SLOW Movement

NY Times: Is Algebra Neccessary

 

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July 28, 2012

Is Algebra Necessary?

By ANDREW HACKER

A TYPICAL American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with algebra. In both high school and college, all too many students are expected to fail. Why do we subject American students to this ordeal? I’ve found myself moving toward the strong view that we shouldn’t.

My question extends beyond algebra and applies more broadly to the usual mathematics sequence, from geometry through calculus. State regents and legislators — and much of the public — take it as self-evident that every young person should be made to master polynomial functions and parametric equations.

There are many defenses of algebra and the virtue of learning it. Most of them sound reasonable on first hearing; many of them I once accepted. But the more I examine them, the clearer it seems that they are largely or wholly wrong — unsupported by research or evidence, or based on wishful logic. (I’m not talking about quantitative skills, critical for informed citizenship and personal finance, but a very different ballgame.)

This debate matters. Making mathematics mandatory prevents us from discovering and developing young talent. In the interest of maintaining rigor, we’re actually depleting our pool of brainpower. I say this as a writer and social scientist whose work relies heavily on the use of numbers. My aim is not to spare students from a difficult subject, but to call attention to the real problems we are causing by misdirecting precious resources.

The toll mathematics takes begins early. To our nation’s shame, one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school. In South Carolina, 34 percent fell away in 2008-9, according to national data released last year; for Nevada, it was 45 percent. Most of the educators I’ve talked with cite algebra as the major academic reason.

Shirley Bagwell, a longtime Tennessee teacher, warns that “to expect all students to master algebra will cause more students to drop out.” For those who stay in school, there are often “exit exams,” almost all of which contain an algebra component. In Oklahoma, 33 percent failed to pass last year, as did 35 percent in West Virginia.

Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white. In New Mexico, 43 percent of white students fell below “proficient,” along with 39 percent in Tennessee. Even well-endowed schools have otherwise talented students who are impeded by algebra, to say nothing of calculus and trigonometry.

California’s two university systems, for instance, consider applications only from students who have taken three years of mathematics and in that way exclude many applicants who might excel in fields like art or history. Community college students face an equally prohibitive mathematics wall. A study of two-year schools found that fewer than a quarter of their entrants passed the algebra classes they were required to take.

“There are students taking these courses three, four, five times,” says Barbara Bonham of Appalachian State University. While some ultimately pass, she adds, “many drop out.”

Another dropout statistic should cause equal chagrin. Of all who embark on higher education, only 58 percent end up with bachelor’s degrees. The main impediment to graduation: freshman math. The City University of New York, where I have taught since 1971, found that 57 percent of its students didn’t pass its mandated algebra course. The depressing conclusion of a faculty report: “failing math at all levels affects retention more than any other academic factor.” A national sample of transcripts found mathematics had twice as many F’s and D’s compared as other subjects.

Nor will just passing grades suffice. Many colleges seek to raise their status by setting a high mathematics bar. Hence, they look for 700 on the math section of the SAT, a height attained in 2009 by only 9 percent of men and 4 percent of women. And it’s not just Ivy League colleges that do this: at schools like Vanderbilt, Rice and Washington University in St. Louis, applicants had best be legacies or athletes if they have scored less than 700 on their math SATs.

It’s true that students in Finland, South Korea and Canada score better on mathematics tests. But it’s their perseverance, not their classroom algebra, that fits them for demanding jobs.

Nor is it clear that the math we learn in the classroom has any relation to the quantitative reasoning we need on the job. John P. Smith III, an educational psychologist at Michigan State University who has studied math education, has found that “mathematical reasoning in workplaces differs markedly from the algorithms taught in school.” Even in jobs that rely on so-called STEM credentials — science, technology, engineering, math — considerable training occurs after hiring, including the kinds of computations that will be required. Toyota, for example, recently chose to locate a plant in a remote Mississippi county, even though its schools are far from stellar. It works with a nearby community college, which has tailored classes in “machine tool mathematics.” 

That sort of collaboration has long undergirded German apprenticeship programs. I fully concur that high-tech knowledge is needed to sustain an advanced industrial economy. But we’re deluding ourselves if we believe the solution is largely academic.

A skeptic might argue that, even if our current mathematics education discourages large numbers of students, math itself isn’t to blame. Isn’t this discipline a critical part of education, providing quantitative tools and honing conceptual abilities that are indispensable — especially in our high tech age? In fact, we hear it argued that we have a shortage of graduates with STEM credentials.

Of course, people should learn basic numerical skills: decimals, ratios and estimating, sharpened by a good grounding in arithmetic. But a definitive analysis by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce forecasts that in the decade ahead a mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above. And if there is a shortage of STEM graduates, an equally crucial issue is how many available positions there are for men and women with these skills. A January 2012 analysis from the Georgetown center found 7.5 percent unemployment for engineering graduates and 8.2 percent among computer scientists.

Peter Braunfeld of the University of Illinois tells his students, “Our civilization would collapse without mathematics.” He’s absolutely right.

Algebraic algorithms underpin animated movies, investment strategies and airline ticket prices. And we need people to understand how those things work and to advance our frontiers.

Quantitative literacy clearly is useful in weighing all manner of public policies, from the Affordable Care Act, to the costs and benefits of environmental regulation, to the impact of climate change. Being able to detect and identify ideology at work behind the numbers is of obvious use. Ours is fast becoming a statistical age, which raises the bar for informed citizenship. What is needed is not textbook formulas but greater understanding of where various numbers come from, and what they actually convey.

What of the claim that mathematics sharpens our minds and makes us more intellectually adept as individuals and a citizen body? It’s true that mathematics requires mental exertion. But there’s no evidence that being able to prove (x² + y²)² = (x² - y²)² + (2xy)² leads to more credible political opinions or social analysis.

Many of those who struggled through a traditional math regimen feel that doing so annealed their character. This may or may not speak to the fact that institutions and occupations often install prerequisites just to look rigorous — hardly a rational justification for maintaining so many mathematics mandates. Certification programs for veterinary technicians require algebra, although none of the graduates I’ve met have ever used it in diagnosing or treating their patients. Medical schools like Harvard and Johns Hopkins demand calculus of all their applicants, even if it doesn’t figure in the clinical curriculum, let alone in subsequent practice. Mathematics is used as a hoop, a badge, a totem to impress outsiders and elevate a profession’s status.

It’s not hard to understand why Caltech and M.I.T. want everyone to be proficient in mathematics. But it’s not easy to see why potential poets and philosophers face a lofty mathematics bar. Demanding algebra across the board actually skews a student body, not necessarily for the better.

I WANT to end on a positive note. Mathematics, both pure and applied, is integral to our civilization, whether the realm is aesthetic or electronic. But for most adults, it is more feared or revered than understood. It’s clear that requiring algebra for everyone has not increased our appreciation of a calling someone once called “the poetry of the universe.” (How many college graduates remember what Fermat’s dilemma was all about?)

Instead of investing so much of our academic energy in a subject that blocks further attainment for much of our population, I propose that we start thinking about alternatives. Thus mathematics teachers at every level could create exciting courses in what I call “citizen statistics.” This would not be a backdoor version of algebra, as in the Advanced Placement syllabus. Nor would it focus on equations used by scholars when they write for one another. Instead, it would familiarize students with the kinds of numbers that describe and delineate our personal and public lives.

It could, for example, teach students how the Consumer Price Index is computed, what is included and how each item in the index is weighted — and include discussion about which items should be included and what weights they should be given.

This need not involve dumbing down. Researching the reliability of numbers can be as demanding as geometry. More and more colleges are requiring courses in “quantitative reasoning.” In fact, we should be starting that in kindergarten.

I hope that mathematics departments can also create courses in the history and philosophy of their discipline, as well as its applications in early cultures. Why not mathematics in art and music — even poetry — along with its role in assorted sciences? The aim would be to treat mathematics as a liberal art, making it as accessible and welcoming as sculpture or ballet. If we rethink how the discipline is conceived, word will get around and math enrollments are bound to rise. It can only help. Of the 1.7 million bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2010, only 15,396 — less than 1 percent — were in mathematics.

I’ve observed a host of high school and college classes, from Michigan to Mississippi, and have been impressed by conscientious teaching and dutiful students. I’ll grant that with an outpouring of resources, we could reclaim many dropouts and help them get through quadratic equations. But that would misuse teaching talent and student effort. It would be far better to reduce, not expand, the mathematics we ask young people to imbibe. (That said, I do not advocate vocational tracks for students considered, almost always unfairly, as less studious.)

Yes, young people should learn to read and write and do long division, whether they want to or not. But there is no reason to force them to grasp vectorial angles and discontinuous functions. Think of math as a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves. So why require it, without alternatives or exceptions? Thus far I haven’t found a compelling answer.

Andrew Hacker is an emeritus professor of political science at Queens College, City University of New York, and a co-author of “Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It.”

WSJ: Toughest Exam Question - What Is The Best Way to Study?

WORK & FAMILY

OCTOBER 26, 2011

Toughest Exam Question: What Is the Best Way to Study?

• By SUE SHELLENBARGER

Here's a pop quiz: What foods are best to eat before a high-stakes test? When is the best time to review the toughest material? A growing body of research on the best study techniques offers some answers.

With test-taking season upon us, Sue Shellenbarger on Lunch Break looks at the latest findings from the science of studying. For students approaching SAT/ACTs, midterms and finals, which memory tricks work best and does cramming help?

Chiefly, testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory. The method is more effective than re-reading a textbook, says Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. If you are facing a test on the digestive system, he says, practice explaining how it works from start to finish, rather than studying a list of its parts.

In his junior year of high school in Cary, N.C., Keenan Harrell bought test-prep books and subjected himself to a "relentless and repetitive" series of nearly 30 practice SAT college-entrance exams. "I just took it over and over again, until it became almost aggravating," he says.

Practice paid off. Mr. Harrell, now 19, was accepted at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, a college he's dreamed of attending since the third grade. He scored 1800 (out of 2400) on the SAT, up 50% from 1200 on the PSAT, a preliminary test during his sophomore year.

Taking pretests "felt like hard work," Mr. Harrell says, but seeing steady increases in his scores boosted his confidence. Practice tests also help with test-taking skills, such as pacing, says Paul Weeks, vice president of educational services for the ACT, which creates and administers college-entrance exams.

Getty Images

Repeated practice tests help master test format and pacing.

Sleep also plays a role in test performance, but in two unexpected ways. Review the toughest material right before going to bed the night before the test. That approach makes it easier to recall the material later, says Dan Taylor, director of a sleep-and-health-research lab at the University of North Texas in Denton. And don't wake up earlier than usual to study; this could interfere with the rapid-eye-movement sleep that aids memory, he says.

A common study habit—the all-nighter—is a bad idea. Although 60% of college students stay up all night at some point in school, the practice is linked to lower grades, says Pamela Thacher, an associate professor of psychology at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., based on a 2008 study of 120 students. It also impairs reasoning and memory for as long as four days.

Being Confident

Write down fears and anxieties before the test to free working memory and prevent distractions during the test.

To combat self-doubts (such as 'I'm bad in math'), remind yourself of proven personal traits and strengths that can propel you to success.

Practice in advance facing all the pressures you will face on exam day, such as driving to the testing center or visiting an unfamiliar testing room.

Test yourself by recalling broad concepts rather than trying to memorize facts or re-reading textbooks.

Before the test, envision yourself answering questions calmly and with confidence.

Everybody knows you should eat breakfast the day of a big test. High-carb, high-fiber, slow-digesting foods like oatmeal are best, research shows. But what you eat a week in advance matters, too. When 16 college students were tested on attention and thinking speed, then fed a five-day high-fat, low-carb diet heavy on meat, eggs, cheese and cream and tested again, their performance declined. The students who ate a balanced diet that included fruit and vegetables, however, held steady, says Cameron Holloway, a senior clinical researcher at the University of Oxford. The brain requires a constant supply of energy and "has only a limited backup battery," he says.

While many teens insist they study better while listening to music or texting their friends, research shows the opposite: Information reviewed amid distractions is less likely to be recalled later, says Nicole Dudukovic, assistant professor of psychology at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.

Discuss on The Juggle

• Do your kids suffer from test anxiety? Have you found ways to ease the problem?

In her research, college students categorized and made judgments about pictures of more than 100 items. Then, they were tested on a new mix of pictures and asked to recall which ones they had already seen and how they had categorized them; half the time, they were also asked to listen and respond to a set of rhythmic sounds. When the students were tested later, they were more likely to remember correctly what they had studied without distractions.

"Students do have this belief that they can do it all and they aren't really being distracted" by music or sounds from a noisy cafe, Dr. Dudukovic says. But while the sounds may "make them feel more relaxed," she says, they won't help them ace the midterm.

Bryan Almanza says he did poorly on the PSAT as a high-school sophomore because he didn't know how to prepare. He got too little sleep the night before and ate only a bowl of cereal for breakfast. On the test, some hard physics questions made him nervous and distracted, says Mr. Almanza, 18, a senior at Campbell High in Smyrna, Ga. "I'm going to fail," he remembers thinking at the time. A test-prep program at his school taught him to get plenty of sleep, eat a good breakfast and pace himself on the test. By staying calm, optimistic and focused, he raised his score significantly on the SAT.

Tips on Conquering Test-Day Jitters

Even when students are fully prepared, anxiety can be another burden on test day.

An estimated 35% of students are so nervous before high-stakes tests that it impairs their performance, says Richard Driscoll, a Knoxville, Tenn., clinical psychologist who has researched text anxiety.

To help ease fears, Julie Hartline, lead counselor at Campbell High School in Smyrna, Ga., helped start a three-week program last year to teach juniors anxiety-reduction techniques.

One calming tactic that has been shown to improve scores is to teach yourself in advance to think differently about the test, Dr. Driscoll says. Envision yourself in a situation you find challenging and invigorating; a soccer player might imagine scoring a goal, or a mountain climber might envision herself topping a ridge, he says. Then switch your mental image to the testing room and imagine yourself feeling the same way. With practice, you'll be able to summon up more confidence on test day.

Also, reducing "novelty and stress on the day of the exam" can prevent choking under pressure, says Sian Beilock, a researcher and author on cognitive performance. If you are taking the exam in an unfamiliar place, visit the room in advance.

If you are still feeling anxious, set aside 10 minutes beforehand to write down your worries, says Dr. Beilock, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. She and a fellow researcher tested 106 ninth-graders for anxiety before their first high-pressure exam, then asked half of them to spend 10 minutes writing down their thoughts right before the test. The anxious kids who did the writing exercise performed as well on the test as the students who had been calm all along. But anxious students who didn't do the writing performed more poorly. Expressing one's worries in writing, Dr. Beilock says, unburdens the brain.

—Email [email protected]

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

NY Times: Time to Revive Home Economics

 

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September 5, 2011

Time to Revive Home Ec

By HELEN ZOE VEIT

East Lansing, Mich.

NOBODY likes home economics. For most people, the phrase evokes bland food, bad sewing and self-righteous fussiness.

