Lift Up Your Hearts!

I've been experimenting with Memrise for several days—long enough to conclude it merits a mention.

Memrise is a vocabulary review system that specializes in languages, of which there are an incredible number, from French to Quechua to Klingon!  (Alas, no Swiss German, no doubt hampered by the lack of an official written form.)  There are other subjects, as well, but not many yet, and they are not well developed.  The Periodic Table course, for example, would do better not reversing the "o" and the "u" in fluorine, and settling on either of the two acceptable spellings of the element Al, instead of compromising with "Alumnium."  (Or is that a new element, named after all college graduates?)

I'm loving the Introductory German!  My favorite language course is still Pimsleur, which along with Hippo gets the correct sound and feel of the language and its structure into my brain.  But I also need a way to build up vocabulary, and Memrise is the best I've found so far.  The vehicle is a simple "garden" system:  new words are seeds, and through practice you sprout them, help them grow, "harvest" (more like transplant) them to long-term memory, and water them to keep them healthy.  E-mail reminders bring you back to your "garden" at varying intervals—short for recently-learned words, longer for ones you know better—so you don't lose what you've learned.

It's easy to use and kind of fun.  I find that I'm picking up vocabulary pretty well so far, though I do wonder who decided which words to introduce first.  I mean, die Bundesrepublik?  "Federal Republic" is not exactly a term I use every day.  Or how about der Mülleimer?  Dustbin?  Dustbin?  Dustbins are things people in the English novels I love to read are always "tipping" things into, but I'm sure I've used the term fewer times than Federal Republic.  And is blöd (stupid) really an essential vocabulary word?  Still, in addition to these oddities there are more useful terms, such as das Haus (house), vielleicht (maybe), and der Name (name).  And I've finally caught the difference between der Staat (state) and die Stadt (city).

Unfortunately, I can't make the audio work in Firefox, and so must use IE or Chrome if I want to hear the words pronounced.  That's something I find very valuable, not only for understanding and speaking, but because having heard the sound of a noun I'm much more likely to be able to remember whether it's die, der, or das, something I always have trouble with.  I'm beginning to think of the article and the word as one entity, which of course will get me into trouble when I have to worry about inflection, but I'll climb that hill when I get to it.

It's also German German, and so uses the Eszett instead of the Swiss double "s."  However, it accepts the double "s" when I have to type in an answer, so I'm fine with it.  Letters with an umlaut are easy to enter, via either a mouse click or the Windows U.S. International keyboard (which I prefer because it is faster).

Here's hoping I manage to stick with the program, and not lose everything when I go on vacation....

Florida gets all too much press for crazy happenings, so it's about time another state took the spotlight.  Was it another school shooting that put Cascade High School in Hendricks County, Indiana, in the headlines?  Nope.  The newsworthy offense was a senior prank involving the deadly ... Post-It note!  (H/T Free-Range Kids)  Actually, the offense was on the part of the school administrators, who so far have suspended over 50 students, either for participating in the prank or for protesting the school's draconian response.

For years, MIT and Caltech have known that inventive, harmless pranks are a sign of an intelligent, creative student body.  I think we can guess what schools the administrators did NOT graduate from—though maybe the helpful janitor (Frazz?) did. 

Celebrating a Simple Life has a perceptive post this morning.  Ostensibly, it's about giving meaningful praise to children's artwork, but I say her wisdom has a much wider application, for chldren and adults in all areas of life.  Read the whole thing; it's worthwhile, it's short, and it shows a great picture painted by her son.

When you give meaningless praise, your kid comes to expect it for every not-so-impressive act they perform.  It's exhausting to the parent, becomes meaningless to the child, and sets up a bad habit of being forced to praise mediocrity, with your child knowing full well that the praise is hollow.

When you describe what you see, you are telling the child your work is worth examining more closely.  You are encouraging language development through your description.  You are teaching your child to have a critical eye for their own work.  And then when you do offer praise, your kid knows they deserved it.

(Apologies, to those who care, for publishing the awkward gender-neutral but grammar-offensive language.  The content is worth getting past that.)

