolidating their advantages and working hard to improve. At the same time, less-wealthy countries like Chile, Brazil, Indonesia and Peru, have made what the O.E.C.D. describes as “impressive gains catching up from very low levels of performance.” In other words, if things remain as they are, countries that lag behind us will one day overtake us.

The United States can either learn from its competitors abroad — and finally summon the will to make necessary policy changes — or fall further and further behind. The good news is that this country has an impressive history of school improvement, as reflected in the early-20th-century compulsory school movement and the postwar expansion, which broadened access to college. Similar levels of focus and effort will be needed to move forward again.

Who Says Math is Boring?

I am, apparently, the parent of a rather unusual daughter.  When asked what she wanted to do when she grew up, she replied in all seriousness: "I want to sit in a room and do math problems all day long." This is a true story.  She went on to major in biochemistry and was awarded a Ph.D. from Rutgers University.  This story is not for parents of girls like mine.  But it is an issue that all parents need to be talking to their school principal about.  We can't afford to have Americans serving Starbucks to the Chinese and Indian engineers, computer programmers, and physicists.

American students are bored by math, science and engineering. They buy smartphones and tablets by the millions but don’t pursue the skills necessary to build them. Engineers and physicists are often portrayed as clueless geeks on television, and despite the high pay and the importance of such jobs to the country’s future, the vast majority of high school graduates don’t want to go after them.  This link is for the video on the NY Times web site.

Math Doesn't Have to Be Boring

Nearly 90 percent of high school graduates say they’re not interested in a career or a college major involving science, technology, engineering or math, known collectively as STEM, according to a survey of more than a million students who take the ACT test. The number of students who want to pursue engineering or computer science jobs is actually falling, precipitously, at just the moment when the need for those workers is soaring. (Within five years, there will be 2.4 million STEM job openings.)

One of the biggest reasons for that lack of interest is that students have been turned off to the subjects as they move from kindergarten to high school. Many are being taught by teachers who have no particular expertise in the subjects. They are following outdated curriculums and textbooks. They become convinced they’re “no good at math,” that math and science are only for nerds, and fall behind.

That’s because the American system of teaching these subjects is broken. For all the reform campaigns over the years, most schools continue to teach math and science in an off-putting way that appeals only to the most fervent students. The mathematical sequence has changed little since the Sputnik era: arithmetic, pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and, for only 17 percent of students, calculus. Science is generally limited to the familiar trinity of biology, chemistry, physics and, occasionally, earth science.

These pathways, as one report from the National Academy of Education put it, assume that high school students will continue to study science and math in college. But fewer than 13 percent do, usually the most well-prepared and persistent students, who often come from families where encouragement and enrichment are fundamental. The system is alienating and is leaving behind millions of other students, almost all of whom could benefit from real-world problem solving rather than traditional drills.
Only 11 percent of the jobs in the STEM fields require high-level math, according to Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. But the rest still require skills in critical thinking that most high school students aren’t getting in the long march to calculus.

Finding ways to make math and science exciting for students who are in the middle of the pack could have a profound effect on their futures, providing them with the skills that will help them get technical jobs in the fields of food science, computer networking or medicine. It would entice many students who are insecure in their own abilities into advanced careers. But it is going to require a fundamentally different approach to teaching these subjects from childhood through high school. Here are a few of the many possible ideas to begin that change.

A More Flexible Curriculum

American students need vastly improved skills in math and science — they ranked 30th among students in 65 nations in math — but they do not all have to be trained to be mathematicians or scientists. While all students need a strong grasp of the fundamentals of critical thinking and problem solving, including algebra and geometry, they should be offered a greater choice between applied skills and the more typical abstract courses.

This is not an endorsement of tracking, the old practice of shunting some students into vocational classes while others are prepped for college. Every graduate should be ready for college (whether for a two- or four-year degree) but should also be exposed to the variety of skills that will be demanded as the country continues its shift to a post-industrial economy. As a study by the Georgetown center notes, very few high schools offer career or technical education; any deviation from a classical math education is viewed with suspicion.

Research has shown that the right mix of career and technical education can reduce dropout rates, and the courses offered don’t have to be from the old “industrial arts” ghettos. They should be taught at a challenging level and make students aware of careers that are now being ignored. Take engineering, for example, a field that pays well and needs ever more workers. Most high school students say they have no interest in the subject. That’s largely because few of them ever encounter it: Only 3 percent of graduateshave taken an engineering course. Only 19 percent of students have taken a computer science course, mostly at the advanced placement level.