But home economics is more than a 1950s teacher in cat’s-eye glasses showing her female students how to make a white sauce. Reviving the program, and its original premises — that producing good, nutritious food is profoundly important, that it takes study and practice, and that it can and should be taught through the public school system — could help us in the fight against obesity and chronic disease today.

The home economics movement was founded on the belief that housework and food preparation were important subjects that should be studied scientifically. The first classes occurred in the agricultural and technical colleges that were built from the proceeds of federal land grants in the 1860s. By the early 20th century, and increasingly after the passage of federal legislation like the 1917 Smith-Hughes Act, which provided support for the training of teachers in home economics, there were classes in elementary, middle and high schools across the country. When universities excluded women from most departments, home economics was a back door into higher education. Once there, women worked hard to make the case that “domestic science” was in fact a scientific discipline, linked to chemistry, biology and bacteriology.

Indeed, in the early 20th century, home economics was a serious subject. When few understood germ theory and almost no one had heard of vitamins, home economics classes offered vital information about washing hands regularly, eating fruits and vegetables and not feeding coffee to babies, among other lessons.

Eventually, however, the discipline’s basic tenets about health and hygiene became so thoroughly popularized that they came to seem like common sense. As a result, their early proponents came to look like old maids stating the obvious instead of the innovators and scientists that many of them really were. Increasingly, home economists’ eagerness to dispense advice on everything from eating to sleeping to posture galled.

Today we remember only the stereotypes about home economics, while forgetting the movement’s crucial lessons on healthy eating and cooking.

Too many Americans simply don’t know how to cook. Our diets, consisting of highly processed foods made cheaply outside the home thanks to subsidized corn and soy, have contributed to an enormous health crisis. More than half of all adults and more than a third of all children are overweight or obese. Chronic diseases associated with weight gain, like heart disease and diabetes, are hobbling more and more Americans.

In the last decade, many cities and states have tried — and generally failed — to tax junk food or to ban the use of food stamps to buy soda. Clearly, many people are leery of any governmental steps to promote healthy eating; Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity has inspired right-wing panic about a secret food police.

But what if the government put the tools of obesity prevention in the hands of children themselves, by teaching them how to cook?

My first brush with home economics, as a seventh grader in a North Carolina public school two decades ago, was grim. The most sophisticated cooking we did was opening a can of pre-made biscuit dough, sticking our thumbs in the center of each raw biscuit to make a hole, and then handing them over to the teacher, who dipped them in hot grease to make doughnuts.

Cooking classes for public school students need not be so utterly stripped of content, or so cynical about students’ abilities to cook and enjoy high-quality food.

A year later, my father’s job took our family to Wales, where I attended, for a few months, a large school in a mid-size industrial city. There, students brought ingredients from home and learned to follow recipes, some simple and some not-so-simple, eventually making vegetable soups and meat and potato pies from scratch. It was the first time I had ever really cooked anything. I remember that it was fun, and with an instructor standing by, it wasn’t hard. Those were deeply empowering lessons, ones that stuck with me when I first started cooking for myself in earnest after college.

In the midst of contracting school budgets and test-oriented curricula, the idea of reviving home economics as part of a broad offensive against obesity might sound outlandish. But teaching cooking — real cooking — in public schools could help address a host of problems facing Americans today. The history of home economics shows it’s possible.

Helen Zoe Veit, an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University, is the author of the forthcoming “Victory Over Ourselves: American Food in the Era of the Great War.”

Project Happy Feet: PHF Returns to Siem Reap

Source: http://www.projecthappyfeet.org/beta/?p=1138

PHF Returns to Siem Reap

in News by Deborah — June 27, 2011 at 1:41 pm | 0 comments

At least once a year, PHF returns to the countries that they have been supporting to feel the ground, perform their audits and relook at the programmes it hopes to embark to support the local community. This ensures that we are not only kept up to date with the latest developments in the country and note the changes that have occurred but also to ensure that our programmes and projects are most relevant and helpful to the local community.

The following chronicles our trip to Siem Reap from 21 – 26 June 2011:

DAY 1

ConCERT

Our trip started out with a meeting with ConCERT (Connecting Communities, Environment and Responsible Tourism) – a non-profit organization based in Siem Reap that connects local NGOs that need help to the people who can provide the help they need. ConCERT not only provides information about these local NGOs, but also ensures that these NGOs are well managed, financially transparent and work in partnership with the local people – key criteria for PHF as we are selecting the NGOs we plan to support.

Through its Founder and Chairman, Michael Holton, we find out about the realities of the ground and how some NGOs have been set up but have soon exploited the system to benefit themselves instead of the local community. He shared with us tips of caution as we proceeded to identify organizations we hope to work with (on top of those we already have planned to support).

Read here more about Responsible Tourism as shared by ConCERT.

After much reading up and research, we arranged to meet up with This Life Cambodia and Trailblazer Foundation.

 

DAY 2

Visiting Angkor Thom Village with Shinta Mani

We started out Day 2 of our trip bright and early with a trip to the villages in the Angkor Thom district – the villages that touched the hearts of co-founders, Grace and Deborah on their first trip to Siem Reap, that got PHF all started.

Shinta Mani, a boutique hotel that runs itself as a social enterprise, arranged the visit for us. It was a surreal experience for all of us once again as we went from family to family to understand the situation they were in and how Shinta Mani has helped them improve their lives by installing water pumps or building a concrete home for shelter over their heads.

Through the visit, we learnt that majority homes in the Angkor Thom district look old and dilapidated because the Apsara Authority (which protects the area in and around the Angkor Wat area) forbids any form of construction in areas that fall within the zone surrounding the Angkor Wat. Since the Angkor Thom district falls within this zone, the villagers thus can only do minor repairs to their homes.

Making a Difference with MaD Cambodia

Lunch was one with a difference as we headed to the MaD Eatery to meet up with Founder of MaD Cambodia, Phillip Starling.

Not only was the lunch wonderfully delicious, it was also one without any price tag on the menu. We simply paid what we thought was worth the price, and the money goes towards funding the activities of the MaD Cambodia. A novel idea indeed.

Our lunch meeting with Phillip and his partner, Concetta, was not only informative but delightful. One who speaks his mind and believes in approaching problems in a non-conventional way, Phillip shared with us the good things they were doing for the Prolit Village – ranging from providing after-school programmes that teach not only life skills but also stimulates the mind, to introducing a novel idea of compost toilets that not only prevents pollution, but also provide a rich source of organic fertilizers for the local farmers.

Phillip welcomed us to visit the Prolit Village anytime we wanted. “We don’t have to get the poor people to show you that there are really poor people there,” he said in a tongue-in-cheek manner, referring to some NGOs who stage poverty in order to benefit from unassuming kind hearts.

Purchasing Slippers at Phsar Ler (All Market)

Rattana from Shinta Mani picked us up from our the MaD Base Camp and together, we headed with her to the local’s market where things are whole lot cheaper than if we had gone to the old market (where tourists typically visit). There, she efficiently made her bargain and we purchased 130 pairs of slippers (sponsored by staff members at Robinsons) for the school children we were planning to visit the next day.

Getting in Touch with Siem Reap Hostel

We had recommended some of our friends who had made the trip earlier to Siem Reap to put up at Siem Reap Hostel since it provided very affordable and clean accommodation. Not only was the location pretty near the Old Market, the hostel also has recently put together programmes that are helping the local community and we wanted to find out more.

Tiani, General Manager at the hostel, met up with us and briefed us of the small programmes they have begun to undertake, specifically supporting the efforts of Green Gecko, a home for street kids, as well as their micro-financing project for Tuk Tuk drivers.

She highlighted that perhaps one of the needs for the local community was to provide skills-based training to ensure they not only are equipped with technical skills (e.g. construction, electrical, plumbing), but also the safety awareness so that they do not harm themselves.

 

DAY 3

Slippers for Sambour School

Our friends from Shinta Mani met with us, and together we made our way to the Sambour School in the Angkor Thom district. Shinta Mani supported the construction of the school previously and has been supporting the school in whatever ways they can since.

During the long (and very rocky) journey, we learnt more about our Shinta Mani friends, Kol (Front Office Manager) and Saoline (Culinary Instructor). Both Kol and Saoline were beneficiaries of the programme at Shinta Mani. Years ago, they had undergone the training provided at Shinta Mani which selects individuals from underprivileged communities, and puts them through a training programme in either culinary or front of house skills. During the programme, they had also learnt the English Language.

Today, both Kol and Saoline are both very successful individuals who have managed to escape the poverty cycle and even managed to bring their parents from the village to stay with them in the city. It was certainly heartening for us to see them now trying to give back to the community in what way they could.

At the Sambour School, we promptly unwrapped the slippers and put them on the feet of the 130 children there, something we were glad we were able to do since at least 95% of the children were without footwear. Some even needed our help to put on the slippers – it seemed it was the first time they were wearing footwear in their lives.

Sala Bai with Shina Mani

Since Shinta Mani was under renovation (it is expanding its hotel to accommodate more guests and a bigger training school for its trainees), Kol recommended we have lunch at Sala Bai, a restaurant with a concept similar to Shinta Mani (or KOTO in Hanoi).

We invited our friends at Shinta Mani to join us for lunch, during which we learnt more about their lives, and their future plans.

Grace collected a load of industry related books from her colleagues from Temasek Polytechnic, and these were donated to Shinta Mani to stock up their new library for its trainees. Kol and Saoline received the books with gratitude, commenting that they were really good books for the trainees who were to come in.

Meeting with This Life Cambodia

If there was an organisation that we’ve met that was the most structured, we’d say it was This Life Cambodia (TLC).

During the meeting with Mr Sen Se, TLC’s Assistant Director, Ms Chea Borany, Programme Coordinator and Mr William Brehm, Research, Evaluation and Monitor Officer, we learnt about the comprehensive programmes that they had, in particular the lower secondary school development programme where they empower the community to better the education provided at the public schools. We loved the idea that whichever programme TLC embarked on, there was an exit strategy – which meant they plan to make the system self-sustaining, or one that allowed the local community to continue the work themselves.

The programme came complete with a breakdown of objectives, tasks and checklists, complete with who in the community was responsible for each task. The local community was held accountable and for that reason, gave them a sense of ownership of the programme.

 

DAY 4

Taom is Developing Well

We headed to the St John’s Church in Siem Reap to meet up with Fr Stephanus and Thon, who was overall in charge of the developments of the 6 villages that the church supported. In particular, we had wanted to know about the developments in Taom, the village that received the most support from friends of PHF since 2008.

We were heartened to know that the library that was built there was utilised not only by the children in the Taom village, but those in the nearby regions as well. The two ladies who were receiving our scholarship to be trained in pre-school education will be graduating and will be starting lessons for the younger children in the village.

The next plans for the village is to look into a water sanitation project as well as to equip the area with electricity – perhaps using solar panels. It gave us room to think about how we could support their efforts.

At the end of the meeting, Deborah presented USD 790 – part proceeds from the Chefs for a Cause project to Fr Stephanus to support the rice soup programme that runs once a week across 8 learning centres for 6 villages.

Innovative Ideas from Trailblazer

Our meeting with Mr Rattana from Trailblazer Foundation turned out to be one which was highly informative.

Mr Rattana promptly brought us to their backyard after a brief introduction – it was here that all their hard work laid.

Trailblazers help the local community (specifically the Sras Village, which was identified as one of the poorest villages in Siem Reap) by introducing innovative ideas that help them sustain in their own environment. For example, they research and experiment on crops that can grow well in their local soils, and if successful, introduce the crops to the community of mostly farmers, who can either grow them for sustenance or for sale. They take into consideration things like duration of growth, ease of growth and cost of growing the crops. They look into possible demands from restaurants and hotels to ensure that while they are producing a supply, there is also a corresponding supply. We were especially impressed to see how they have begun to experiment the growth of mushrooms using saw dust from rubber trees.

Mr Rattana also showed us how they produce a filtration system at their backyard that allow villagers to gain access to potable water. The innovative invention requires no electricity and provides clean water almost instantly, thereby reducing illnesses relating to drinking unclean water. Costing USD 50 each to install, Trailblazers charge USD2.75 per filtration system to the household that requires it. This money however doesn’t go towards Trailblazer but towards a community fund that functions as a micro-loan facility to villagers who need it.

 

DAY 5

MaD Cambodia’s Outreach at Prolit Village

We had arranged to visit the Prolit Village after our meeting with Phillip from MaD Cambodia. Rith, our local guide, came to pick us up on his jeep and brought us to the MaD Base Camp. From there we met up with General Manager, Songhy, who led the way to the Prolit Village in the Puok District some 25 km from the Siem Reap city centre.

The journey brought us to feel the air of the country side (literally!) as we were duly bathed in a cloud of red dust on the way to the village.

Once there, Songhy showed us how their team, who have been working at the village for the past 8 months, installed water pumps, a task we learnt that wasn’t as easy since it wasn’t always that they could find a water source. Sometimes, even after hours of drilling and finding a water source, the water cannot be used as it contains harmful substances. The team will then have to find an alternative source and the drilling begins all over again.

Songhy also showed us how the compost toilet worked. We were surprised that the toilet wasn’t foul smelling despite not having any means of flushing.

At the village, we also visited the learning centre, as well as saw the growing of the Moringa plants, which offered a rich source of protein, minerals and vitamins to the villagers who were more often than not malnourished.

Visiting Little Angels

Our guide Rith invited us to visit his farm after our visit to the Prolit Village. On the way there, we stopped by the Little Angels Orphanage, set up by his friend Sery Rathana, an orphan himself who had lost his parents during the Khmer Rouge regime.

Sery had set up the orphanage to help mostly boys who have lost either one or both parents. Besides ensuring they go through school, have three meals a day and a bed to sleep on, Sery also teaches the boys the Khmer art of carving on cow’s hide. It was clear that the boys there loved what they were learning as they earnestly punched through the cow’s hide, creating pieces of art. “I tell them, if they don’t go to school, I won’t teach them,” Sery said smiling.

We scoured through the place and took our notes. It was clear that Sery had a heart for these boys he is genuinely helping. But he could do with more help from us, and we were eager to create a better learning and living environment for him and the boys at the orphanage. We were inspired by him – a local who felt that he was in a better position than others and wanted to help those who were worse off then he.

Visiting a Friend’s Farm

After a visit to the Prolung Pottery and Weaving Centre, Rith drove us towards his farm.

“Welcome to my farm,” he said proudly as he drove us into the compounds of his farm. Off the main road, the one hectare piece of land was surrounded mostly by large fields and a flowing river. The breeze was surprisingly cool as we stepped out of his jeep.

Rith proudly introduced us to his wife and then, his family of poultry – from chickens (at least five different breeds!) to ducks, to geese and even a turkey! He explained how he bred his free-range poultry, and how he had learnt to rear the poultry himself by attending free courses conducted by NGOs.

“That’s my fish farm,” he pointed to a big pond of still water.

“There’s fish?” we asked.

Rith began beating his drum and all of a sudden hundreds of fish started splashing out of the water. We learnt that Rith beats his drum each time he feeds his fish with a mix of feed he cooks himself.

