Pixar’s Presto

Bill Gates – how do you make education better?

Bill Gates, philantropist :)

“A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
[...]
So, how do you make education better?

A top quartile (top 25%) teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.

What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like?”

They’re not old and they donn’t have masters, which is what the educational system rewards.
They simply have students with good test results, and the teacher’s syndicates made the records of this tests unavailable. By law.

“You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.“

Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.

When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.

How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.

Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does.”

The Power of Time Orientation – Philip Zimbardo @ TED

Philip Zimbardo: “Now lets tempt four-year-olds, giving them a treat. They can have one marshmallow now. But if they wait until the experimenter comes back, they can have two. Of course it pays, if you like marshmallows, to wait. What happens is 2/3rds of the kids give in to temptation. They cannot wait. The others, of course, wait. They resist the temptation. They delay the now for later.

Walter Mischel, my colleague at Stanford, went back 14 years later, to try to discover
what was different about those kids.
There were enormous differences between kids who resisted and kids who yielded, in many ways. The kids who resisted scored 250 points higher on the SAT. That’s enormous. That’s like a whole set of different IQ points. They didn’t get in as much trouble. They were better students. They were self-confident and determined. And the key for me today, the key for you, is they were future-focused instead of present-focused.
…

So, very quickly, what is the optimal time profile?

• High on past-positive.
• Moderately high on future.
• And moderate on present-hedonism.
• And always low on past-negative and present-fatalism.

So the optimal temporal mix is

• what you get from the past – past-positive give you roots. You connect your family, identity and your self.
• What you get from the future is wings to soar to new destinations, new challenges.
• What you get from the present hedonism is the energy, the energy to explore yourself, places, people, sensuality.”

Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom on TED.com

Barry Schwartz: “And, perhaps most important, as teachers, we should strive to be the ordinary heroes, the moral exemplars, to the people we mentor. And there are a few things that we have to remember as teachers.

• One is that we are always teaching. Someone is always watching. The camera is always on.
• [...]they have come to the realization that the single most important thing kids need to learn is character.

1. They need to learn to respect themselves.
2. They need to learn to respect their schoolmates.
3. They need to learn to respect their teachers. And, most important,
4. they need to learn to respect learning.

That’s the principle objective. If you do that, the rest is just pretty much a coast downhill.
And the teachers: the way you teach these things to the kids is by having the teachers and all the other staff embody it every minute of every day. “

4 ways to make the power of gr(e)atitude work

So, 3 (times 4) good things today:

Find / Remember / Recognize / Thank (at least):

• 3 people that I’m grateful to have in my life.
• 3 abilities that I’m glad I have
• 3 things I’m grateful I achieved
• 3 things I’m grateful to have/happen around

Also related to a former post, here’s a good part from an article wrote by David J. Pollay on the Positive Psychology News Daily site:

Gratitude Is a Bridge to Your Positive Future ©

Gratitude provides you with the courage to pursue your ambition in life.  Gratitude reminds you of everything that you have; what you remember strengthens your bridge to a positive future.  And there are four key ways to reinforce your foundation of gratitude.

A Reminder of Your Key People

First, gratitude reminds you of all the key people in your life.  Think of these individuals now.  Who are the people who advise you?  Who are the people who challenge you?  Who are the people who set you straight when you veer off course?  And who are the people who give you a hug when you need one?  Be grateful for these people; strengthen your bridge.

A Reminder of Your Strengths

Second, gratitude reminds you of your strengths.  Think of what comes naturally to you.  What do you do well?  What do you enjoy doing?  What do others say you excel in?  What are your gifts?  Be grateful for what makes you unique; strengthen your bridge.

A Reminder of Your Achievements

Third, gratitude reminds you of what you have achieved.  Think about what you have accomplished in your life.  What goals have you met?  What successes have you enjoyed?  Be grateful for your achievements; strengthen your bridge.

A Reminder of the Wonders Around You

Finally, gratitude reminds you of the wonders around you:  the warmth of the sun, the glow of the moon and stars, the current of a river, the ripples of a lake, the waves of an ocean, the comfort of a breeze, the colors of flowers, the majesty of tall trees, the utility of buildings, the speed of planes, and the power of trains.  Be grateful for the miracles of nature and the wondrous products of man; strengthen your bridge.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, pastor, and Nazi resister, wrote about gratitude in this way:  “In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”  When you fill your life with gratitude, you will experience the feeling of abundance in your relationships, your strengths, your achievements, and everything that is miraculous and powerful around you.

TV pollution

A picture is worth 1000 words. But the TV shows me the ugly face of this statement.

For more of Clay Bennet’s cartoons, you can follow this link:

http://www.csmonitor.com/news/cartoonClassicsStatic.html

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Useful Firefox extensions

(BYM) Blank Your Monitor + Easy Reading – Protects your eyes a little by turning the background of the webpages to black. You can easily de/activate it with the button in the statusbar.

No Squint – Simple and effective – set the zoom level of a page and it will remember it. Also, it brings back the zoom-with-Ctrl+mousewheel feature.

WikiLook – Don’t know what a word means? Install WikiLook, select the word and move the mouse over it – a definition will popup – clean, fast & unobtrusive = elegant.

Multirow Bookmarks Toolbar – does well what it says

Read it later – Found something interesting but don’t have the time for it right now? – just click a button and you’ll have it available when you want to.

AdblockPlus – No overt publicity = less crap on my Web, less pollution, cleaner, faster browsing experience.

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