The Common Core math standards now being adopted by most states are an important effort to raise learning standards, particularly in primary and middle school, when many students begin to fall behind. They encourage the use of technology and applied thinking, moving students away from rote memorization. At the high school level, they would introduce all students to useful concepts like real-world modeling. But the standards also assume that all high school students should pursue a high-level math track, studying quadratic equations, transformational geometry and logarithms. The standards need more flexibility to ensure that they do not stand in the way of nontraditional but effective ways to learn, including career-oriented study.

Very Early Exposure to Numbers

Only 18 percent of American adults can calculate how much a carpet will cost if they know the size of the room and the per-yard price of the carpet, according to a federal survey. One in five American adults lack the basic math skills expected of eighth graders, making them unfit for many newly created jobs. In many cases, that’s because they weren’t exposed to numbers at an early age.

A new study, by researchers at the University of Missouri, showed that the most important factor that predicted math success in middle school and upward was an understanding of what numbers are before entering the first grade. Having “number system knowledge” in kindergarten or earlier — grasping that a numeral represents a quantity, and understanding the relationships among numbers — was a more important factor in math success by seventh grade than intelligence, race or income.

Children of all backgrounds can build a good foundation in math with early exposure to numbers, which should be required in all preschool classes. But less than half of 4-year-olds are enrolled in full-day pre-K programs, and only 70 percent of kindergartners go all day. Although preschool enrollment has increased in recent years, it is still not a high priority in many states and cities, as shown by the cold reception to expansion proposals by President Obama and Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio of New York.

Better Teacher Preparation

The most effective teachers have broad knowledge of their subjects. Too many lack that preparation. More than half of the 6.7 million students studying physical sciences — chemistry, physics and earth science — are learning from teachers who did not major in those subjects. Only 64 percent of those teachers are certified. The number is better for math teachers, as 78 percent are certified, but that still leaves three million math students being taught by uncertified teachers. The problem is significantly worse in low-income communities and in middle schools.

Some districts give additional instruction to science and math teachers, or team new teachers with more experienced colleagues. But the most important effort is the national campaign to add 100,000 STEM teachers by 2021. The Carnegie Corporation has led a coalition of businesses, universities and other institutions to make it happen at the ground level. The American Museum of Natural History, for example, has pledged to prepare 130 certified science teachers by 2015. The University of Chicago will train 500 new teachers for Chicago’s public schools over five years. The campaign now has commitments for more than 37,000 new teachers, but it still has far to go.

Experience in the Real World

A growing number of schools are helping students embrace STEM courses by linking them to potential employers and careers, taking math and science out of textbooks and into their lives. The high school in Brooklyn known as P-Tech, which President Obama recently visited, is a collaboration of the New York City public school system and the City University of New York with IBM. It prepares students for jobs like manufacturing technician and software specialist. Students work with IBM mentors and are encouraged to earn both a diploma and an associate degree after a combined six years in high school and college.Ten more such schools are planned around the state, and last month President Obama announced a promising new grant program to encourage dozens more high schools to offer job-oriented STEM education.

In Seattle, Raisbeck Aviation High School is working with Boeing and other aerospace firms to mentor students in engineering and robotics. Many schools are teaming with software companies to teach programming, including two schools that are very popular in New York City. Though many of these efforts remain untested, they center around a practical and achievable goal: getting students excited about science and mathematics, the first step to improving their performance and helping them discover a career.

How Was School Today, Dear?

Ken Robinson, an "educationalist," gave a TED talk in May, 2013, called "How to Escape Education's Death Valley."  TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conferences bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less).  If you haven't watched them, you are in for such a treat!

In this talk, KR says there are three conditions under which human life flourishes and they are contradicted every day in every classroom.  The first is: human beings are naturally different and diverse.  Rather than teach to have each student passionately explore his or her special talents and interests, we teach for conformity.  All across the nation, if it's January we are learning facts about the American Revolution.  Never mind that your son has just discovered the wonders of astronomy and doesn't want to read, talk, or take a test about anything else.  He will have to wait . . .

Second, all humans are naturally curious and that makes us natural learners.  Have you ever spent a day with a 3-year old?  How many questions did you answer?  My granddaughter is four, and the phrase she uses most often is "How Come?" But our schools want to achieve compliance.  The present system was originally proposed by Horace Mann to educate workers for the industrial age.  It was beneficial to have hordes of compliant workers standing at assembly lines.  In the information age, we need innovators, creative thinkers.