We were surprised when Rith invited us to sit in a hut by the fish pond.

“Let’s have lunch,” he said, pointing us to the hammocks he had bought on the way to his farm.

Within a few minutes, lunch was served – Char-grilled chicken with rice and black chicken soup – a meal that was simple but homely and delicious. We were touched by his gesture of hospitality. It was clear that Rith didn’t treat us like a usual client, but as friends.

Over lunch we learnt of Rith’s plans to use his farm as a means to train less fortunate Cambodians in farming. His daughter came to join us and we were glad to hear that he has invested much in her education. “Big investment,” he chuckled as he looked at his two daughters.

 

DAY 6

Goodbyes

Rith came to pick us up from the hotel to send us to the airport.

“Thank you for helping us Cambodians,” he put his hands together in gratitude as he waved us goodbye. “Please keep in touch and come back. We can do a lot more together.”

Certainly.

Our trip this time didn’t involve us visiting village after village giving out handouts, yet it was equally if not more fulfilling and inspiring. We noticed a change in the local scene since our visit to Siem Reap in 2008. The local community is a lot more motivated to get their fellow counterparts out of the poverty cycle.

At some point, the credible NGOs realised that handouts could possibly create a culture of reliance. They realised that it made no sense to develop a system that was imposed on the local community, or went against the government. They realised that if they really want to help, then they should do so by empowering the local people – teach them a skill, give them a job, let them have a sense of ownership, let them make decisions as a community, provide platforms for change to better their lives, let them try, let them experiment and through that process, allow the change to take place.

What this means for us is that we need to re-look at how we support our friends in Cambodia. Sometimes, it’s not as simple as giving slippers or donate clothes, or decide to build a library or paint a wall of a village school. When we do extend ‘help’, perhaps we should first ask ourselves, “Are we really helping them?”

We can certainly do more together. But first to think of the best way how.

Visit the photo gallery of our trip on our Facebook Page here!

NY Times: Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas

 

 

---

June 6, 2011

Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas

By BENEDICT CAREY

Like any other high school junior, Wynn Haimer has a few holes in his academic game. Graphs and equations, for instance: He gets the idea, fine — one is a linear representation of the other — but making those conversions is often a headache.

Or at least it was. For about a month now, Wynn, 17, has been practicing at home using an unusual online program that prompts him to match graphs to equations, dozens upon dozens of them, and fast, often before he has time to work out the correct answer. An equation appears on the screen, and below it three graphs (or vice versa, a graph with three equations). He clicks on one and the screen flashes to tell him whether he’s right or wrong and jumps to the next problem.

“I’m much better at it,” he said, in a phone interview from his school, New Roads in Santa Monica, Calif. “In the beginning it was difficult, having to work so quickly; but you sort of get used to it, and in the end it’s more intuitive. It becomes more effortless.”

For years school curriculums have emphasized top-down instruction, especially for topics like math and science. Learn the rules first — the theorems, the order of operations, Newton’s laws — then make a run at the problem list at the end of the chapter. Yet recent research has found that true experts have something at least as valuable as a mastery of the rules: gut instinct, an instantaneous grasp of the type of problem they’re up against. Like the ballplayer who can “read” pitches early, or the chess master who “sees” the best move, they’ve developed a great eye.

Now, a small group of cognitive scientists is arguing that schools and students could take far more advantage of this same bottom-up ability, called perceptual learning. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine, after all, and when focused properly, it can quickly deepen a person’s grasp of a principle, new studies suggest. Better yet, perceptual knowledge builds automatically: There’s no reason someone with a good eye for fashion or wordplay cannot develop an intuition for classifying rocks or mammals or algebraic equations, given a little interest or motivation.

“When facing problems in real-life situations, the first question is always, ‘What am I looking at? What kind of problem is this?’ ” said Philip J. Kellman, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Any theory of how we learn presupposes perceptual knowledge — that we know which facts are relevant, that we know what to look for.”

The challenge for education, Dr. Kellman added, “is what do we need to do to make this happen efficiently?”

Scientists have long known that the brain registers subtle patterns subconsciously, well before a person knows he or she is learning. In a landmark 1997 experiment, researchers at the University of Iowa found that people playing a simple gambling game with decks of cards reported “liking” some decks better than others long before they realized that those decks had cards that caused greater losses.. Some participants picked up the differences among decks after just 10 cards.

Experts develop such sensitive perceptual radar the old-fashioned way, of course, through years of study and practice. Yet there is growing evidence that a certain kind of training — visual, fast-paced, often focused on classifying problems rather then solving them — can build intuition quickly. In one recent experiment, for example, researchers found that people were better able to distinguish the painting styles of 12 unfamiliar artists after viewing mixed collections of works from all 12 than after viewing a dozen works from one artist, then moving on to the next painter. The participants’ brains began to pick up on differences before they could fully articulate them.

“Once the brain has a goal in mind, it tunes the perceptual system to search the environment” for relevant clues, said Steven Sloman, a cognitive scientist at Brown University. In time the eyes, ears and nose learn to isolate those signs and dismiss irrelevant information, in turn sharpening thinking.

Good teachers at all levels already have their own techniques to speed up this process — multiplication flash cards, tips to break down word problems, heuristic rhymes — but scientists are working to tune students’ eyes more systematically and to build understanding of very abstract concepts.

Fractions, for one. Most American middle school students, though they understand what fractions represent, don’t do so well when tested on their ability to change one fraction, like 4/3, to another, like 7/3, by adding or subtracting (many high school students bomb these tests, too).

In a 2010 study, researchers at UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania had sixth graders in a Philadelphia public school use a perception-training program to practice just this On the computer module, a fraction appeared as a block. The students used a “slicer” to cut that block into fractions and a “cloner” to copy those slices. They used these pieces to build a new block from the original one — for example, cutting a block that represented the fraction 4/3 into four equal slices, then making three more copies to produce a block that represented 7/3. The program immediately displayed an ‘X’ next to wrong answers and “Correct!” next to correct ones, then moved to the next problem. It automatically adjusted to each student’s ability, advancing slowly for some and quickly for others. The students worked with the modules individually, for 15- to 30-minute intervals during the spring term, until they could perform most of the fraction exercises correctly.

In a test on the skills given afterward, on problems the students hadn’t seen before, the group got 73 percent correct. A comparison group of seventh graders, who’d been taught how to solve such problems as part of regular classes, scored just 25 percent on the test.

“The impressive thing for me was that we went back five months later, after the summer, and the gains had held up,” said Christine Massey, director of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science and a study co-author. When the younger students returned as seventh graders in the fall, they scored just as high as they had the previous spring on tests of fractions that they had not seen. Knowing what a fraction represents is one thing, the authors say, but repeatedly seeing and manipulating all those fractions by slicing and cloning drives the concept home once and for all.

The research team found similar results in high school sophomores who practiced with the software that Wynn Haimer used, working to match algebraic equations with graphs.

“I find that often students will try to solve problems by doing only what they’ve been told to do, and if that doesn’t work they give up,” said Joe Wise, a physics instructor at New Roads School, where the study was done. “Here they’re forced to try what makes sense to them and to keep trying. The brain is very good at sorting out patterns if you give it the chance and the right feedback.”

The modules are less demanding than problem sets, but they’re not video games — they’re homework. “To be honest, I’ve got so much to wrap up this year that I haven’t really used the program much,” said Gabe Boros, one of Mr. Wise’s students. “I did try it a couple of times and improved a little, but often I have to guess or use tricks to eliminate the wrong answers.”

Which is the whole idea: Subtle shortcuts are the very stuff of perceptual intuition. With practice, neurons in the visual cortex and elsewhere specialize to identify these signature patterns, and finding them frees up mental resources for deductive reasoning, to check answers or to move on to harder problems. Such perceptual intuition isn’t cheating — it’s what the big-shot experts do. In the case of graphs and equations, it includes making quick judgments about where lines should intercept the axes and about their slope, even when that is not at all obvious.

On the surface at least, this may sound like the approaches that SAT or LSAT prep courses take, using time-saving strategies and informed guessing. But there is a difference, researchers say. The prep courses teach to the test, but perceptual training tools are aimed at the underlying skills — manipulating fractions, graphing equations. “It’s not how well you do, but how well you learn,” as Mr. Wise put it.

Ideally, perceptual training does more than breathe life into abstract principles, the same way that repairing engines instills a lived experience of internal combustion mechanics. It also primes students to apply the principles in other contexts. This ability to transfer, as it’s known, is fundamental to scientific reasoning and is among the highest goals of teachers at all levels.

Here, too, perceptual learning may help. In a series of experiments, researchers at Indiana University have had students practice on software that models scientific principles, like positive feedback loops. In one, middle school students use a mouse to add “slime mold” to a slide and watch as it spreads faster the more they add. The process fuels itself.

“The kids who have seen this situation will transfer it to other positive feedback loops, like global warming,” said Rob Goldstone, director of the cognitive science program at Indiana University. “The more ice that melts, the more heat that’s absorbed into the earth, the warmer it gets, which melts more ice, and so on.”

“Once they have the concept, I can refer back to it,” said Nancy Martin, a science teacher at Jackson Creek Middle School in Bloomington, Ind., who has worked with Dr. Goldstone. “I can say, ‘Remember how the ants worked, or the slime; does that have anything to do with what we’re discussing today?’ ”

In an education system awash with computerized learning tools and pilot programs of all kinds, the future of such perceptual learning efforts is far from certain. Scientists still don’t know the best way to train perceptual intuition, or which specific principles it’s best suited for. And such tools, if they are incorporated into curriculums in any real way, will be subject to the judgment of teachers.

But researchers are convinced that if millions of children can develop a trained eye for video combat games and doctored Facebook photos, they can surely do the same for graphs and equations.

Perceptual Learning

How does a student learn from gut insinct? Try these samples to find out.

 

Basic Math

Measurements and Graphing: Match the equation to the graph and learn to perceive basic measurement concepts.

 

Positive and Negative Feeback

Extreme Ball: Time a fan to blow and push a ball attached to rubber bands.

Extreme Population: Help your city reach a population of one million citizens.

Stabilize Ball: Time a fan to blow and stabilize a ball attached to rubber bands.

Stabilize Population: Help your city's population stabilize at 500,000 citizens.

FT: Time to listen to Tagore

Time to listen to Tagore

By Harry Eyres

Published: April 29 2011 22:17 | Last updated: April 29 2011 22:17

Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore are probably the two most famous Indians of the early to mid-20th century. The tiny, shaven-headed, dhoti-clad Gandhi (1869-1948) appears to us more sharply in focus than the lavishly bearded, robed Gurudev (Tagore’s nickname), with his air of an ancient prophet. You can’t imagine a film called Tagore filling the cinemas. Tagore (1861-1941) was a poet, a dreamer, an idealist; Gandhi combined his idealism with political nous. Yet in some ways, Tagore right now might be the more relevant, even essential figure. Perhaps that is the thinking behind the Tagore Festival at Dartington Hall, Devon from May 1-7, when poets, musicians, thinkers and environmentalists gather to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Tagore’s birth.

Gandhi, born in western India, and Tagore, born into a prominent intellectual and artistic family in Bengal, were friends with differences. They held each other in great mutual respect – Gandhi’s title of Mahatma was even given to him by Tagore – but that did not preclude outspoken disagreement. That disagreement was perhaps more tactical than strategic – both shared the aims of Hindu-Muslim unity and the abolition of the caste system – but the tactical divergences could be acute. Tagore did not hesitate to criticise sacred tenets of Gandhi-ism, including the practice of passive resistance: “Passive resistance is a force, which is not necessarily moral in itself – it can be used against truth as well as for it.”

He demurred most strongly when Gandhi declared that the 1934 Bihar earthquake was divine retribution for India upholding untouchability; Tagore insisted that purely physical events should not be laden with metaphysical interpretations. As for Gandhi’s belief in the importance of spinning at a wheel, Tagore saw it as potentially dehumanising, risking turning human beings into machines. On all their points of difference, Tagore stood up for the inviolable freedom, dignity and creativity of the individual. If those sound like noble, woolly abstractions, they did not appear that way to Tagore. In the essay “My Life”, originally a lecture given in China in 1923, he explains how he was born in Bengal at the coming together of three great movements, one religious, one literary, and one political or national. His family happened to be prominent in all three areas; his father became the leader of a religious movement combining Hindu and Christian elements, which made him deeply unpopular with traditionalists. In fact, their unconventionality and revolt against orthodoxy made the whole family virtual outcasts.

Tagore was a poet; he had “a deep sense, almost from infancy, of the beauty of nature, an intimate feeling of companionship with the trees and the clouds”, and the urge towards expressing this feeling. All poets have to make their own idiom out of the common stock of language; or, as Tagore put it, the poet “should not only have his own seeds but prepare his own soil”. He started reading the Vaishnava erotic poems and then to write his own before he was 10; by his mid-teens he was a celebrated poet. Internationally, the culmination of his poetic career was the award of the Nobel Prize for his collection Gitanjali in 1913 – the first time the prize had been awarded to an Asian.

Formal education played very little part in all this. Tagore was suspicious of it; he strongly disliked the period he spent at a school in Brighton, England, and then left University College London without a degree; later he said he “never ... had what is called an education” and that “the main object of teaching is not to give explanations but to knock at the doors of the mind”.

Quite strange then that he should have founded his own school. But Tagore’s school, founded at his father’s ashram in Santiniketan in 1901, was unconventional. He instituted open-air classrooms to give the living world of nature and human kindness priority over the dead world of rigid book-learning. He believed that “the object of education is the freedom of mind which can only be achieved through the path of freedom”. (The school, called Patha Bhavana, still exists, surrounded by Visva-Bharati university, and numbers among its alumni the economist Amartya Sen.)

What would Tagore make of the success of the galloping Indian economy? For him success depended on much more than national self-determination and economic growth. In his addresses “Civilisation and Progress” and “The Voice of Humanity” Tagore questions the western ideal of material progress devoid of a spiritual core. Already in the 1920s, he saw an aggressive force of greed linked to a science “smothering all time and space over the earth” and “all that was human ... broken into fragments.”

Tagore speaks to us of the need for a return to simplicity: for the peace that “comes from the inner spirit, the power of sympathy, the power of self-sacrifice”.

www.tagorefestival.com

[email protected]

More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

WSJ: How to Get a Real Education

THE SATURDAY ESSAY
APRIL 9, 2011

How to Get a Real Education

Forget art history and calculus. Most students need to learn how to run a business, says Scott Adams. 

By SCOTT ADAMS

I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?

Scott Adams

I speak from experience because I majored in entrepreneurship at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. Technically, my major was economics. But the unsung advantage of attending a small college is that you can mold your experience any way you want.

There was a small business on our campus called The Coffee House. It served beer and snacks, and featured live entertainment. It was managed by students, and it was a money-losing mess, subsidized by the college. I thought I could make a difference, so I applied for an opening as the so-called Minister of Finance. I landed the job, thanks to my impressive interviewing skills, my can-do attitude and the fact that everyone else in the solar system had more interesting plans.