I'm convinced that non-specific praise in any area, for child or adult, usually does more harm than good.  It means we're not taking them or their work seriously.  It means we're too lazy (tired, busy, etc.) to do our own job right.  And it sets up children, especially, for failure in the long run: when praise is unrelated to the quality of the work, how can they improve? When a five-second scribble receives the same fulsome admiration as a 30-minute effort, how do they learn that persistence and hard work make a difference?

That's not to say that it isn't important to convey to our children (and others) that we love them because of who they are, not because of what they do.  I'm not advocating conditional love.  But when commenting on work done, specific and meaningful praise is what both feeds the heart and encourages more and better efforts.

The Stories of Emmy:  A Girl Like Heidi by Doris Smith Naundorf (Xulon Press, 2010)

Doris Smith Naundorf is known in upstate New York as The Story Lady.  The Stories of Emmy are taken from her one-woman play, Interweaving the Generations.  Emmy, Doris's mother, grew up partly in her Swiss village of Muttenz, and partly in Paterson, New Jersey, where her family moved when she was ten years old.  Her stories give a delightful glimpse into Swiss, American, and immigrant life in the early 1900's.  (Grandchild warning:  There is one sad incident requiring parental discretion; the stories are meant to be appropriate for chidren, but reality is sometimes harsh.)

Muttenz is near Basel (four minutes by train, a century later), and the stories are sprinkled with Baseldeutsch, the delightful Swiss-German dialect spoken there.  A glossary is provided for each chapter.

Driving the several blocks to the train station, Emmy excitedly chattered to her father.  "Will we get there in time, Vatti? she asked.  "Mutti says we must be there early, so we will not miss the train."

"Jo, jo," replied her father.  "In a country that makes such fine watches and clocks, of course the Zúúg runs on time.  It is up to the passengers to be there early so the conductors can keep their schedule."

"The Zúúg, the train, is never late?"

"Of course not!  We Swiss cannot even imagine such a thing!" her father assured Emmy.

I couldn't resist finding Emmy, age 20, and her family in the 1920 census.  (Click on the image to view a version large enough to read.  Their name, Lüscher, appears without its umlaut.)

Woo-hoo!  My copy of Dots: Zero to One Hundred arrived today!

I can't be griping all the time.  Here's some great news for homeschoolers—and others who don't fit in the standard school model—who have suffered, as we did, from age discrimination by community colleges.  Here are some excerpts from the encouraging story in tomorrow's Orlando Sentinel.  (I know.  Don't ask me why a column dated February 19 is available on the 18th, but it is.)

Two years ago, [Lake-Sumter Community College] refused to admit as a dual-enrollment student a then-12-year-old Center Hill girl who was more than academically qualified to study at the two-year community college.  Instead of enthusiastically embracing Anastasia Megan, a brilliant young woman home-schooled by her parents, college administrators took the most backward stance imaginable and fought to keep her out.

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights in Atlanta, to whom Annie's family complained, recently closed the matter after LSCC eliminated its age requirement, trained employees to stop discriminating and offered Annie a chance to apply.

However, by the time LSCC offered to consider Annie in July 2011, it was clear that her course of study already had outstripped what the community college could provide.   Starting in August, Annie, now 14, and another of the triplets, her brother Zigmund, will attend Queens University in Ontario, Canada. She was among 300 successful applicants to the college of business and commerce from a field of 5,000. ... Annie's brother is entering the university's engineering school (Annie's second choice), and the third triplet, Elizabeth, is enrolled in a high-school International Baccalaureate program.

[S]uch a ruling by the Office for Civil Rights is likely to have an effect on community colleges statewide. It's all about access in community colleges, and that's the way it ought to be.  The Megan family neither asked for nor received a nickel in damages. The Megans didn't hire a lawyer.  LSCC, however, spent about $12,000 on attorney fees fighting to discriminate against a kid whose achievements were remarkable.  Asked why the college ever would fight to keep any student out, [College President Charles Mojock] said: "That was then, and this is now. We live and learn too."

Here's an interesting article from Newsweekon the popularity of homeschooling with "urban, educated" parents.

