Category: Education

Natural selection, at work?

I want to be like you!

Recently there was an event at which Bill Gates and Warren Buffett answered questions from students of the Columbia Business School in New York. I referred to the event recently when writing about Warren Buffett.

So why were these students interested in Messrs Gates and Buffett? It is, of course, because they are successful.

While different people define success in many different ways, we can be reasonably sure that, in the context of a business school, most of those business students would categorise Gates and Buffett as being among the most successful people alive.

So what did the students ask about? Well, of course, they asked about success! The questions were of two main types.

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Are you there, but not present?

Communicating effectively means being totally mentally connected.

I have been working with a client recently through a very tough performance improvement plan.

As part of the plan, my client had to be videoed working with people in his workplace. I had to observe the video and then give feedback on it.

He seemed very efficient and made notes whilst he worked with each person. Occasionally though, something didn’t seem to be quite right. When I watched more closely I realised what was wrong. He wasn’t present. He wasn’t really connecting with the people he was working with.

It made me reflect on how much more effective he would have been if he had been able to connect with these people? I wondered if he was even able to understood about being present and what that meant?

By Jon Lavin

Remarkable people: Tim Smit

The Eden Project in Cornwall, England

To lead the project which took an old clay pit in a remote corner of the UK and converted it into a world class environmental visitor attraction is a tremendous achievement.

Homo sapiens? A game show!

Tim Smit had some fun with the business community at the 2009 Annual Convention of the UK Institute of Directors. Everyone, including he, was in their best business attire, but very few people could get away with crumpled shirt and jeans!

However, he has a serious message about the environment (1:55) and he knows a thing or two about people as well!

Monty Python: is there intelligent life on earth?

For fun, and on an Australian tack, Eric Idle is not so sure.

By John Lewis

The Power of Words

Never give up is so much more than just a cliché.

Regular readers will know that fellow LfD author, John Lewis, has been posting regularly on the subject of remarkable people.  I have found them inspiring, to the extent that I’m going to depart from my usual safe area of economics and tell a personal story.  It’s a story of family dynamics, the power of sibling bonds and why hope and trust in the future, especially for young people, is so, so important.  I have called my story the Power of Words.

—–oooOOOooo—–

I can hear it like it was yesterday, resonating in my head, crowding out the doubts and negative thoughts, filling my mind with possibilities:  yes, I CAN do it!

Then ....

I was in my junior year of college and had no idea what I was going to do with my life.  It was becoming quite a burden.

Because I had always been good in school, i.e., the “smart one,” everyone had expected so much of me when I went to school.  I really envied my older sister; she had always been the pretty one, the popular one, the one who got invited to the prom by not one, but three young men.

And, it seemed to me at the time, she was so lucky because no one expected her to go out and conquer the world after high school.   She didn’t go to college; she went to secretarial school and studied to become an airline attendant instead.

I envied her in every way possible!  But at least I had something: I was “the smart one,” or so I thought!  Years later, my sister went back to school to study psychology.  She earned a 4.0 [four straight ‘A’s. Ed] and was invited to continue on to earn her Ph.D.  I’ll be darned if she wasn’t the smart one, too! And she is a wonderful and thoughtful person to boot! But I digress.

Read more of my story

What makes “a good school”?

A very obvious explanation of good schooling from a British perspective.

There is frequent reference in the media to “good schools”, usually concerning how to create one or get one’s children into one. It is clearly assumed by writers that use this phrase that everyone understands what it means. I am not so sure ….

So what exactly IS “a good school” as far as a parent who wants the best for his children is concerned?

Do the teachers make “a good school”?
Well, teachers are clearly an important contributor to the quality of a school, but are they the critical factor? I think not ….

The premises, facilities, equipment and environment?
The answer is for me the same as for the first question.

The relevance, logic, variety and quality of the curriculum?
Once again, we have the same answer ….. and in truth, it is not too difficult to work out a curriculum that corresponds to these criteria.

So, what IS the critical factor then?

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Black holes, colliders and paradoxes

This is a very strange world that we live in.

It would be fair to say that my knowledge about what I am writing in this Post is minimal to the point of total ignorance.  So why open my mouth and prove it!  Because the conquest of fundamental questions about our world is not only an example of mankind at its greatest but also something of broad appeal.