The drinking age in those days was 18, and the entire compensation package for the managers of The Coffee House was free beer. That goes a long way toward explaining why the accounting system consisted of seven students trying to remember where all the money went. I thought we could do better. So I proposed to my accounting professor that for three course credits I would build and operate a proper accounting system for the business. And so I did. It was a great experience. Meanwhile, some of my peers were taking courses in art history so they'd be prepared to remember what art looked like just in case anyone asked.

One day the managers of The Coffee House had a meeting to discuss two topics. First, our Minister of Employment was recommending that we fire a bartender, who happened to be one of my best friends. Second, we needed to choose a leader for our group. On the first question, there was a general consensus that my friend lacked both the will and the potential to master the bartending arts. I reluctantly voted with the majority to fire him.

But when it came to discussing who should be our new leader, I pointed out that my friend—the soon-to-be-fired bartender—was tall, good-looking and so gifted at b.s. that he'd be the perfect leader. By the end of the meeting I had persuaded the group to fire the worst bartender that any of us had ever seen…and ask him if he would consider being our leader. My friend nailed the interview and became our Commissioner. He went on to do a terrific job. That was the year I learned everything I know about management.

Read More

• Turning the Classroom Upside Down

At about the same time, this same friend, along with my roommate and me, hatched a plan to become the student managers of our dormitory and to get paid to do it. The idea involved replacing all of the professional staff, including the resident assistant, security guard and even the cleaning crew, with students who would be paid to do the work. We imagined forming a dorm government to manage elections for various jobs, set out penalties for misbehavior and generally take care of business. And we imagined that the three of us, being the visionaries for this scheme, would run the show.

We pitched our entrepreneurial idea to the dean and his staff. To our surprise, the dean said that if we could get a majority of next year's dorm residents to agree to our scheme, the college would back it.

It was a high hurdle, but a loophole made it easier to clear. We only needed a majority of students who said they planned to live in the dorm next year. And we had plenty of friends who were happy to plan just about anything so long as they could later change their minds. That's the year I learned that if there's a loophole, someone's going to drive a truck through it, and the people in the truck will get paid better than the people under it.

The dean required that our first order of business in the fall would be creating a dorm constitution and getting it ratified. That sounded like a nightmare to organize. To save time, I wrote the constitution over the summer and didn't mention it when classes resumed. We held a constitutional convention to collect everyone's input, and I listened to two hours of diverse opinions. At the end of the meeting I volunteered to take on the daunting task of crafting a document that reflected all of the varied and sometimes conflicting opinions that had been aired. I waited a week, made copies of the document that I had written over the summer, presented it to the dorm as their own ideas and watched it get approved in a landslide vote. That was the year I learned everything I know about getting buy-in.

“Why do we make B students sit through the same classes as their brainy peers? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make sense to teach them something useful instead?”

For the next two years my friends and I each had a private room at no cost, a base salary and the experience of managing the dorm. On some nights I also got paid to do overnight security, while also getting paid to clean the laundry room. At the end of my security shift I would go to The Coffee House and balance the books.

My college days were full of entrepreneurial stories of this sort. When my friends and I couldn't get the gym to give us space for our informal games of indoor soccer, we considered our options. The gym's rule was that only organized groups could reserve time. A few days later we took another run at it, but this time we were an organized soccer club, and I was the president. My executive duties included filling out a form to register the club and remembering to bring the ball.

By the time I graduated, I had mastered the strange art of transforming nothing into something. Every good thing that has happened to me as an adult can be traced back to that training. Several years later, I finished my MBA at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. That was the fine-tuning I needed to see the world through an entrepreneur's eyes.

If you're having a hard time imagining what an education in entrepreneurship should include, allow me to prime the pump with some lessons I've learned along the way.

Combine Skills. The first thing you should learn in a course on entrepreneurship is how to make yourself valuable. It's unlikely that any average student can develop a world-class skill in one particular area. But it's easy to learn how to do several different things fairly well. I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The "Dilbert" comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That's how value is created.

Fail Forward. If you're taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you're doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later. I failed at my first career in banking. I failed at my second career with the phone company. But you'd be surprised at how many of the skills I learned in those careers can be applied to almost any field, including cartooning. Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle.

Find the Action. In my senior year of college I asked my adviser how I should pursue my goal of being a banker. He told me to figure out where the most innovation in banking was happening and to move there. And so I did. Banking didn't work out for me, but the advice still holds: Move to where the action is. Distance is your enemy.

Scott Adams

Attract Luck. You can't manage luck directly, but you can manage your career in a way that makes it easier for luck to find you. To succeed, first you must do something. And if that doesn't work, which can be 90% of the time, do something else. Luck finds the doers. Readers of the Journal will find this point obvious. It's not obvious to a teenager.

Conquer Fear. I took classes in public speaking in college and a few more during my corporate days. That training was marginally useful for learning how to mask nervousness in public. Then I took the Dale Carnegie course. It was life-changing. The Dale Carnegie method ignores speaking technique entirely and trains you instead to enjoy the experience of speaking to a crowd. Once you become relaxed in front of people, technique comes automatically. Over the years, I've given speeches to hundreds of audiences and enjoyed every minute on stage. But this isn't a plug for Dale Carnegie. The point is that people can be trained to replace fear and shyness with enthusiasm. Every entrepreneur can use that skill.

Write Simply. I took a two-day class in business writing that taught me how to write direct sentences and to avoid extra words. Simplicity makes ideas powerful. Want examples? Read anything by Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett.

Learn Persuasion. Students of entrepreneurship should learn the art of persuasion in all its forms, including psychology, sales, marketing, negotiating, statistics and even design. Usually those skills are sprinkled across several disciplines. For entrepreneurs, it makes sense to teach them as a package.

That's my starter list for the sort of classes that would serve B students well. The list is not meant to be complete. Obviously an entrepreneur would benefit from classes in finance, management and more.

Remember, children are our future, and the majority of them are B students. If that doesn't scare you, it probably should.

—Mr. Adams is the creator of "Dilbert."

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WSJ: Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

 

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids? And what happens when they fight back?

By AMY CHUA

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

Erin Patrice O'Brien for The Wall Street Journal

Amy Chua with her daughters, Louisa and Sophia, at their home in New Haven, Conn.

I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.

When it comes to parenting, the Chinese seem to produce children who display academic excellence, musical mastery and professional success - or so the stereotype goes. WSJ's Christina Tsuei speaks to two moms raised by Chinese immigrants who share what it was like growing up and how they hope to raise their children.

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All the same, even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough.

Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be "the best" students, that "academic achievement reflects successful parenting," and that if children did not excel at school then there was "a problem" and parents "were not doing their job." Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.

From Ms. Chua's album: 'Mean me with Lulu in hotel room... with score taped to TV!'

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.

Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can't. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me "garbage" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.

As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)

Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, "You're lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you." By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out.

I've thought long and hard about how Chinese parents can get away with what they do. I think there are three big differences between the Chinese and Western parental mind-sets.

Newborn Amy Chua in her mother's arms, a year after her parents arrived in the U.S.

First, I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.

For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child "stupid," "worthless" or "a disgrace." Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child's grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher's credentials.

If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.

Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)

Sophia playing at Carnegie Hall in 2007.

Second, Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children. (And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.) Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.

By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.

Third, Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children's own desires and preferences. That's why Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can't go to sleepaway camp. It's also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother, "I got a part in the school play! I'm Villager Number Six. I'll have to stay after school for rehearsal every day from 3:00 to 7:00, and I'll also need a ride on weekends." God help any Chinese kid who tried that one.

Don't get me wrong: It's not that Chinese parents don't care about their children. Just the opposite. They would give up anything for their children. It's just an entirely different parenting model.

Read More

• In China, Not All Practice Tough Love
• The Juggle: Are U.S. Parents Too Soft?

Here's a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. Lulu was about 7, still playing two instruments, and working on a piano piece called "The Little White Donkey" by the French composer Jacques Ibert. The piece is really cute—you can just imagine a little donkey ambling along a country road with its master—but it's also incredibly difficult for young players because the two hands have to keep schizophrenically different rhythms.

Lulu couldn't do it. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.

"Get back to the piano now," I ordered.

"You can't make me."

"Oh yes, I can."

Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu—which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her—and that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful. Also, he said, maybe Lulu really just couldn't do the technique—perhaps she didn't have the coordination yet—had I considered that possibility?

"You just don't believe in her," I accused.

"That's ridiculous," Jed said scornfully. "Of course I do."

"Sophia could play the piece when she was this age."

"But Lulu and Sophia are different people," Jed pointed out.

"Oh no, not this," I said, rolling my eyes. "Everyone is special in their special own way," I mimicked sarcastically. "Even losers are special in their own special way. Well don't worry, you don't have to lift a finger. I'm willing to put in as long as it takes, and I'm happy to be the one hated. And you can be the one they adore because you make them pancakes and take them to Yankees games."

I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.

Then, out of the blue, Lulu did it. Her hands suddenly came together—her right and left hands each doing their own imperturbable thing—just like that.

Lulu realized it the same time I did. I held my breath. She tried it tentatively again. Then she played it more confidently and faster, and still the rhythm held. A moment later, she was beaming.

"Mommy, look—it's easy!" After that, she wanted to play the piece over and over and wouldn't leave the piano. That night, she came to sleep in my bed, and we snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up. When she performed "The Little White Donkey" at a recital a few weeks later, parents came up to me and said, "What a perfect piece for Lulu—it's so spunky and so her."

Even Jed gave me credit for that one. Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.

There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests. For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. I think it's a misunderstanding on both sides. All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.

Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.

—Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and author of "Day of Empire" and "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability." This essay is excerpted from "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua, to be published Tuesday by the Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2011 by Amy Chua.

NY Times: Japanese Universities Draw ForeignStudents with Manga

December 26, 2010

Japanese Universities Draw Foreign Students With Manga

By MIKI TANIKAWA

TOKYO — When Zack Wood produces his illustrated stories online, his Japanese classmates say they look like American comics while his American friends say they look decidedly like manga, the popular form of comics that originated in Japan.

That is precisely the blend Mr. Wood, who grew up in the United States and is now studying at Kyoto Seika University’s manga program, is angling for.

Mr. Wood, a 25-year-old graduate of Stanford University in California, and students like him have gravitated toward the modern Japanese arts, feeling they may help them advance their careers in animation, design, computer graphics and the business of promoting them.

And as Japanese universities work harder to attract students to fill their classrooms while the country’s birth rate declines, more are offering degrees in manga and animation.

“I like it here because you get totally immersed in the skill training” of manga and animation, Mr. Wood said. “It has turned out to be a lot of fun.”

Once they are armed with unique technical and industry knowledge, many international students are eager to gain work experience here upon graduation before heading back home.

Li Lin Lin, 28, a student from northeastern China who attends Digital Hollywood University, a school in Tokyo that specializes in animation and video games, said that upon finishing her degree, it would probably be “easy” to find a job in the animation field in China. The real trophy, she said, was getting job experience in the country of manga. Ms. Li is especially interested in working for a Japanese animation studio.

“I think you can do almost anything back home once you get a degree and animation working experiences in Japan,” said Ms. Li, emerging from her class on digital animation coloring one Saturday afternoon.

Hidenori Ohyama, senior director of corporate strategy at Toei Animation, said it was possible that international students could end up at Japanese companies like his. “If they apply, take our tests and pass, they will become employees just like anyone else,” he said.

His company, a leading animation company that has produced “Dragonball” and “Slam Dunk” films, has Romanian and Korean producers, among other foreign citizens, Mr. Ohyama said.

None of the animation-themed Japanese university programs seem to be on the international radar yet, said Kison Chang, a training manager at Imagi Studios, an international animation production studio based in Hong Kong.

But he said students studying in Japan who ended up with solid work experiences at Japanese studios could be prime candidates for international recruitment.

“They would certainly be a great benefit to our professional line,” he said. “They might bring in some kind of spirit which we may not know, or something we didn’t realize that would be a benefit to us,” he said.

Such individuals are not yet on his teams, nor at any of his rivals, he said.

Another possible reason that the programs have not received international attention is that the language of instruction is Japanese.

Tomoyuki Sugiyama, president of Digital Hollywood University, conceded that language might be a serious barrier, especially for Western students.

“If we had an English-based program at the graduate level, for example, we would be inundated with Western students almost instantly,” he said.

Nevertheless, at Kyoto Seika University, which established the country’s first manga program, the number of foreign students in it has risen to 57 currently out of a total of 800 students in the program from just 19 in 2000.

Since it was founded in 2005, Digital Hollywood University has seen its international students grow to 84 this year, roughly 20 percent of its student body, from just one when the school began.

“I want to see it grow to 50 percent of the entire students in the very near future,” Mr. Sugiyama said.

In the past 10 years, more than a dozen university departments and programs have been created to offer a degree or a cluster of courses meant as a concentration in manga, animation and video games, and a similar number of vocational schools offer training in the art.

At Digital Hollywood, with campus buildings spread across the Akihabara area in Tokyo, the nation’s capital for otaku, or nerds, students from Korea, China, Malaysia, Taiwan and other Asian countries, who constitute the bulk of the international student body, mingle with Japanese students.

The curriculum at the schools usually includes courses on drawing, coloring, and motion picture production, as well as film directing, writing plays and the study of copyright laws.

In recent years, universities in China and Korea have also begun offering manga and animation programs, drawing many students locally. But Keiko Takemiya, dean of the manga program at Kyoto Seika University and a famed manga artist, said there were differences.

“What they teach in Korea is mostly cartoons like you see in the U.S.,” she said. “They don’t quite teach the ‘story manga.”’

Story manga is known for its feature lengths and distinct story lines, as compared with the one-liner cartoons with gags and jokes.

Ms. Takemiya said that manga’s secret was in its limitless boundaries in form and content, and that the sheer number and the kind of manga available in Japan far exceed those in other countries.

And that includes adult-themed manga/animation that may or may not include sexually explicit content that many other countries are staying away from.

“What they teach in China is animation meant for children,” said Mr. Sugiyama of Digital Hollywood. “But what we teach is geared towards both children and adults.”

A professor at Kyoto Seika University, Jacqueline Berndt, one of the few non-Japanese faculty members in the field, said language and culture were an obstacle to wider acceptance of the programs.

In addition, she said, the manga and animation programs might not have yet been fully organized into a coherent body of knowledge and theories that scholars from other countries can understand and appreciate.

One reason the art has never been compiled into a structured body of knowledge: In a country where public education has been strictly administered, manga and animation have thrived in a creative way precisely because they operated outside the purview of the system, free from any supervision from the authorities.

“Manga flourished as a counterculture to the establishment academia,” Ms. Takemiya said. “There was actually a resistance to the idea of organizing the art into an academic program” in the industry.

Most Japanese scholars and teachers acknowledge that the body of knowledge they teach is still in the process of being organized into a system.

“We put together and offer classes that we believe will be of use to people who are going into the trade, but if we wait till manga and animation studies are fully structured and organized academically, that’s too late,” Mr. Sugiyama said. “In a world where creative content is digitalizing and globalizing, we need to train young people in these arts now.”