We think of homeschoolers as evangelicals or off-the-gridders who spend a lot of time at kitchen tables in the countryside. And it’s true that most homeschooling parents do so for moral or religious reasons. But education observers believe that is changing. You only have to go to a downtown Starbucks or art museum in the middle of a weekday to see that a once-unconventional choice “has become newly fashionable,” says Mitchell Stevens, a Stanford professor who wrote Kingdom of Children, a history of homeschooling. There are an estimated 300,000 homeschooled children in America’s cities, many of them children of secular, highly educated professionals who always figured they’d send their kids to school—until they came to think, Hey, maybe we could do better.

We've come a long way in the 25+ years of my experience.  (Not that "evangelicals or off-the-gridders who spend a lot of time at kitchen tables in the countryside" comes close to being an accurate description of the home education movement at any time that I remember.  It was always much broader than that.)

One consequence of the increasing popularity of homeschooling is that there is now enough collective knowledge that journalists are less likely to write utter nonsense.  I found the article to be fairly accurate.  An exception would be the section equating homeschooling with attachment parenting, which they define as, "an increasingly popular approach that involves round-the-clock physical contact with children and immediate responses to all their cues."  This bizarre description makes it sound as if mothers continue to carry their eight-year-olds around in slings all the time.  No normal one-year-old would put up with that, let alone someone of school age.

Other than that, it's a pretty fair article, considering it was written by someone on the outside looking in.  And considering the really clueless articles that have been written on homeschooling over the years.

It's hard being a long-distance grandmother, whether the distance is 1000 miles or 4800.  Certainly I'd rather our grandchildren live just down the street!  But one compensation for the loss of frequent interaction is the joy of seeing how much the children change between visits.  As we await the time when I'll have baby news to announce, I'll share a few stories of life with Joseph, 18 months old and soon to assume the important role of big brother.

John Ciardi said that a child should be allowed to learn, "at the rate determined by her own happy hunger."  Joseph's current "happy hunger" is for letters and numbers.  He  has a wooden puzzle of the upper case alphabet that is the first toy he takes out in the morning, and again after his nap.  This was supplemented at Christmas by the nicest number puzzle I've seen, which includes the numbers from 0 through 20 and arithmetic operators as well.

First, he toddles over to the shelf for his alphabet, and then—because it is more difficult to reach—points to the number puzzle and commands, "Hum!" ["Numbers!"]  After naming the numbers and letters to himself and/or asking for them to be named, taking them out of the puzzle frame, putting them back in, and yes, throwing them with glee across the room—he is a little boy—he will get paper and a pencil and ask for various numbers and letters to be written, often adding his own scribbles, which, of course, look nothing like the models—yet.

Joseph knows all the letters, most by letter name (e.g. "bee," "ess," "tee"), some by "is for" (e.g. "cow" for C, "ha(wk)" for H.  He knows the numbers 0 - 10, 12, and 20.  Some are clear ("two, "ten") and some, such as seven and twenty, you have to know what he's saying, but it's consistent.

Not only does he know the pieces, and where they go, but he's also cognizent of what's missing, and worries until it is found.  Before dinner, and again at night, we help Joseph pick up the toys.  The other day he and I were working on the number puzzle, and Stephan the alphabet.  Stephan remarked to himself, "where's the Z?", finally found it (did I mention that the pieces get thrown around the room?), and put the puzzle where it belongs without announcing his success.  After Joseph and I finished the number puzzle, he went to Stephan and asked, "Zee?", content only when shown that it was in its proper place in the puzzle.

Just this morning Janet discovered that he also knows how to count, at least to six:  she was fixing dinner (which happens at noon here, because Daddy bikes home from work to join us), and Joseph was helping by handing her potatoes to weigh.  He handed her the first one, and announced, "one."  Then the second, followed by "two."  Then "three, four, five, six."  At the seventh and last potato, he hesitated, having forgotten; seven is one of his newest number words.  Our apologies to Glenn Doman and to the Right Start Math folks, who want children to lean quantities before they learn counting, but it was his idea.  We had no idea he could do it.  Then again, maybe he knows more quantities than we think.  He loves his daddy's Dots book.