The third principle is that human beings are inherently creative; we create our lives, and in spite of the culture of education that strives to turn out finished students who all know the same body of knowledge and have the same values, we are still all individuals.  The culture of standardization is opposed to basic human nature, which may be one reason it isn't working very well.

Tomorrow we will talk about "Unschooling."

A Little Perspective, Please

I have a friend who is convinced that this country is going down the toilet.  She believes that all parents are incompetent and are raising children who won't be able to live in society.  She thinks the economy will never improve, that college graduates can't get jobs, that divorce is out of control, and on and on and on.  It's depressing to try to have a conversation with her because she is so negative.  So when I saw this article, the words leaped off the page at me.  This is from an article published on Cracked.com.

"In general, it's easier to be negative.  It's easier for us as a generation, because to admit that the world isn't that bad right now would be to admit that we have it easier than our grandparents did and that the world thus has the right to expect more from us.  But as much as we like to joke about the sorry state of the world, the facts really don't back us up.  Here are four myths that the facts just don't back up." 

"Everything Is So Expensive."

The Complaint:

"The corporations and the government have us all living like slaves. I can back it up with numbers, too -- in 1950 you could buy a brand new nine-room brick home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for the whopping sum of $11,500. A decent family car was about $500, and the gas for it was about 25 cents a gallon. A large loaf of bread cost under 15 cents. A large coffee was a nickel, with a free refill. I could go on and on. But now between greedy corporations and the government confiscating our income with sky-high taxes, you have to work two jobs just to survive."

The Reality:

Let's start with the obvious: A low-end job in the service industry paid a dollar an hour in 1950. A fancy job in insurance or real estate? A buck-fifty an hour. You'd take home $50 a week after taxes. So please don't talk about the good old days of 50-cent steaks when people were getting paid what would now be Tooth Fairy money.

So how does this all average out, once you account for income? We don't have to guess. Punch anything into the cost of living calculator -- the one that uses the exact same formula that the government uses to decide things like tax rates -- and you'll see that the prices of most things have stayed pretty constant over the years. High-end manufactured goods have gotten cheaper. Much cheaper, as manufacturing costs drop.

In 1954, the cost of a high-end Westinghouse color TV, with a massive 15-inch screen, was $1,295. No, not adjusted for inflation. That was the actual price at the time -- half of the yearly income for some families. Everybody writes this off as if it's a constant of the universe ("of course new technology gets exponentially better and cheaper with time!") instead counting it among the benefits of the modern system. Why? This economic system has resulted in handheld devices that can access all the information in the town library, at a price affordable to the working man, and all we can do is complain about the cost of unlimited data plans?

And the golden age of the $500 car... how many of you come from families with two cars? Statistically it's most of you, and far more than what it would have been in 1960, when there were half as many cars on a per-capita basis in the U.S. (it averaged about one car per household -- so if you had two, someone else had none).

And taxes? Again, the numbers don't lie -- in the U.S. taxes are the lowest they've been since 1950. The government even threw you an extra two percent reduction in payroll tax as a cherry on top. The U.S. has the second-lowest taxes among developed countries.

Yes, we're going through a worldwide downturn and yes, a bunch of you are unemployed. Those of you who are reading this at a homeless shelter, we're not saying it's all in your head. But on the whole we could use a little perspective.

"People Are Getting Stupider."

The Complaint:

"Two words: 'Jersey Shore.' People are getting stupider by the minute, and the stupid people are breeding faster than the smart people. They watch mindless reality shows, and all anybody cares about is celebrity gossip and bullshit. Teenagers are obsessed with Twitter and video games and have probably never read a book."

The Reality:

IQ scores have risen 24 points since 1914. And on top of that, you have to account for the Flynn effect, discovered by James R. Flynn, which is a way of compensating for increased education (but more on that in a moment). The intelligence quotient is set up in such a way that an average score is 100. So, what do you do if people keep getting higher and higher scores, to the point where 100 is no longer the average? You rejigger the way scores are calculated so that it goes back down to 100.

So, while IQ scores may appear to be similar from one generation to the next, the scores have to be constantly adjusted back down to 100 because children are doing better and better on the test. If you scored 100 on a test back in the day, you might actually be considered slightly mentally challenged now.

Meanwhile, the quality of education has been going up for the past 40 years, with children scoring higher in reading and mathematics. That's not just in the U.S. -- it's worldwide. Graduation rates, too, are on an upward trend. So by the sheer numbers, we are actively creating useful members of society at an increasing rate. The world collectively is getting smarter. If you treat the combined mass of human knowledge as a resource for the future (and you should), then we're drowning in riches like Scrooge McDuck.