ST: Time for science lessons, take out your phones

Singapore

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Nov 22, 2010

Time for science lessons, take out your phones

Nan Chiau Primary's innovative use of IT in teaching wins it top honour from Microsoft

By Amelia Tan

Nan Chiau Primary pupils (clockwise from bottom left) Abel Tsen, Janelle Lee, Yuki Chua, Isabel Ow and Ng Tze Ming, all 10, using their cellphones during a science lesson. -- ST PHOTO: NEO XIAOBIN

 

WHEN Nan Chiau Primary teachers start their science lessons, they ask their pupils to take out not their textbooks, but their mobile phones.

Using their handsets' styluses, the pupils use the software uploaded on their phones to read up on the concepts, then go on to do exercises. If in doubt, they surf the Internet for more information.

Teachers test the pupils' understanding by getting them to sketch diagrams of what they have learnt. Their work is uploaded to a server for teachers to review.

The school, in partnership with National Institute of Education (NIE) researchers, has introduced this new way of learning to all Primary 3 classes and two Primary 4 classes. It has bought about 300 mobile phones, so the pupils can each have one to take home.

Although there are other schools that also use mobile phones in classes, they do so on a smaller scale, for example, taking photographs or videos during class trips.

Nan Chiau Primary's innovative use of technology has been recognised: Software giant Microsoft last Thursday named it a 'Mentor School' - the highest honour it gives to schools that develop information technology programmes that can serve as models for schools globally.

Mentor Schools can get access to Microsoft experts who will help them develop new programmes. The schools also get to test out new Microsoft technology, and share their expertise with other schools. There are 25 other Mentor Schools around the world.

Besides Nan Chiau Primary, Singapore has two other Mentor Schools - Ngee Ann Secondary and Crescent Girls' School. The only country with more Mentor Schools is Australia, which has five.

Crescent Girls' has been a Mentor School since 2007, while Ngee Ann Secondary was upgraded from being a Pathfinder School this year.

All Crescent Girls' students have tablet PCs, which allow them to blog, upload videos and chat using instant messaging with their teachers and classmates.

Ngee Ann Secondary has developed 'virtual buddies' on Windows Live Messenger that answer questions on physics and texts from Shakespeare.

Schools can apply to be a Mentor School or Pathfinder School - the second highest level of recognition - by submitting a written entry and video about how they use technology in teaching and learning. A panel of judges comprising Microsoft staff and experts makes the final call.

The awards are part of Microsoft's Partners in Learning - a US$500 million (S$650 million) initiative set up in 2003 to improve education through access to technology and training.

Nan Chiau Primary applied to be a Pathfinder School, but its work impressed Microsoft so much that it upgraded the school.

Microsoft Singapore managing director Jessica Tan said the judges felt the school had 'a robust and well-thought vision and plan' for its IT projects.

Nan Chiau Primary has resident researchers from NIE throughout the year. They work with teachers to design and evaluate IT projects for teaching and learning.

The school is working with the NIE, Singapore Centre for Chinese Language and Microsoft on a new software, MyCloud, to teach Chinese. The software can read out uploaded text and has an e-dictionary to help with difficult words.

Principal Tan Chun Ming said: 'IT equipment costs a lot of money. We cannot embark on a project without proper planning and after a few months say, 'Hey, this is not working out' and stop it. So all our IT initiatives begin with research and our teachers work with the researchers to evaluate if the projects are successful.'

Researchers have tracked the results of a Primary 4 class that has been using mobile phones for lessons for two years.

The pupils who used to get Cs and Bs in science before using the gadgets now get Bs and As. Pupils say they like using mobile phones in class because it is fun.

Janelle Lee, 10, who got an A at the recent year-end exams, said: 'Science lessons used to be boring. Now with the mobile phones, I can watch videos, surf the Internet and draw pictures.'

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ST: Economics made easy with LTA examples

Singapore

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Nov 1, 2010

Economics made easy with LTA examples

By Maria Almenoar

 

THEY might be too young to drive yet but some junior college students will soon know more about Electronic Road Pricing than many motorists currently on the road.

They owe this to a video package on transport policies that the Land Transport Authority (LTA) worked with the Ministry of Education to produce for teachers to use in economics lessons.

The package has four discs for students to view, a disc for teachers to use in planning lessons and a booklet with a summary and questions to raise in discussions.

Through these videos, students learn about the different operators that make up the transport system here, passenger fares, traffic congestion and the Republic's overall masterplan for transportation.

The screenings are tied in with economic concepts that have been lined up in the syllabus for students to assimilate.

For example, the videos help illustrate that the local taxi industry, where many companies compete, operates as an oligopoly, whereas the bus industry, with two players, is a duopoly.

So far, the package has been distributed to 20 junior colleges and Millennia Institute, as well as integrated programme schools that offer economics at A-level.

LTA's group director for corporate communications, Mrs Tammie Loke, said: 'The more they understand about policymaking and economic trade-offs in managing urban transport, the better equipped they will be to manage the system and its use.'

She added that the response had been encouraging and teachers had found the videos easy to use.

Teachers interviewed said this was probably the first time that a government authority had gone out of its way to make such materials relevant to students.

Said Madam Tan Dai Hwee, 35, a senior teacher at Anderson Junior College: 'Students find it difficult to make the connection with textbook examples.

'When we use examples like traffic jams, students start to see why economics is actually very relevant to their lives.'

ST: School can wait, childhood cannot

Singapore

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Nov 1, 2010

SOAPBOX

School can wait, childhood cannot

Gen Y parents should relax a bit and not push to make kids top achievers

By Corrie Tan

 

IT IS easy when you are not a parent to write off worries that run along the lines of, what if my child does badly in school? Or what if she does not have the interview skills to get a good job? Or what if he lacks an appreciation of the arts?

Me, I worry instead that Singapore's novice parents - my peers - seem to be pushing too hard when it comes to childraising.

Rattled by the Ministry of Education's announcement that examinations at the Primary One level would be scrapped by 2013, many parents rushed to buy endangered exam papers of top primary schools from unauthorised vendors.

Let's not even talk about private tuition. Last month, The Straits Times reported that children as young as four are being sent for extra classes to prepare them for primary school. And, oh, to the Toastmasters Club to hone their speech and presentation skills.

At this rate, the average Singaporean six-year-old will soon have: a Grade Eight certificate in piano and violin, flawless public speaking skills, the ability to multiply and divide four-digit numbers and a vocabulary to bamboozle college professors.

Early childhood educators have advised caution. If a child enjoys his or her classes, then there is something to be gained from them. But children should not be dragged there kicking and screaming.

While parental concerns about a child's future are legitimate, I wonder if the greater slice of Gen Y, achievement- oriented and exposed to a surfeit of education options, measures success only in terms of grades and trophies.

Or do they, as time-starved young professionals, equate enrolling their children in enrichment courses with a greater contribution to their development?

I believe that an unwilling child is likely to learn nothing, regardless of his hours in class. And isn't it a happy childhood that matters in the end, since it's something that cannot be reclaimed?

From age four to six, I frequented the playground and not tuition centres. The piano was a foreign instrument that produced noise when I attacked its keys.

At six, I played an angel in a kindergarten Nativity play. My knees shook and I forgot some lines. And maths? What was maths?

I still passed A-level mathematics, went to university, got a job and can knock out some tunes on the piano.

In a blog devoted to her cancer-stricken four-year-old daughter - now cancer- free after chemotherapy - a former teacher of mine summed it up best: 'One thing I know for sure, I'm going to let my little girl enjoy her childhood and forget about angsting about her being monolingual or being unable to spell anything other than words like princess, love, castle and once upon a time.

'School can wait. Jobs can wait. Childhood cannot. Life cannot.'

[email protected]

Fast Company: How TED Connects the Idea Hungry Elite

September 1, 2010

How TED Connects the Idea-Hungry Elite

By Anya Kamenetz

Inside the World's MOST EXCLUSIVE (and Most Accessible) CLUB with SPECIAL GUESTS including

Elizabeth Gilbert • Richard Branson • Jamie Oliver • Malcolm Gladwell • Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala • Barry Schwartz • Ken Robinson • Sarah Silverman • Bill Clinton • David Byrne • Bill Gates • Craig VenterJill • Bolte Taylor • Dave Eggers • Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy • Sunitha Krishnan • Tony Robbins • Julia Sweeney • Isabel Allende • E.O. Wilson • and the chief himself, Chris Anderson!

The other day, I got an email from a new friend. The subject line read "Are you a TED talk person?"
It linked to an 18-minute video of MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely talking about the bugs in our moral codes. Other friends have sent me videos of Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert on the spiritual dimension of creativity; rocker David Byrne on how venue architecture affects musical expression; and UC Berkeley professor Robert Full's insights into how geckos' feet stick to a wall.

Each of these emails is like a membership card into the club of "TED talk people." I love being a member of this club. The videos give my discovery-seeking brain a little hit of dopamine in the middle of the workday. But just as important, each one I see or recommend makes me part of a group of millions of folks around the world who have checked out these videos. What links us is our desire to learn; TEDsters feel part of a curious, engaged, enlightened, and tech-savvy tribe.

These two things -- great ideas and the human connections they create -- make TED a unique phenomenon. Other conferences, such as the World Economic Forum in Davos and D: AllThingsDigital in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, have similar elite A-list rosters. But TED, which takes place annually in Long Beach, California, is the only one that fully exploits the power of what you might call, with apologies to Cisco, the human network. In the nine years since publishing entrepreneur Chris Anderson bought TED, it has grown way beyond a mere conference. By combining the principles of "radical openness" and of "leveraging the power of ideas to change the world," TED is in the process of creating something brand new. I would go so far as to argue that it's creating a new Harvard -- the first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years.

Of course TED doesn't look like a regular Ivy League college. It doesn't have any buildings; it doesn't grant degrees. It doesn't have singing groups or secret societies, and as far as I know it hasn't inspired any strange drinking games.

Still, if you were starting a top university today, what would it look like? You would start by gathering the very best minds from around the world, from every discipline. Since we're living in an age of abundant, not scarce, information, you'd curate the lectures carefully, with a focus on the new and original, rather than offer a course on every possible topic. You'd create a sustainable economic model by focusing on technological rather than physical infrastructure, and by getting people of means to pay for a specialized experience. You'd also construct a robust network so people could access resources whenever and from wherever they like, and you'd give them the tools to collaborate beyond the lecture hall. Why not fulfill the university's millennium-old mission by sharing ideas as freely and as widely as possible?

If you did all that, well, you'd have TED.

Its "faculty": A roster of speakers that runs from Bill Clinton to J.J. Abrams, from Desmond Tutu to Isabel Allende -- anyone who's driving change across the globe. Their topics range from biophysics to graphic design, covering all that Roman playwright Terentius might have had in mind when he said, "Nothing human is alien to me." The economic model? With attendance fees, advertising, and corporate sponsorships, TED ran an operating surplus of more than $2 million last year, which was reinvested into expanding its reach.

That's because unlike fearful old-school colleges, TED is finding that the more open it is, the more it becomes the global education brand of the 21st century. The runaway success of the TED talk videos, Chris Anderson tells me, persuaded him "to completely rethink what TED was, from a conference to a platform for ideas worth spreading." When you frame your mission in those terms, transformation follows. TED's Open Translation Project has in the past year made its videos truly accessible to a global audience; 3,100 community volunteers have translated the videos into more than 77 languages, adding a potential audience of 2.2 billion people. Anderson has gone even more radical, doing something that few universities would ever consider: He has started licensing the TED name and video content to anyone who wants them -- for free. The result: In just the first year, with comparatively little input from the mothership, TEDsters from around the world have put on 615 independent conferences, called TEDx, in locations from Kiberi, Nigeria, to Amsterdam. "We're exploring TED as a global classroom," Anderson tells me. "It's very much part of what we're dreaming of."

[video_twistage 1]

The story of TED goes back to 1984, when Richard Saul Wurman -- everyone calls him Ricky -- started the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference. As the former chair of the American Institute of Architects, Wurman had helmed the Aspen international design conference. But with TED, he says, "I just wanted to throw the world's best dinner party."

Wurman wrote the elegant, distinctive design rules that have been key to TED's success: A single track of programming ("They think people want choice, but the people talking at the break don't have a common memory and all feel that they went to the wrong session"); no Q&A ("Out of the first 20 questions you get, 19 are either speeches or bad questions"); and, most famously, an 18-minute-talk length. Wurman is Jewish, and 18 is a significant number in Judaism, representing the word chai, or life. But don't bring that up with him. "It's become mystical -- it's not fucking mystical," he says. "Fifteen minutes would be trivial, too short. If you said 20, people would talk for 25; 19 seems perverse, 17 is a prime number, so I made it 18."

Wurman, who's a cross between Ricky Jay and P.T. Barnum, turned TED into a three-ring circus of ideas. (One year, in fact, a Barnum descendant handed out red noses to attendees.) "I had the stage decorated with Norman Lear's copy of the Declaration of Independence valued at $25 million here; a couple million dollars' worth of Chihuly glass there; a cast of the head of Sue, the big dinosaur from the Field Museum, in Chicago," he remembers. "I had animal acts with live snakes and cheetahs. I kissed a brown bear that was as tall as I was. I had magicians and I had jugglers and I also had Nobel Prize winners and Bill Gates and Billy Graham and the Google guys when they were just two kids from Stanford -- everybody you could think of."

With that kind of mix, speakers (who have never been paid, but don't have to fork over the $6,000 admission fee) would hang around for the entire week, mingling with celebrities, writers, moguls, and their moms in a marathon bull session. These days, TED's atmosphere is more Sundance than circus, but the bull session still thrives. And that's something, sadly, that you won't find on a conventional college campus. "I teach really smart kids," says Swarthmore professor Barry Schwartz, whose TED talk on the paradox of choice was based on his best-selling book, "but mostly I'm teaching them. Maybe once or twice a year, some particularly sophisticated, talented, imaginative kid will come up with something I haven't already thought of." The same holds true, he says, of his fellow faculty. "The problem is I've been in this place for a long time and after awhile you develop this lazy attitude that you no longer have anything to learn from your colleagues. You withdraw into your own cocoon. Well, people who come to TED are open to being changed by their interactions and conversations. They're in an environment where they're going to learn something new every five minutes. You could create something like that on a college campus, but generally that doesn't happen."

It's "networking extraordinaire -- just a total bonanza," says Cyndi Stivers, editor of Entertainment Weekly's EW.com [1]. And out of that networking comes action. Wired magazine was born there. An Inconvenient Truth got a big push at the conference. Researchers and not-for-profits find sponsors; writers and scholars find agents and publishers; Web geeks find a path out of obscurity. Esra'a Al Shafei is a 23-year-old from Bahrain who runs an online hub for journalism and free expression called MideastYouth.com [2]. In 2009, she was made a TED Fellow at the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford. "TED gives you a sense of credibility," she says. "I've been running Mideast Youth for four years, but before the fellowship, nobody talked about it." TED connections have led her to sources of technical and moral support that helped her launch CrowdVoice, which tracks voices of protest around the world.