Joseph is also very good at putting the pieces in their places on the puzzle board.  I remarked that he went very quickly from the "large knob puzzles" to being able to do this much harder variety, and Janet said, "Oh, he still can't do the large knob puzzles!  He gets frustrated quickly and gives up."  Which only confirms that children will work patiently and persistently to learn what they really love! 

Oh, I suppose I should mention that he's learning the letters and numbers in three languages....  I think he's more fluent with English at this point, though really, how would I know?

Joy for a grandmother's heart, especially a grandmother whose college major was math.  :)

Joseph is SO much fun.  His two favorite toys are his wooden alphabet puzzle, and his new-for-Christmas wooden number puzzle (0 - 20, with +, -, x, {division), < (works flipped for >) and =).  He's passionate about them; first thing in the morning, and again after his nap, he goes immediately for them.  He knows all the letters, most by letter name (e.b. "bee," "ess," "tee"), some by "is for" (e.g. "cow" for C, "ha(wk)" for H.  He knows the numbers 1 - 10, 12, and 20, and sometimes gets 0 but not consistently.  Some of numbers are clear ("two, three") and some, such as seven and twenty, you have to know what he's saying, but it's consistent.  And he's very good at putting the pieces in their places on the puzzle board.  I remarked that he went very quickly from the "large knob puzzles" to being able to do this much harder version, and Janet said, "Oh, he still can't do the large knob puzzles!  He gets frustrated quickly and gives up."  But he's so obsessive about the letters and numbers that he worked persistently enough to get good at them.  One of his favorite activities is to give me a piece of paper and a pencil and ask me to write letters and numbers.

He's also a very good-natured and calm child.  We shall see how that plays out when there is another little one in the house!

Our son-in-law, Stephan, has an artist's eye, and it shows in this book he created for our grandson, Joseph.  He has published it, in three versions, through Blurb, so anyone may order a copy.

The inspiration was the absolute delight Joseph has shown, from a very young age, in the "math dot cards" from Glenn Doman's How to Teach Your Baby Math program, and his joy in reading books that show an object along with its name.  As you can see, on the left side of the page is the numerical form of a number, with the written form in four languages (English, German, French, and Japanese), while the right side shows the number respresented by red dots.

Now Joseph will be able to examine his beloved dots whenever he likes.

Because there's no getting around the fact that specialty books are expensive, Stephan has produced three versions:

• The premier, full-length edition ($69.95) is hardcover and includes all numbers from zero to one hundred.
• The mid-length edition is less expensive ($47.95), hardcover, and includes all numbers from zero to fifty, plus the tens from sixty to one hundred.
• The bargain edition ($24.95) is softcover and includes all numbers from zero to twenty, plus the tens from thirty to one hundred.

This video was from six months ago, when Joseph was ten months old, but you can see his enthusiasm.

Stephan's Dots in Books page will keep us updated on how Joseph reacts to the book.  You can also leave comments and suggestions there.  Maybe there'll even be a new video some day.

For the past week I have been reliving elementary school.

My inspiration was this TED lecture from Salmon Khan of Khan Academy.

As a concept, Khan's idea is at once important, brilliant and frightening.

Important—because he is part of a growing movement to put education within reach of everyone. Well, everyone with access to an Internet connection, anyway.

Brilliant—because he turns school upside down.  The teacher does not introduce the material; that's done via an online lecture, assigned for homework.  Class time, then, becomes available for what is traditionally thought of as homework—working problems, writing essays—and discussion.  Thus anyone who is confused or needs help has immediately at hand both the teacher and his fellow students.  The teacher's time is allocated more efficiently, being spent on those who need help rather than those who don't.  The time of the struggling student is also used more efficiently, because he can get problems cleared up on Exercise 1 rather than struggling uselessly through 2 - 20 or just giving up.  Potentially, this system also helps other students, who find the work easy, to advance quickly to work that challenges them.  Although experience has taught me that the last is not high amongst most schools' priorities, this system might make them more amenable to the idea.

Brilliant, also, is his insistence that everyone should be expected to master the material.  I never did understand why any grade less than A is considered passing.  In almost no subject in which I received an A did I feel I had mastered the material—how much worse is it for someone who earns a C?  Perhaps in some subjects it doesn't matter much, but if you "pass" a child with a C in reading, or in math, you handicap him for life.

