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The Most Focused Kids in the World?
In her new, provocatively titled book The Smartest Kids in the World, journalist Amanda Ripley tells the story of Kim, a 15-year-old Oklahoma girl who has the good fortune to spend a year going to school in Pietarsaari, on Finland’s west coast. Kim is fortunate because she has landed quite by chance in a public school system that Ripley identifies as one of the world’s best, a model of international academic performance year in and year out. Ripley reports on Kim’s experience, and on the lives of her Finnish classmates, as she tries to identify the reasons for Finnish kids’ superior academic performance.
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No Fate! Or Fate. What’s Your Choice?
High on my list of guilty pleasures are the Terminator movies, especially T2, which I just watched again the other day. In a crucial scene in this futuristic thriller, hero Sarah Connor is close to despair in a Mexican desert camp, beaten down by the daunting responsibility of saving the world. Sitting alone at a picnic table, she dozes off and dreams of the nuclear devastation that has been foretold and of all the people who will perish. When she wakes with a start, she grabs her Bowie knife and begins carving into the table. She then jumps into action, as the camera lingers on the words she has scratched out: “No fate.” This epiphany transforms Sarah.
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Tiny Foragers: How Do We Know What’s Safe To Eat?
It’s the holiday season, and we’ll soon be decorating our home with greenery—holly sprigs, poinsettia, maybe a mistletoe, and of course the tree, probably some kind of spruce. We’ll have young kids around, and most of this greenery is benign. But some of these plants are toxic, possibly even deadly, if eaten. So what we are doing in effect is creating a treacherous world for our youngest revelers to explore. Re-creating really. Our holiday home will be a microcosm of the ancient world in which our early ancestors lived, and died. Throughout evolutionary history, humans have gathered leaves and berries to eat, but they have done this with little information to guide their choices.
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Is Drinking Alone An Early Warning Sign?
The rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous are full of stories, many of them about early drinking days. The vast majority of alcoholics first experimented with drinking as teenagers, and usually for social reasons—to fit in with their friends, to overcome shyness and feel more comfortable in gatherings, and so forth. But every once in a while, someone will tell a different sort of tale—an often wrenching tale of drinking alone from the very beginning, without friends, without social pleasure, just to drink. Such early, solitary drinking is rare, but not unheard of. Of course, most people start drinking for social purposes, and most of those go on to lives of moderate social drinking.
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Why Do Giraffes Have Long Necks?
Anyone who has seen this majestic creature in the wild, nibbling away at the top of an acacia tree, has to marvel at the wonder of evolution. The giraffe’s long neck is a perfect adaptation to the animal’s natural habitat. Clearly the giraffe evolved this uncommon and helpful trait in order to reach those nourishing leaves. That’s how natural selection works. If you’re a 6-year-old. As appealing as this explanation is, it shows a complete misunderstanding of the concept of adaptation by natural selection, a key concept in the theory of evolution. What’s wrong with the 6-year-old’s idea is not its focus on the neck’s function.
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When Praise Hurts: The Psychology Of Gushing
Search the Internet for “101 Ways to Praise a Child” and you’ll find a poster--actually many variations of a single poster. Some are available to download, or if you want quantities, you can purchase the posters from a discount school supply house, laminated if you choose. Some are simple black-and-white typography, while others have bright, four-color, illustrated borders. They are available for classroom teachers, for speech and language therapists, for drug educators—and of course for parents. I don’t know the precise origins of the “101 Ways to Praise a Child” poster, but it was no doubt a product of the self-esteem movement that began to sweep the nation’s schools in the ‘90s.