In 2007, biologist E.O. Wilson won TED's annual prize, a $100,000 grant intended to make a world-changing wish expressed from the TED stage come true. Wilson and his team are creating an open biodiversity database called the Encyclopedia of Life. But if you ask them, their TED connections have been even more important than TED's money. Microsoft and Adobe loaned programming expertise, and the high-profile ad agency Razorfish made an award-winning four-minute video of the project. "We're constantly getting messages from people who have heard about us from TED," says Bob Corrigan, the project's acting deputy director, "and their energy has made real contributions."

This is exactly what Anderson hoped for when he bought TED in 2001. "I showed up there in 1998 for the first time," he tells me, "and basically fell completely in love with the conference, the people attending, their willingness to think big, crazy thoughts. From my point of view, it felt like something you could devote your life to."

Like TED, Anderson himself is a blend of technology, shiny entrepreneurialism, and do-good zeal. As the son of a missionary doctor, he grew up in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan, and as an adult he sold two tech-related publishing companies. After purchasing TED, he changed its status from for-profit to not-for-profit, and went about trying, in Wurman's words, "to save the world." According to Bruno Giussani, a former journalist who now directs TEDGlobal, "Chris believes in the fact that when you put smart people together into a room, they tend to engage, and he wants to use that to make a contribution toward a better world."

The most important thing Chris did," says EW.com's Stivers, "was take this inward-looking, exclusive dinner party, and have it face outward." The TED videos best manifest this about-face, yet they're an idea that almost didn't happen. June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media, says, "Friends of mine thought this was professional suicide. It was not at all obvious that there was an audience for taped lectures online."

Think of online video and what's the first thing that comes to mind? Piano-playing cats? Lady Gaga? Maybe Paris Hilton? The instant popularity of TED talks might say something more promising about both our collective consciousness and our collective attention span. Cohen tells me, "When we launched, the example I used to help size the opportunity was a Malcolm Gladwell podcast that had been downloaded 40,000 times. Actually, the talks were watched 10.5 million times in the first year." People emailed Cohen from all over the world, saying that they had shared a video with their entire address book, or that they'd watched a video with tears running down their face. That passion reset TED's mission. "Within three months, we relaunched ted.com [3] and realigned the entire organization around this mission of spreading ideas," says Cohen.

It was a risk. Would lecturers who typically pull down five-figure fees agree to sign release forms and give their speeches away online? Would attendees grumble about sharing the secret sauce? "Releasing all the content to the world for free had the potential to capsize our business model," Cohen says. Not so. TED first put the talks online in 2006. "That year," she says, "we increased the fee for the conference by 50%, and sold out in one week with a 1,000-person waiting list."

If you visit ted.com today, you'll find more than 700 talks. The most popular clock 5 million or 6 million views apiece, and are backed by advertising from sponsors such as IBM. "It is absolutely amazing," says Nicholas Negroponte, who spoke at the first dozen TEDs. "I met a man in South Africa recently who told me that his wife is angry because he is spending all his time with a 'mistress' " -- that is, the TED talks.

TED talks appeal to some needs a little further up Maslow's hierarchy than Paris Hilton's video, but they're not steamed broccoli. "Most staged presentations," as Cohen says, "are filmed like a high-school musical." TED uses multiple cameras, ready to catch a close-up when Bill Gates decides to unleash mosquitoes on the crowd to demonstrate a point about malaria. It edits out throat clearing, aiming to grab the viewers' attention in the first 30 seconds. Its techies are expert in what Cohen calls the "black art" of encoding video in various formats -- an embeddable player, streaming video, YouTube, podcast.

One thing that it does have in common with the Hilton video is that when a TED talk goes viral, it changes the star's life. Just ask Jill Bolte Taylor, whose video about her spiritual awakening following a stroke went online in 2008. "My name was placed on Time's Most Influential list for 2008," she says. "Oprah saw the video and interviewed me immediately for her Webcast Soul Series. More than a dozen book publishers saw the video and wanted to republish my self-published book, My Stroke of Insight. It was a remarkable six weeks."

Kevin Kelly, journalist, visionary, Wired brain truster, and TED veteran, puts it best: "This is a new genre of communication. Now, just like people running to The New Yorker with short stories, there's this global competition to do the perfect 18-minute TED talk."

Sure, these talks have their limits as an educational medium. An 18-minute presentation, no matter how expert, can't accommodate anything overly theoretical or technical -- the format is more congenial to Freakonomics than economics. Sometimes the earnestness threatens to overflow, while trendy technophiles and bullish business folk are often too slick. And there's a more fundamental problem with the model: In the age of free, members of TED's virtual faculty don't get rewarded directly for their contributions. They must have a foundation, a consulting business, a book, or a job at a traditional university -- something else to do that ugly work of monetizing their ideas, even as the videos bring TED money from sponsorships.

Nevertheless, the videos are finding their way into classrooms across the world. After posting on Twitter, I heard from educators using them to teach 10th graders at a private school in Arlington, Virginia; MBA students at Indiana University; and even a freshman seminar built entirely around TED talks at the University of Mary Washington, in Virginia. And thanks to volunteers like Anour Dafa-Alla, an Arabic-speaking Sudanese PhD student who lives in Seoul, the Open Translation movement has subtitled 10,000 videos in just one year, bringing them into global classrooms too. This year, 61% of ted.com traffic is from outside the U.S., up from 49% in 2009.

Let's stop to review. With the best minds, an experiential aspect that doesn't burden the venture with ridiculous overhead, a business model that works, a brand name that creates great opportunities for alumni, and a fantastic way of disseminating this learning to the world, TED seems pretty far along in creating a 21st-century education model that's open, yet high in prestige. So what's next? And what's still missing?

"When we put the talks online for free," says licensing director Lara Stein, "the brand was increasing in visibility. The concept was, how can we leverage the power of that and allow people to create something with it?" Stein, previously at Microsoft, championed the idea of allowing the community to create spin-off conferences called TEDx. She established a short-and-sweet set of guidelines designed to affirm the balance TED has always sought between intellectual freedom and quality control. TEDx licenses are free. Events can't be longer than a day. At least 25% of the content must be existing TED talk videos. Local speakers must be recorded, with the videos released to ted.com and also to a YouTube channel. If more than 100 people are to attend, one of the organizers must have attended TED proper and "experienced the TED DNA," as Stein says. Live by those guidelines and you too can set up a TEDx event.

Anderson told me that the response has been overwhelming. "We thought we might get a few dozen and that they'd be small. Instead, we're getting 20 every week, and the ambition is breathtaking. Jeff Bezos was knocked out by [one]. He was saying it's an astonishing phenomenon. It's not exactly a franchise -- there's really no direct obvious precedent." The TEDx events have been on all kinds of themes in all kinds of places, from Sydney and Tel Aviv to the Great Wall, a village in Rajasthan, an American school for the deaf, and a shantytown in Nigeria. Last spring, people stranded in London because of the ash cloud created by Eyjafjallajökull organized a TEDx Volcano in 24 hours, and TEDx Oil Spill took place in Washington, D.C., in response to the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.

I gave a talk at TEDx Atlanta this May, on the future of higher education. The other talks were meaty, and as promised, the networking was even better. I hit it off with fellow speaker Gever Tully, who runs an unusual camp called the Tinkering School. I went to visit him later on the cloudy northern California coast. We played with cardboard and copper wire, as his students do, and he showed me a catamaran designed and hacked together out of PVC pipe by grade-schoolers, as we talked over future plans to collaborate. The experience drew me further into the learner-centered education movement. The Atlanta event was one of three organized by Tod Martin, president of Unboundary, a strategic and brand consultancy in Atlanta that has FedEx and Coca-Cola as clients. "It's more of a self-governing system than a TED-governed system," he says. "But people police the brand reverently once they're entrusted with it."

Giving the store away so successfully has softened even some of TED's harshest critics. In 2008, veteran tech columnist Sarah Lacy wrote a much-noted BusinessWeek piece called "Why I'm Fed Up With TED." Now, Lacy says, "From what I've seen on the ground, TEDx is doing a better job of walking the TED talk of including people from more underprivileged backgrounds in this conversation. I hope that continues. That is way more meaningful than a bunch of famous people sitting in Long Beach together and comes closer to actually changing the world." Even Wurman, who dismisses TEDx as "amateur night at the circus," says that the one he attended was of high quality.

That said, TEDx remains nerve-wracking for the TED team. "One of the mantras of management for the past 20 years has been that you must be obsessive about protecting your brand," says the European director, Giussani. And frankly, there are any number of ways that risk could backfire. What would happen if a TEDx event hosted a junk scientist or a hate-spewing cleric, or had a misfire like the Sarah Silverman debacle this February? (She gave a crude talk at the Long Beach TED conference, Anderson promptly tweeted his disapproval, and TED had its first celebrity fiasco.) And what would happen if TEDx events, by their sheer numbers, start to decline in prestige and excellence? It's hard to see how organizing, participating in, or attending one can give someone the same caliber of contacts or reputational boost as doing the same for TED proper. How can you keep up quality control if you let everyone play?

I don't know the answer. What I do know is that you have to admire an organization that has consistently doubled down on its philosophy of trusting the power of connected individuals and great ideas. "It is truly a new model," Stein says, "this willingness by a community to volunteer and change the world through education, and leveraging the platform to do that. There's nothing I can point to quite like it."

That's why I'm not surprised by TED's next move, which is to help its global community connect online. Global Conversation, which launches this fall and is sponsored by GE, is a set of tools that will allow people to hold conversations and plan meetings through ted.com. "Those tools will have a great impact, by empowering conversations and connection," says Cohen. "That's part of what fascinates me about working at TED: We're catalysts. What happens when you create a platform that can be used by people in a way you never predicted?" The answer, so far, is bold and promising. Here's hoping that promise is fulfilled.

Article location:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/148/how-ted-became-the-new-harvard.html

ST: Eco-tourism package deal

Singapore

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Sep 27, 2010

Eco-tourism package deal

S'pore and Malaysia are in talks to link Sungei Buloh with 3 Johor sites rich in biodiversity

By Amresh Gunasingham

Migrant whimbrels perch on trees on Pulau Kukup - a protected site in Johor which, with Tanjung Piai, Sungai Pulai and Singapore's Sungei Buloh, is being studied to find out more about the environmental impact of visitors and best modes of transport between sites. --ST PHOTO: KEVIN LIM

 

THE sleepy seaside village of Kukup, a short hop across the Causeway, stirs to life only on weekends when tourists descend on its famous seafood eateries.

But all that could change if an eco-tourism project combining the lure of Malaysia's biodiversity spots with Singapore's Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve takes off.

The two countries are in talks to look at how three gazetted nature sites in Johor - Pulau Kukup, Tanjung Piai and Sungai Pulai - can be marketed with the popular Sungei Buloh wetlands, to tap the burgeoning eco-tourism market.

The 647ha Kukup island, a five-minute boat ride from the mainland, is one of three Ramsar-accredited nature reserves in Johor state teeming with rich

biodiversity such as flying foxes, bearded pigs and long-tailed macaques.

The title is granted by the Swiss-based Ramsar Convention Bureau to identify wetlands of international importance.

In total, Sungei Buloh with the three spots in Johor will mean more than 1,300ha of lush green reserves, full of flora and fauna, that can be managed holistically and can attract tourist dollars.

The tourism agencies of both countries are conducting a feasibility study, separated into four phases, which includes looking at the environmental impact of visitors on these sites and the best modes of transport between the spots, said Ms Jeannie Lim, tourism concept development director at the Singapore Tourism Board.

She added that Malaysia and Singapore are now studying examples of cross-boundary eco-tourism products overseas.

The collaboration, first mooted last year as part of Singapore's involvement in the Iskandar Malaysia development region, was reiterated during talks between the two countries' prime ministers last week.

The talks secured a historic land swop deal to settle the issue of Malayan Railway land in Singapore, and the leaders also agreed to cooperate on projects such as a rapid transit system link between Johor Baru and Singapore, and an iconic wellness project in Iskandar.

While the feasibility study is on, the lure of Kukup remains a cheap weekend getaway where a mere RM85 (S$36) gets a night's stay and three meals at one of the sprawling holiday chalets overlooking dozens of fish farms dotting the sea.

Fishing remains the main source of income for most locals here, but for years Kukup has crumbled under the weight of a declining fish industry. The busy Strait of Malacca is riven by pollution that has dwindled the supply of red snappers and garoupas in the waters. The issue has been compounded by soaring food prices and a weakening economy.

Kukup is expected to benefit greatly if the eco-tourism plan succeeds. So, too, is the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve here.

Already, more than 140,000 visitors passed through its gates last year, more than three times the number visiting the three Johor sites.

Tourism experts such as travel consultant Subaraj Rajathurai, 47, who for the past 20 years has toured the nature sites in Johor, sees the initiative between the two countries as a 'win-win' situation.

Singapore can leverage on its world-class hotels and efficient transport networks - attributes that already make it a strong tourist hub regionally, while tapping a market dominated by neighbours with bigger and lusher green spaces, he said.

'Many of the roads in Johor are narrow and riven with potholes. A lot of work must be done to make it more attractive to international tourists,' he added.

Experts point to a largely untapped market of eco-tourists who can be wooed - estimates put the number of bird watchers in the United States, for example, in the millions.

Then there are the environmental benefits. Protecting wetlands which are separated by small stretches of water could also slow the loss of mangroves and allow birds to migrate back and forth, noted Assistant Professor Edward Webb from the department of biology at the National University of Singapore.

He said: 'The old school way of managing ecosystems, in which each country takes care of its own spaces, is outdated.

'Ecosystems do not respect national boundaries.'

===

Singapore

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Sep 27, 2010

Biodiversity boost to sleepy spots

Amresh Gunasingham susses out the three Johor sites, which may be linked with Sungei Buloh if an eco-tourism project between Malaysia and Singapore takes off.

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A park will soon be built surrounding the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve, which teems with flora and fauna. There are concerns about excessive public exposure, with 140,000 visitors going to the reserve last year. --ST PHOTO: AIDAH RAUF

 

SUNGEI BULOH

THREE decades ago, a visitor to the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve would be greeted by a smattering of prawn ponds situated within acres of wasteland.

Today, through a concerted effort to protect the 138ha green space, which was gazetted as a nature reserve in 2002, the area now teems with a variety of flora and fauna, including more than 220 species of birds.

Concerns have been raised about the need to protect the site from excessive public exposure.

Some 140,000 visitors walked through the reserve's gates last year. To try and alleviate the crowds, the authorities want to lower the number to 100,000 by channelling some of them to a 38ha park that will be built soon surrounding the reserve.

Linked to the nearby Kranji trail, the new park will be replete with facilities such as observation pods, coastal boardwalks and wireless learning trails.

The prospect of developing a cross-border tourist attraction involving the reserve and the three Ramsar green spaces in Johor has caught the attention of researchers and nature enthusiasts alike.