That is proved by the continuing popularity of the BBC Television Series – Horizon.  In that series there have recently been two fascinating programmes: Who’s afraid of a big Black Hole? and How long is a piece of string? (Readers outside the UK will not be able to view these programmes.)

Here are the programme summaries:

Black holes are one of the most destructive forces in the universe, capable of tearing a planet apart and swallowing an entire star. Yet scientists now believe they could hold the key to answering the ultimate question – what was there before the Big Bang?

The trouble is that researching them is next to impossible. Black holes are by definition invisible and there’s no scientific theory able to explain them. Despite these obvious obstacles, Horizon meets the astronomers attempting to image a black hole for the very first time and the theoretical physicists getting ever closer to unlocking their mysteries. It’s a story that takes us into the heart of a black hole and to the very edge of what we think we know about the universe.

and

Alan Davies attempts to answer the proverbial question: how long is a piece of string? But what appears to be a simple task soon turns into a mind-bending voyage of discovery where nothing is as it seems.

An encounter with leading mathematician Marcus du Sautoy reveals that Alan’s short length of string may in fact be infinitely long. When Alan attempts to measure his string at the atomic scale, events take an even stranger turn. Not only do objects appear in many places at once, but reality itself seems to be an illusion.

Ultimately, Alan finds that measuring his piece of string could – in theory at least – create a black hole, bringing about the end of the world.

Read more of this strange world

Education, Literacy and Text-Messaging …

English Paper – Question 9, bmbl gr8 cu focl.  Discuss!

Well, every day one learns something new and today I found out that British  GCSEs (the state exams taken by pupils at age 16) will henceforth include a section on “text-messaging”.

Yup, you read it right … at a time when many employers are complaining that even university graduates cannot write and spell correctly we are going to spend time in secondary school practising for exam questions on text-messaging, or “the art of not writing proper English because it is so fiddly”.

text message speak

There are – sadly – so many idiotic things happening in Britain these days that one has sort of got inured, but this takes the biscuit. And the new courses will be not only on the messaging itself but on the “etiquette” of the art …… Am I living in a parallel universe?

What is the “etiquette” of text-messaging? The whole point about this form of communication is its anarchic, personal style. The internet and mobile phoning  are two of the few areas of our life where we can communicate exactly as we like with whom we like. Why this OBSESSION with regulating everything? LEAVE IT ALONE!! And CERTAINLY don’t waste precious school time TEACHING how to text message “PROPERLY”.

And as for “PROPERLY”, WHO exactly is to decide? Ah, we need “norms” … we can’t have anything UNREGULATED after all, especially not in modern Britain. Better set up a commission, preferably at EU level and vast expense, with a President (Oh, they DO so love Presidents) to decide for us HOW to text message with “etiquette”.

When I read this I thought it must be April 1st, but “No”, it is serious …. Pupils “will have to write an essay on the etiquette and grammar of texting, using their own messages as examples – earning up to ten per cent of their overall English GCSE mark.”

But the best is yet to come. It seems that this new departure is “part of the Studying Spoken Language module intended to make GCSEs harder.”

“Harder”? Who wrote this garbage? How can anyone claim that and keep a straight face? And of course, once you have text-messaging on the syllabus and in the exam, then teachers will start to PREPARE for it …. precious time will be devoted to it in class …

“Plonkett – why are you on your mobile phone?”

“I’m just practising for my exam, Sir.”

“Oh, that’s all right then.”

The whole thing makes me despair actually. We are paying civil servants large amounts of money to come out with this nonsense. Many kids can hardly read and write now; apart from anything else it is a clear message that writing in textspeak is OK and that the other stuff is a bore.

“Studying  Spoken Language”? If this is the aim, why not get kids to study speeches of great orators? Gandhi, Luther King, Churchill, Kennedy?  Or even of some of the more eloquent current MPs? William Hague, Vincent Cable and so on? Study what they say? How they get their message across? Discuss and analyse their arguments? That would be fascinating, no? And the kids might at the same time learn something about how their society – and therefore lives – are governed.

Well, No – we have to have “text-messaging” ….

Sorry, our kids deserve better, and so does the British taxpayer.

By Chris Snuggs

Oh, and by the way, the answer to the question at the top of the post is: busting my brains laughing, great, see you, fall of chair laughing. DILLIGAS is all I can ‘say’.