Finally, the photos from our summer vacation are up in the usual place. Maybe that means videos might come, too, someday…
Note that if the host server still has a restriction on how many requests per minute are allowed from the same address, the pictures may stop loading at some point. If that happens, go make yourself some tea and try the album a little later.
Put on your cynic hat for a moment, and answer the following questions.
What do you do when you’re on top of a society that believes in meritocracy, but you want your kids to stay on top?
What if your society believes its schools help create a meritocracy, because kids get the grades they deserve and, as a consequence, the university acceptances and jobs and scholarships they deserve?
According to an article on Yahoo! finance, the answer is clear: maintain the gap between you and the masses by spending more money on your child’s education – by moving to a good district, or paying for private schools or tutoring. The article claims this simple circumvention of the alleged “meritocracy generator” is widening the wealth gap, because rich kids go to better schools, get better jobs, and get richer.
In other words, public schools generate meritocracy (if they even do that) only for those who can’t afford to opt out. And pouring more money into the educational system won’t help, because the rich can always outspend us. So, obviously, the solution has to be to make public school mandatory for everyone, and ban both private schools and private tutors, and set up rules so that rich kids cannot parlay their parent’s leverage into any advantage. But of course, that’s discrimination, because if inherited wealth cannot confer any advantage, then why should inherited smarts or inherited athletic ability or inherited good looks parlay any advantage? This approach leads us straight down the Harrison Bergeron path.
If, then, we can’t forbid the rich to outspend us in education, how can we work at closing that education gap their wealth seems to be creating? As mentioned, the public school system can’t be the answer to that, because it can’t compete with its better-financed private lookalikes. What’s left, in my opinion, is to spend money smarter, and homeschooling – where achievement appears to be independent of income and spending – seems to be one way to do it.
Can you think of other approaches?
Josh Kaufman is a guy who’s held a TED talk. With the proliferation of TED talks, that doesn’t seem to set him apart much, but this does: he’s a guy whose TED talk I’ve watched.
TED talks take around 20 minutes, and you’re welcome to watch the talk in its entirety, but for my own benefit I’ve jotted down his four steps for learning a new skill here.
Adam Leipzig is another guy who’s held a TED talk that I’ve watched. His is half the length of Josh Kaufman’s, which gives him a leg up. His contention is that the happiest people focus outward, on serving others, and he suggests thinking about the following set of questions:
Once you’ve gone through these questions and answered them to your satisfaction, Leipzig suggests changing your answer to the ubiquitous question “What do you do?” from a description of your job to a description of how others change as a result of your work. So, for instance, replace “I head the metallography lab in a steel mill” with “I make sure our customers have reliable data for their safety-relevant car parts” or something along that line. It’s still not perfect: the “change” component is still missing, so I’ve still got some work to do…
Over on sursumcorda’s blog, there’s a post about noticing the numbers we read. I’ve recently noticed wrong numbers in two otherwise excellent books – errors that I think are frequent enough that mentioning them here won’t hurt.
The first instance comes in “Switch,†the Heath brothers’ fascinating examination of what helps and what hinders change both in personal and organizational practice. In their tenth chapter, “Rally the Herd,†they discuss how apt reporting of peer behavior can be used to spread proper behavior. They tell the story of a review time turnaround at a peer-reviewed journal called MSOM:
When Gerard Cachon took over MSOM, most peer reviews were taking from seven to eight months… …Cachon announced that MSOM would review papers within sixty-five days – that was 72 percent faster than its previous average!
Now, the 72 percent don’t appear out of nowhere: 65 days are roughly 28 percent of seven to eight months, so it’s correct (albeit oddly accurate) to say Cachon wanted to reduce the average review period by 72%. However, “faster†implies speed, not duration: and then the Heath brothers understate their case. The original review cycle ran at a speed of about 1.6 reviews per year; Cachon wanted to raise the speed to 5.6 reviews per year. The difference – 4.0 reviews per year – is a whopping 250%!
The second instance comes in “Built to Last,” the business book by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras which investigates what attributes determine the long-term fate of a company. In their eighth chapter, “Home-Grown Management,” they write:
Of 113 chief executives for which we have data in the visionary companies, only 3.5 percent came directly from outside the company, versus 22.1 percent of 140 CEOs at the comparison companies. In other words, the visionary companies were six times more likely to promote insiders to chief executive than the comparison companies [emphasis theirs].
While it is true that 22.1 is roughly six times 3.5, that factor represents the relative likelihood of hiring an outsider, not of promoting an insider. For insider promoting, the factor is far less majestic: 96.5 percent is only 1.2 times more than 77.9 percent, making the visionary companies only a good fifth more visionary than their peers…
Here’s the first chunk of Maggie P. videos.
Microphone game, Creekside play, Walking the plank, Baby microphone, Monopoly, Joseph goes under, All three in the creek, More creek play, Daniel goes under, Vivienne floats, Patient gets fed.
Here is the next chunk from the compact camera. There are 33 more from our video camera, and 138 from Grandma…
Joseph reads and walks, Frog and Toad get read, Daniel finds a powered walker, Joseph and Vivienne melt marshmallows, Joseph and Daniel make a racket, Joseph on the monkey bars (again), Vivienne gets monkey bar help, Joseph and Vivienne slide/are sent down the fireman’s pole, Bedtime play with friends.
As you can imagine, we have quite a number of photos and videos from our trip to the US. I’ll post them in chunks rather than shooting for one single home run. This small chunk is from June, before I joined the fray.
Vivienne jumps into the pool, Daniel shuts the forbidden drawer, Daniel has fun with his rocker (again), Pool action, Cleaning up blocks, Daniel finds a walker.
Along with the videos posted this week, there were also photos on the camera. They’re up at the usual place, with the usual credentials.
We have a small digital camera that also takes videos. It takes them in AVI format, so a few of those videos and the memory card is full. Here they are – downloaded off the camera because the card filled up…
Joseph playing a reaction game at the Technorama special exhibit at the Emmen Center, Vivienne playing the same game, Joseph and Faith singing Happy Birthday to Vivienne, Faith and Joseph making cookies, a quick panorama of the cousins in and around the pool, Book Club, Math quiz part 1, Math quiz part 2, Babies’ turn to star.
The photos are up in the usual place. It’s worth asking how during a two-week period where grown-ups were not outnumbered we managed to record fewer videos and take fewer pictures than usual.
Joseph practices Hiragana, Vivienne’s walkie bike, Joseph rides solo, Daniel uses a walker, Daniel drinks from a cup, Daniel makes music, Daniel adds a final flourish, Daniel laughing, Daniel discovers the keyboard, Baby attack, Daniel flops, Jazzy Dan, Daniel flops again.