'It makes both economic and ecological sense,' said Assistant Professor Edward Webb from the department of biology at the National University of Singapore.

---

SUNGAI PULAI

JOHOR is a state blessed with an abundance of natural wonders and Sungai Pulai is a good example.

Spanning 9ha, it is the second-largest mangrove area in the state and was gazetted by the state government in 1923, the first mangrove forest to receive that distinction.

For years, the reserve has played an important economic role in supplying wood products such as timber.

It is also home to the rare small tree, Avicennia lanata, and animals such as the smooth otter and flat-headed cat. Threatened bird species like the mangrove pitta are known to live there.

The reserve, much of which remains protected and open only to environmental groups and researchers, sits at the mouth of a lowland tropical river basin, teeming with animal life.

Yet over the years, the mangroves there, like those in the rest of Malaysia, have fallen victim to illegal logging, the clearing of upland vegetation and land reclamation.

It is estimated that, between 1980 and 1990, 12 per cent of the country's mangrove forests disappeared.

---

TANJUNG PIAI

LOCATED at the southern tip of Malaysia, the Tanjung Piai National Park is home to more than half of the 40 known freshwater mangrove species in the world.

Named after a local fern known as 'Paku

Piai', the park supports many threatened species, such as the pig-tailed macaque, and birds such as the mangrove pitta.

The site has been conferred the status of a state park for eco-tourism by the Johor government, meaning it is funded by an estimated RM5 million (S$2.15million) annual budget that is shared with four other such parks.

The park is easy to navigate - a raised boardwalk network runs through the mangroves, while an ample number of maps and directional signs are also provided.

The site already appears to be popular with Singaporean nature lovers and schools alike, with schools taking students on annual nature trails and rubbish clean-ups there. More than 70 per cent of the 35,000 visitors to Tanjung Piai annually are from overseas.

Said Mr Yeo Suay Hwee, a nature guide: 'The reserve supports 23 species of mangroves. Considering there are only 30 known freshwater mangrove species in the region, that is a substantial number.'

---

PULAU KUKUP

A CENTURY ago, the seaside town of Kukup in south-west Johor was a famed fishing hub. Yet, just a stone's throw away from its coast, the 647ha island of Pulau Kukup holds the distinction of being the world's second largest uninhabited mangrove forest.

Local legend has it that the island is cursed - it was once home to five celestial princesses until one of them committed the forbidden act of falling in love and eloped with a sailor.

Gazetted as a national park in 1997, the lack of human intervention has seen it become home to more that 70 bird species and 30 mangrove species, crabs and wild boars, while the mudflats are rich with shellfish.

A thriving marine cage industry exists in the coastal waters between the island and the mainland. Its geographical position enables it to shield the mainland from the elements.

'Kukup has huge mudflats, which are important for the stabilisation and maintenance of mangroves,' said assistant professor Edward Webb from the department of biology at the National University of Singapore.

However, the western part of the island has been eroding in the last 15 years, leading to some mangroves vanishing.

ST: Top marks for S'pore education

Singapore

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Sep 25, 2010

Top marks for S'pore education

Finland, S.Korea also praised in global report on quality of teachers

By Jane Ng

Tanjong Katong Girls' School teacher Chen Ziyang gave up a place in medical school to join the teaching profession and has no regrets. -- ST PHOTO: DESMOND WEE

 

A GLOBAL management consulting firm has attributed Singapore's excellent education system to the 'integrated approach' it has taken in building up a pool of great teachers.

It has done this by making teaching appealing to its top students with the offer of competitive salaries, rigorous training and opportunities to grow professionally, said McKinsey.

The report, Closing The Talent Gap, noted the common emphasis on the quality of teachers recruited here, in Finland and South Korea, which have the world's best- performing education systems.

Students from these countries outperform their US counterparts in international assessment tests in mathematics, science and reading, the report noted.

One main reason was that these three countries focused on hiring, developing and retaining quality teachers.

Singapore recruits its teachers from the top 30 per cent of each cohort; Finland does so from the top 20 per cent of its high school cohort and requires all teachers to have a master's degree, while South Korea draws its primary school teachers from the top 5 per cent of each cohort.

In contrast, only about a quarter of new teachers in the US come from the top one-third of their cohorts, the report said.

Professor Lee Sing Kong, the director of Singapore's teacher training body, the National Institute of Education (NIE), said that attracting the best and giving them the best training is the way to a top-quality teaching force.

To attract the cream of the crop, the Education Ministry (MOE) offers a remuneration package on par with the industry's.

MOE's director of personnel Lu Cheng Yang said: 'Compensation matters when you want to get those people who are high- quality, have some interest in teaching, but who also have many other career choices.'

He added that it was MOE's hope that new teachers discover a passion for the job within five years, see it as a meaningful vocation and then stay in it for life.

Apart from a basic salary, teachers here get merit increments, performance bonuses and outstanding contribution awards.

They are paid a salary while being trained at NIE, and a retention bonus in the form of a cash payout every three to five years.

In Finland, salaries are modest but teaching is a top career choice; teachers there are more highly regarded than doctors and lawyers, partly because of the profession's prestige. In South Korea, teachers' salaries fall somewhere between those of engineers and doctors.

Salary aside, passion is what MOE wants in its teachers - and Mr Chen Ziyang has it in spades.

This teacher of English and biology at Tanjong Katong Girls' School gave up his place in medical school to pursue his passion, inspired by Chinese writer Lu Xun, who was a medical student before becoming a writer.

Mr Chen, 26, called 'foolish' by his parents and peers, has one of Lu Xun's sayings as a retort.

'Lu Xun said: 'Why cure the ills of the human body when you can't change a person's behaviour? I believe moulding character, making a difference to students, is more meaningful than healing a body.''

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FT: Ethics teaching asks the wrong questions

Ethics teaching asks the wrong questions

By Mary Gentile

Published: September 13 2010 10:17 | Last updated: September 13 2010 10:17

A few years ago, I suffered a crisis of faith. After working in the field of business ethics at Harvard Business School and later as a consultant on global MBA education, I began to wonder if it was even ethical to try to teach the subject.

I laboured to persuade faculty to raise the topic, but then, the conversation typically went as follows: some students argued we should all “do the right thing”. These individuals typically broke into two groups: those who were saying what they thought was expected and those who really wanted to believe they could be ethical business people.

And then there was another group who felt the class was an exercise in political correctness. What did it have to do with learning how to be successful? They were cynical and sometimes slightly resentful; what right did a business school have to be preaching at them?

Given this particular recipe, coupled with faculty who understandably did not want to argue that students behave in a naively self-destructive fashion, the ethics discussion was less than empowering.

Classes were typically based on thorny ethical dilemmas: the ones we termed “right versus right” discussions, although they often amounted to more of a search for the lesser evil. Students who argued for “ethical” positions would often appear to be less sophisticated; the way to demonstrate you were worldly wise was to argue that the competitive marketplace did not allow for self-serving morality, or even more cleverly, that it was wrong to behave in such a selfish way, putting one’s own conscience over the good of the enterprise and shareholders.

It seemed that despite faculty’s good intentions, these conversations were something of a charade and I questioned the whole endeavour.

But then I realised that the MBA graduates pictured in handcuffs were typically those who had been engaged in more clear-cut offences; rather than right versus right scenarios, their offences were not only unethical but illegal. And I wondered if our focus on distinguishing right from wrong was actually creating a kind of “school for scandal”. Students were practising the very rationalisations that led them to question whether values-driven behaviour was even possible or right in the first place. It was this kind of thinking that later led some of their number into such deep litigious waters.

Were we asking the wrong questions? Shouldn’t we invite students to think about how to do what was ethical and legal, rather than whether it was possible (or profitable) to do so? What if we looked at what had worked in the past for those individuals who had found ways to voice their values in the workplace? And what if we asked students to develop action plans and “scripts” for what they would say and do when they encountered the very predictable pressures to behave unethically? We could then tell them to practice these scripts with each other – not as adversarial role play but as peer coaching exercises. Students would prove their sophistication with the most feasible arguments and methods to do the seemingly impossible, that is behave in accordance with their highest values in the workplace.

Just think what might have happened at BP if individuals there not only knew what the right thing to do was (we know there was more than one engineer who tried to speak up about safety violations), but also knew how to do so effectively.

This idea is not rocket science. It amounts to educators asking students and business leaders asking employees to bring their insights, their critical thinking and innovative ideas to the task of getting the right thing done.

We know that the heroes of business history comprise individuals who made “do-able” what previously seemed impossible. Let’s invite students to apply that same passion and entrepreneurial spirit to building a values-driven economy.

Mary C. Gentile, Ph.D. is the author of Giving Voice to Values: How to Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right (Yale University Press) and Director of the “Giving Voice to Values” curriculum and Senior Research Scholar at Babson College.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

ST: If only I had taken Chinese seriously...

Think

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Sep 19, 2010

If only I had taken Chinese seriously...

By Charissa Yong

Thousands performing exercises at the Forbidden City in Beijing last month. A visitor will have problems appreciating the Forbidden City's grandeur if he cannot fully comprehend the on-site Chinese signboards explaining its history. -- PHOTO: AP

 

Beijing: Recently I decided that I really wanted a time machine, or some time-travel superpowers.

Then I could journey back a few years to knock my younger self on the head and tell her to be serious in her study of Chinese.

The D7 grade I received for my O-level Higher Chinese used to be something I was resignedly proud of. It was a warped badge of honour, proof that I really was as pathetic at the subject as I said.

In kindergarten, I thought ming bai, a phrase the teacher frequently used to ask if we kids understood her instructions, was the colour of a crayon.

I remember doing my valiant best to write a Chinese essay in Secondary 3. I had no idea what 'all-rounded' was in Chinese, and turned to ask my classmate seated next to me. Quan yuan was her joking reply - it literally means 'entirely circular' and is the wrong term - but not knowing better, I dutifully wrote it down. That definitely got everyone laughing at me.

So when I found out I was going to be working in The Straits Times' China bureau in Beijing for six weeks this summer, I was excited, yet horrified.

It was a great opportunity because I had never been to China before, but it also meant I would have to rely solely on my horrendous mother tongue to get by.

English is the language of my thoughts and my tongue, and what my family speaks at home. I grew up on a diet of English storybooks and television programmes, and later fed myself with a whole banquet of English songs. Chinese never really had a chance with me.

In my first week in China, I would choose meals off menus based on whether I could read the Chinese characters, and skip the ones I could not.

Only one person asked me if I was from Singapore. Everyone else wanted to know if I was from Britain or an American-born Chinese, because why else would my spoken Mandarin be so stilted and stuttering? Because I am an ethnic Chinese, I was invisible and could blend into crowds here - right until I opened my mouth. The minute I started talking, everyone knew I was an impostor.

Reporting in an environment where I was severely hampered by my language inadequacies was a great challenge. Half the time, I felt like I could not understand what was going on and had to frantically consult a dictionary. Google's translation tool became my best friend until I banned myself from using it. Nor could I properly express myself, which was incredibly frustrating.

It was also sad. For a story about environmentally friendly burials, I had speak to an elderly Chinese woman whose husband of decades had just died. As the interview ended, I found I had no words that could convey my heartfelt sympathy for her loss.

I had to settle for an apologetic but perfunctory 'I'm sorry to have disturbed you, thank you', and came away from the conversation upset and kicking myself.

Being limited by language was a ghastly feeling. There was so much I wanted to say, but so little were the ways in which I knew how. It felt like my thoughts were trapped within my own mind with no way of being expressed. There was so much I wanted to know, like the histories behind phrases and the nuances of words, and I knew I was missing out on seas of meaning.

A self-defence instructor I interviewed used an idiom to explain to me the significance behind the traditional Chinese martial arts greeting where one's open left palm covers one's fisted right hand. Sadly, it was obvious that I didn't really understand him because I knew very little about the heritage of the language.

The grandeur of the Forbidden City also felt wasted on me because I couldn't fully comprehend the on-site signboards explaining its history.

One Friday night in Houhai, Beijing's Clarke Quay, I sat captivated for hours listening to a musician sing Chinese classics from his soul. I felt helpless because the more beautiful the songs were, the more I wanted to know the stories behind them. But although I heard what he was singing, I didn't know most of what he meant.

Really, I have never wanted to 'speak good Mandarin' as much as I do now. Not because it's cool - although I admit it really is - but because it's a rich, beautiful language, and it is incredibly useful.

All the same, I know that without this short stay in China, I would not have been this interested in learning its language.

Prior to this, I was much more interested in learning Japanese so I could watch my favourite anime episodes without subtitles. It was only when I realised I really liked Chinese song lyrics that I started regretting not being proficient in the language, and it took being thrown into the deep end in China for that regret to blossom into full-fledged remorse.

The irony is that when Chinese lessons were compulsory and easily accessible, I had no interest in them. But now that they are tricky to schedule into my time, I have a genuine desire for them.

I don't know if it's too late, but my time in China has made me really want to try.

[email protected]

The writer is a Singapore Press Holdings scholarship holder who is studying international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She completed a six-week internship with The Straits Times' China Bureau last month.

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Trapped feeling

Being limited by language was a ghastly feeling...

It felt like my thoughts were trapped within my own mind with no way of being expressed.

TED: Sugata Mitra - The child-driven education

Indian education scientist Sugata Mitra gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.

Bottomline: Education is a self organising system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.

FT: Child's play to nurture young engineers

Child’s play to nurture young engineers

By Daniel Schäfer in Ludwigshafen

Published: August 18 2010 22:55 | Last updated: August 18 2010 23:05

Experimental work: children in Ludwigshafen, Germany gain enthusiasm for science

With his big blue safety goggles and oversized apron, little Lukas resembles a miniature chemistry professor as he blows air with a drinking straw into a transparent plastic bucket filled with water. “I am producing bubbly bubbles that are filled with air,” the five-year-old explains excitedly.

This water experiment at a day care centre in Ludwigshafen, south-west Germany, has shown Lukas that the environment is full of air. But the implications are far wider. Experiments such as these form part of corporate Germany’s increasingly desperate effort to tackle its most pressing long-term problem: the drastic skills shortage.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Merkel to stick with cuts despite growth - Aug-16

Analysis: Germany: On a roll - Aug-15

German imports surge points to rebound - Aug-09

Germany’s growth predicted to surge - Aug-06

Germany strives to attract overseas expertise - Aug-03

Comment: Germany plays by the rules - Aug-01

In spite of an unemployment rate that still stands at 7.6 per cent, employers in Europe’s largest economy are faced with a shortage of mathematicians, engineers, electricians and other skilled professionals that threatens to undermine the country’s position as one of the strongest industrial economies in the world.

German companies were short of more than 60,000 skilled workers with technical and scientific qualifications in 2009, according to data from DIW, an economic research institute. With the country’s population rapidly ageing and the educational system failing to spark interest in sciences, Germany’s skills shortage is expected to increase dramatically; Prognos, a research institute, recently forecast that by 2030, there will be a shortfall of 5.2m professionals.

