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How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses
Wired: José Urbina López Primary School sits next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school serves residents of Matamoros, a dusty, sunbaked city of 489,000 that is a flash point in the war on drugs. There are regular shoot-outs, and it’s not uncommon for locals to find bodies scattered in the street in the morning. To get to the school, students walk along a white dirt road that parallels a fetid canal. On a recent morning there was a 1940s-era tractor, a decaying boat in a ditch, and a herd of goats nibbling gray strands of grass.
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Ethical Parenting
New York Magazine: Imagine this scenario: It’s a Tuesday evening and you’re just home from work, still panting from the subway ride, when you determine without doubt that your fourth-grader has lice. The teeny pale eggs, they could be dandruff, but they’re not; ugh, dozens of them, everywhere, clinging to the silky hairs, and all you can think is, Not tonight. Having been through this before, you know that the only way to help arrest a schoolwide epidemic is to spend hours, three at least, dealing with the vermin right now—combing, vacuuming, washing, drying—not including the inter-spousal fighting and the hysterical kid meltdown that invariably accompanies such an outbreak.
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Future Seems Closer than the Past
Inside Science: Sometimes the day seems to drag on and time can’t move fast enough. Other days, time seems to fly by and time gets away from us. In general, people experience time as moving toward the future and away from the past. In a new study, social psychologists found that people see the distance of past or future events very differently and that difference, speculates one of the authors, could affect their overall happiness. “So, a week from now people reported that they felt psychologically closer than a week ago even though it was the same objective amount of time in either direction,” said Eugene Caruso, social psychologist at the University of Chicago.
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You Lookin’ At Me?
Newsweek: Be careful using eye contact: It can backfire. Sure, you've always heard that steadily meeting the gaze of the person across the table shows that you're confident and trustworthy, and that you might even know what you're talking about. But a newly released study suggests that locking eyes with your opponent isn't always a good way to win an argument. On the contrary, it can convince the other person that you're merely being obstinate. And what do you do then? Eyeball-to-eyeball communication between humans appears to be more complicated than previously thought.
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Talking Directly to Toddlers Strengthens Their Language Skills
Just as young children need nourishing food to build physical strength, they also need linguistic nutrition for optimal development of language and cognitive abilities. New research from psychology researchers at Stanford University shows that by talking more to their toddler, parents help the child learn to process language more quickly, which accelerates vocabulary growth. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. It is well-known that socioeconomic status (SES) plays a role in language development.
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It’s Good to Be Kaiser
Pacific Standard: As the political philosopher Mel Brooks once noted, it’s good to be king. But according to a new study, it’s also good to simply have the name King. At least, that’s true in Germany. Researchers report Germans with “noble-sounding surnames” such as Kaiser (emperor), Fürst (prince) or König (king) were more likely to hold managerial positions than countrymen with names denoting more common occupations. Apparently, having a name that denotes authority is a good way to get promoted.