It seems like part of the negative perception is from trying to judge the intelligence of a people by their pop culture. But remember that most people spend their whole day at work or school thinking and making decisions and doing complex troubleshooting -- they treat entertainment as the break from all that.

And if you think that it's a sad sign of the times that Jackass 3D made a ton of money at the box office, hop in your time machine and go back 80 years. You'll find audiences howling with laughter at the Three Stooges.

"All This Processed Food Is Killing Us."

The Complaint:

"Just look at a label. High-fructose corn syrup? 'Phenylketonurics'? Hell, a simple chicken dinner may have 36 ingredients. Who knows what chemical preservative bullshit we eat in an average day? What happened to old-time family meals, when a roast was just a roast, and a loaf of bread just had flour and yeast and other natural ingredients?"

The Reality:

Think those ingredients in your TV dinner are scary? Prior to 1966, there was no ingredient labeling of prepared foods. You bought a tin of meat-and-potato stew, and what was in it was left to the goodwill of the manufacturer, who may have had to fatten profits by feeding people elk hooves and sawdust. You simply didn't know what you were eating.

The ingredient and nutrition labeling acts changed all that. Sure, food manufacturers can still try to lie and put bug shit and viruses in your food, but if caught, they get to pull all of their product off the shelf and dump it, at their own expense. And all those scary chemicals on the ingredients list? Many of those are preservatives. Meant to preserve the food. So it isn't rotten when you eat it.

Also, let's not forget that the refrigerator and freezer are both recent inventions -- go back to the Great Depression or earlier and you find that refrigerators cost more than a car. So keeping food cold or preserved was a crapshoot, with listeria, botulism and the shits acting as the dessert to granny's wholesome down-home country meal.

Oh, and feel free to browse through some recipes from the 1950s -- savor the Baked Corn Chex 'N' Cheese Custard and Spam fritters.

Again, we're not saying there isn't some gross stuff in your food -- there totally is and we have examined it in some detail -- just as we weren't saying that there are no stupid people in the world in our first entry up there.

All we're saying is that we're not at the disastrous nadir of some long downward trend.

"Crime Is Out of Control.”

The Complaint:

"A member of Congress gets gunned down in yet another mass shooting. You can't turn on the news for five seconds without hearing of a child being abducted and mutilated, or a massive gang war along the Mexican border. Every city in America has one section that you wouldn't dare drive through at night. Now compare that to the 1950s, when nobody even locked their doors at night. What changed?"

The Reality:

There absolutely was a huge crime wave in the 1980s, thanks to the crack epidemic (this graph shows the spike in murders in L.A., for instance). But the numbers do not lie: Crime, property crime, theft and burglary have actually been dropping since about 1993. Dropping and dropping, below even where we were before drug violence skewed the stats upward.

If you look at the homicide rate per 100,000 people, which is one of the only crime stats reliably tracked through the 1900s and into today, you can see that not only is it the lowest since the 1950s, but that it's quite a lot lower than it was in the 1970s and even the 1930s. (And it's a scaling formula, meaning it isn't skewed by population.) Now why would the crime rate be so high in the 1930s?

When the economy is bad, people get desperate, and desperate people will do whatever they can to survive, right? And here we sit, 80 years later, with the worst economy since the Great Depression. How's the crime rate faring now? It's lower than it was before the recession. A few days ago, the FBI published its statistics for the first half of 2010, which show that crime has dropped further still.

What has not dropped is the number of TV shows and news features about crime, and newspapers' need to report on violence whenever it occurs. Therefore, the only thing about crime that seems to be going up is the perception of how bad it really is.

So, by the sheer numbers, you would be just as safe keeping your doors unlocked at night as your grandparents were back in "the good old days."

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_18983_5-complaints-about-modern-life-that-are-statistically-b.s._p2.html#ixzz2dCDRKTsF

Success is so sweet!

Success is sweet!  A friend of my grandson's is staying with us until he finds a job and can get his own place to live.  When we typed up his resume, I found out that while he was living in New Mexico he didn't graduate from high school.  Well! Anyone in my family can tell you that news like that just kicks me into high gear.  

I found that the library in Chandler offered GED tutoring and that the test was going to be given on August 24th.  He went to the library and got all the info, he registered online, and I loaned him the money to pay the fee.  He took the test last Saturday and tonight he got his results.  He passed with flying colors! 

What a satisfying feeling, knowing that I helped give him something that will help him from now on.