“We will have to do much more for education and research, otherwise we will face a very dark future,” says Franz Fehrenbach, chief executive of Bosch, the German car parts and industrial conglomerate.

The scale of the problem is such that many German companies have desperately held on to their skilled workforce in spite of last year’s economic decline, the steepest since the second world war.

So, alongside embarking on a poaching battle over the existing professionals and trying to attract more immigrants – a hotly debated topic in Germany – a growing number of senior managers has been starting initiatives to address a problem that in 2009 cost the German economy about €15bn ($19bn, £12.3bn).

Five years ago, Mr Fehrenbach and eight other senior managers founded Wissensfabrik – “Knowledge factory” – which promotes science and economics among schoolchildren and fosters children’s language skills. Since then, the organisation has launched an array of projects to improve an education system that seems increasingly unable to cater for the needs of engineering, electronics and vehicle makers, the backbone of Germany’s export-driven economy.

In Germany, more than 30 per cent of students in technical sciences drop out of university early. According to estimates by VDMA, the German engineering association, 65,000 engineering freshmen started university in 2009 but only 31,000 finished their final exams – far less than were needed by industry.

Gerhard Rübling, head of personnel and executive board member at Trumpf, a family-held laser machinery maker and a founding member of Wissensfabrik, says the situation is dramatic. “The requirements for engineering studies are too tough and the curricula do not always suit the needs of the industry. We need better tutorials and teaching plans at universities and we have to ask ourselves if technical subjects gain enough attention at school.”

While many German companies work with universities to ensure that students are taught the skills that will help in their professional lives, the Wissensfabrik is focusing on children’s formative school and even preschool years.

“We want to support and at the same time challenge the existing educational system,” says Eva Müller, Wissensfabrik’s chief executive.

Wissensfabrik finds companies that are willing to build and finance partnerships with schools, education facilities and childcare centres. It then provides those partners with learning materials and teacher training while also monitoring and supporting the projects.

The education system is only part of the problem. Europe’s export champion has for years blatantly ignored a large pool of existing talent and skill resources.

“We definitely have a lot of catching up to do with women, older people and the migrants who already live in Germany,” says Tanja Nackmayr, deputy director for education at BDA, the German employers’ association.

Trading in cuddly toys

At first, the project appears mean. For at Trumpf, primary schoolchildren must trade their cuddly toys before embarking on a “trainee week” at the laser machinery maker. But any hardship is soon forgotten.

First they design a product, such as a biscuit tin. Then, a laser machine punches the metal needed to build the product, which the children present to their teachers and later sell at school or in flea markets. With that money, they can buy back their toys and have some cash left over. So by the end of the week they have learnt how goods are made and about the consumer economy.

Progress has already been made with the over-55 age group. In the past 10 years, the employment rate of people aged 55 to 64 has shot up from 37.4 per cent to 56.2 per cent.

The number of female employees in industrial jobs is also on the rise, reflecting an increase in the number of university-educated women.

But Europe’s engineering heartland has so far failed to bring migrants into technical or business jobs. The number of migrants who fail to finish school is more than twice the average.

The skills shortage is so worrying that Wissensfabrik has evolved into a corporate mass movement, enlisting more than 70 companies, including some of Germany’s largest industrial groups, such as Siemens, Thyssen­Krupp and Continental.

Wissensfabrik has worked with 120,000 children and adults at more than 1,600 universities, advanced education facilities, schools and childcare centres.

“A successful recruitment strategy has to bank on long-term projects across the whole educational chain – from the early upbringing in kindergarten and the family to a lifelong, on-the-job training,” says Henning Kagermann, one of the founders of German software group SAP and president of Acatech, an academy that promotes technical studies and collaborates with Wissensfabrik.

Projects via the “knowledge factory” range from language training for small children – dubbed “narrative workshops”, as childcare workers learn how to teach children to tell stories – and one-week programmes, funded by companies, in which primary school pupils are taught natural sciences and technical subjects.

Once the projects are up and running, some companies withdraw. At Lukas’s day care centre, sponsor BASF, the chemical group, kick-started the project in 2006 but last year handed the financial responsibility over to the centre’s provider – in this case the Catholic Church.

“BASF wants to be a company that triggers and establishes societal changes, which means that once the projects are up and running, it can gradually withdraw,” says Daniela Kalweit, head of its educational programmes.

The company spends up to €5m each year on similar projects.

At the day care facility in Ludwigs­hafen-Oggersheim, the small borough where former German chancellor Helmut Kohl lives, change is palpable. With the help of various experiments – part of a project dubbed “Vom Kleinsein zum Einstein” (from small child to Einstein) – the 75 children have developed considerable enthusiasm for sciences while learning new words, such as those for various tools or apparatus.

Lukas looks keen to learn more about the “bubbly bubbles”. But it is too early to tell the outcome of BASF’s support for his drinking straw and bucket of water experiment. Asked about his future career, Lukas is resolute: “I want to become a policeman”, comes the reply.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

FT: Hopeless with numbers

Hopeless with numbers

By William Leith

Published: May 8 2010 01:46 | Last updated: May 8 2010 01:46

From calories to currency exchange, more than 6m adults in England struggle to make sense of numbers

To start with, I was good at maths. At primary school I could add and subtract, I was quick to grasp the concepts of multiplication and division. When it came to the concept of infinity, I was an early adopter. At five, my dad told me that infinity was the largest number. “Well then,” I said, “What’s infinity plus one?”

After that, things started to go downhill. When I tried to multiply large numbers, I began to hate the concept of “carrying”. When teachers said, “Carry one”, or “carry two”, I felt an urge to hit them. In the end, I performed these tasks by rote. I got by.

But maths was slipping away from me. I could feel it. When I looked at numbers, I felt a vague sense of panic. I disliked triangles and graphs. Over time, my brain began to shut down. The less I understood maths, the less I liked it. And the less I liked it, the less I thought about it. The part of my brain that should have been used for doing maths was pressed into service for other tasks. Avoiding maths, for instance. Feeling defeated by maths. Hating maths. And, eventually, wearing my innumeracy as a badge of pride.

Maths should have been the king of subjects: the search for patterns in the world around us. In the entire universe, no less. To think about maths is to think of the very interface between the world and the human mind, and to begin to ask the biggest questions of all. Namely, are we really looking deep into the fabric of the world, and seeing it as it is? Are these patterns real – or do they come from within our imaginations? Maths, at its best, is philosophy with substance – pure ideas that are, rather superbly, demonstrable. I was supposed to be learning about equations in order to have access to tools I could use to organise the world around me. So when I was told that, say, the combined ages of John and Jack were 18, and that John was twice Jack’s age, I should have relished the task of using an elegant equation to calculate the ages of both boys.

Let’s see. John is twice as old as Jack. So if Jack is X, John must be 2X. And we already know that 2X plus X, the combined ages of the boys, equals 18. Which means that 3X equals 18 – which means, in turn, that X is 18 divided by three. What’s a third of 18? Six. So Jack is six! And John, being twice as old, must be 12! Child’s play. But not for me. I slogged through equations such as this. Out of touch with the mathematical parts of my brain, I came to believe that these simple procedures were, in fact, incredibly difficult. I failed my maths O level. Then I failed it again. I went through tutor after tutor.

What happened to me is not unusual. Lots of people give up on numbers. Belinda Vernon is head of research at New Philanthropy Capital (NPC), a think-tank that advises donors and charities about how to make the best use of their resources. Vernon, who has just co-written a report called Count Me In about numeracy problems in England, spends a lot of time thinking about why people are bad at maths and how charities can help them. “One in five adults is effectively innumerate,” she tells me. “They can’t work out the change from their shopping.”

According to Vernon’s report, basic numeracy means being able to manage “the skills you need to do a job (for example using spreadsheets, calculating invoices) and to be an engaged citizen in the modern world (for example, making sense of statistics reported in the media).” So more than 6m grown-ups (these figures are just for England) don’t really understand numbers, or how those numbers are having an impact on their lives. They are confused by supermarket offers and bamboozled by tracker mortgages, calorie labels, and petrol prices. They are bad at maths and it’s hurting them. Vernon thinks these people can be helped. At school, teachers can stop them falling through the cracks. As adults they can be shown that, even if they have lost any connection with numbers, they may not have lost it for good.

In Britain, most of us just give up maths aged 16 and never really think about it again. Dr Graham Sigley is deputy director of Catch Up, a charity that trains teaching assistants to give extra maths help in schools. The former head of a primary school in Greater Manchester, he says we have a collective attitude problem. “We live in a culture where it’s OK to be bad at maths.

“I remember, as a head, talking to parents about their children’s problems with maths. One dad sticks in my mind. He said, ‘I wouldn’t worry, nobody in our family can do maths.’ And I was listening to the radio the other day. It was a pop quiz. Zoë Ball was presenting. She got the score wrong. She said, ‘I’ve never been good at maths.’” (Ball’s father, Johnny, presented many children’s television programmes – about maths).

So, lots of people are bad at maths, and nobody seems to care. As Vernon says: “It’s OK to say you’re bad at maths. It’s even rather fashionable to be bad at maths. It’s OK, because you might be creative.” Somehow, we have come to see maths as one side of a coin, and creativity as the other. Another thing, says Vernon, is that children often lose their connection with maths at age 11 or 12, when they move from primary to secondary school. “That’s when maths moves from practical to abstract,” says Vernon. In other words, when they stop thinking about how many apples Jack has, if he starts out with four, and gives one to John, and when they start thinking about this differential expressed as a percentage. Jack had all four apples. Now he has 75 per cent of the apples he had before. And if he gave John another apple, he’d be giving him 33.3 per cent of the apples he had left. And if he gave him a third apple, he’d be giving him 50 per cent of his remaining apples. It’s at around this point that thousands of children begin to give up on maths, and enter the long slog of life as a virtual innumerate.

This is what happened to me. But why? People don’t lose other skills in the same way. Take reading. Why don’t people lose their ability to read in such a dramatic fashion? The consensus seems to be that, in some way, numbers are harder to grasp than words. Understanding numbers demands rigour. When you do maths, you learn lots of little steps; if you miss one step, you can’t progress.

Yet reading is just as difficult as maths. In fact, lots of scientists say it’s even more difficult. In her 2008 book, Proust and the Squid, Dr Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in the US, makes a striking point: we were not born to read. Our brains are hard-wired to speak, and to understand mathematical concepts such as the ratio between things. But everybody must learn to read from scratch.

To read, we must recognise symbols, construct these symbols into words, and form the words into sentences. And as you’re doing all this, you must scan ahead constantly, simultaneously processing many bits of information in a fraction of a second. But almost all of us can do this. Which is harder – reading a page of text in two minutes, or calculating the ages of John and Jack when their combined age is 18, and John is twice Jack’s age? The reading is harder, of course. But almost everybody can do the reading without thinking, whereas one in five of us, when asked to do the equation, loses the will to live.

The difference between numbers and letters is that we have to decode letters to survive and thrive. If 20 per cent of us were illiterate, the world would grind to a halt. People wouldn’t be able to read warning signs or instructions. The world really, really wants us to read.

But the world is not so bothered when we can’t do maths. Politicians don’t mind when we buy their phoney statistics; banks don’t mind if we fail to understand variable interest rates when we sign our mortgage. Credit card companies rather like us to be unable to calculate compound interest in our heads. Being illiterate makes people into a liability. Being innumerate might even make you into a better consumer, from a salesperson’s point of view.

The problem with maths is not that it’s hard. It’s that we don’t do it very much. If you use the maths part of your brain, it comes alive. The difference between hating maths and loving maths can just be a matter of practice. I know this. I was bad at maths. Then I walked up Mrs Peeling’s garden path. She was brilliant. I got matrices, equations, geometry, and algebra – all in seven furious weeks. She explained it, I got it. I passed my maths O level at the third attempt.

Can we improve our attitude to numbers? The NPC report mentions several charities working to improve numeracy. But what it really wants is a bigger solution – a National Numeracy Trust. This would be similar to the National Literacy Trust (founded in 1993 as a focus for efforts to improve the nation’s reading habits). But what would a National Numeracy Trust have to do to make sure that we are well taught and that our numeracy skills don’t slip away?

Make maths exciting. Make it compelling. That’s the verdict of Marcus du Sautoy, professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. “The problem is that we’re not pushing people beyond numeracy to the really exciting bits,” he says. “In English literature kids get motivated by being exposed to great literature. That’s key.” In other words, we should be engaging with Euclid, Pythagoras, Fermat and Fibonacci. “With maths you should play around. See patterns. It can lead to really exciting ideas,” du Sautoy says.

The first job of a National Numeracy Trust, then, should be to get people to practise maths all the time, in the same way that they read all the time. Then it would become second nature. And we all have to grasp a single key concept: numbers are important. Perhaps this era of large debts and austerity cuts will finally give us a reason to think twice about all those noughts on the end of impossibly large figures. Once we understand the importance of numbers, we will start to think about them. And maybe, just maybe, we won’t stop.

The other day, I told my son, who is five, that infinity is the largest number. He thought about this, and said, “What’s infinity plus one?” I hope numbers are different for him.

You can download the NPC’s Count Me In report at www.philanthropycapital.org

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Back to basics: the joy of numbers in Japan

In his new book, Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, the journalist Alex Bellos offers compelling reasons for all of us to love maths. One of my favourite bits is his explanation of why Japanese children are adept at doing mathematical calculations in super-quick time.

These schoolchildren practise with an abacus, an instrument that has been around for hundreds of years. About a million Japanese children use the abacus. In fact, the Japanese version of the “Three Rs” – reading, writing, and ’rithmetic – is known as yomi, koki, soroban – reading, writing, abacus.

Bellos goes to an abacus club, where a teacher, Miyamoto, stands in front of a group of children. Each child has an abacus. Miyamoto calls out the numbers with frantic speed, and the kids rattle the beads to make the calculations. Abacus training, Bellos says, is organised along the lines of a martial art, where the levels of the kids’ ability is measured in dans. There are competitions all over the country to see who is the quickest.

Bellos writes: “Abacus club is fun. I saw that in the faces of the pupils at Miyamoto’s school. They clearly enjoyed their dexterity at flicking the beads with speed and precision. The Japanese heritage of the soroban generates national pride. Yet the real joy of the abacus, I thought, is more primal: it has been used for thousands of years, and, in some cases, is still the fastest way to do sums.”

Some Japanese children become so skilled that they no longer need a physical abacus to perform calculations. They learn to do it in their heads, by imagining a virtual abacus.

This skill is known as anzan, and now anzan competitions are all the rage. In a game called “flash anzan” numbers are flashed on a screen, and competitors add the numbers in their heads as they appear. Each number appears for 0.2 seconds. Bellos watches a Japanese flash anzan champion called Naoki Furuyama calculate the sum of 15 three-figure numbers as they flash on the screen. By the time the last number has appeared, after only three seconds, Furuyama has the answer: 7,907. And why does Furuyama do this? It helps him with his concentration and self-discipline, he says.

‘Alex’s Adventures in Numberland’ (Bloomsbury) by Alex Bellos, £18.99

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.