Frightening—because the system Khan has developed, at least when applied to the classroom, strips the student of privacy in yet one more area of his already over-exposed life.  The teacher knows what videos he watches, what online exercises he has worked on, how he is spending his time, and where he is apparently struggling.  All with good intent, of course, but the potential for abuse is there.

But back to my elementary school revisit.

Khan Academy has videos available on subjects wide and varied, but practice exercises are currently limited to mathematics.  So just for fun I decided to try them out.  (Yeah, I know.  I have a weird idea of fun.)  Here's what I discovered.  Remember, I have done the exercises but not watched the videos, so this is not a fair review of the whole process.

1. The exercises are pretty good, but do not exhibit much variety, and favor people with good test-taking skills.  The program is cluttered with annoying "rewards" of the sticker-and-gold star type, which shouldn't be attractive to anyone over eight and which can have a negative long-term impact on learning.  Nonetheless, I found the exercises very helpful for reviewing old concepts and drilling in my areas of weakness.  Which brings me to
2. Now I remember why I hated math until eighth grade, when I finally discovered algebra.  Elementary school math is replete with the kind of exercises I loathe, such as multiplying and dividing large numbers with lots of decimal places, in which my propensity for understanding the concept but making careless errors is my undoing.  Addition mistakes, transposed numbers, and sloppy handwriting are disastrous when you must get 10 correct answers in a row before moving on to the next lesson.  I can't tell you how many times I completed nine problems correctly only to be reset to zero through a careless error on the tenth.  However, I have more tenacity and patience than I did 50 years ago, or even at college, when I would trudge through the snow on a midwinter's night to have access to the Wang calculators available in the physics department, rather than do my lab calculations by hand.  I made it through, not only the exercises that were supposed to show I could do such calculations, but the ones that anyone in his right mind would have used a calculator for, such as, An alien spaceship travels at 490,000,000 inches per second.  How many miles does it travel in one hour?  I did it, and my brain is better for it—but I have new sympathy for my grandson, who is currently finding math tedious.
   
   Arithmetic : mathematics :: practicing scales : playing a Bach concerto.

I plow on.  The exercises continue through the very beginnings of calculus.  I find doing a few math exercises (even arithmetic exercises) to be a mind-refreshing break when other work gets frustrating.  (See weirdness, above.)

And I love the idea of a mild-mannered nerd who leverages tutoring his cousins into changing the world.

If you can read this, thank a teacher.

I've seen it on bumper stickers for years, and just today at the bottom of my Penzey's Spices receipt.  Only now did I finally wake up to the outrageous insult implied by that platitude.

With all due respect to teachers, of which there are some who are great and many, many more who do their jobs very well, how is it that we presume that a child, who requires only a reasonably supportive environment to learn to eat, to crawl, to walk, to understand, to talk, to love, to manipulate his environment—in short to acquire the essential skills of a lifetime in just a few years—how is it that we presume he cannot learn to read—a minor skill compared with all he has already learned—unless someone teaches him?

That's crazy talk.

I'm grateful for all who are willing to share their knowledge with others, and especially for those who make the sharing enjoyable.  I suspect that those who do best, however, are the ones who realize they are not teaching so much as facilitating a child's natural learning.

But that turns out to be much too big an issue to write about just because I was annoyed by a bumper sticker, when I'm surrounded by vacation detritus, my husband is hungry, and I haven't yet managed that shower I promised myself after walking four miles in the 95 degree heat....

Don't ask me how I came upon Sporcle, but beware—it's addictive!  There are quick quizzes for a wide array of subjects, and I've found them useful for refreshing the ol' memory on things I should know, as well as learning new interesting facts and just plain trivia.  Not to mention spelling, as it doesn't matter if you do know the capital of Iceland if you can't spell Reykjavík, which I can't—yet.  But I'm learning.  Here are some of my favorites:

Countries of Europe  Also North America, South America, Africa (up-to-date with South Sudan!) Asia, Oceania, and—if you have more time than I do—the world) and other geography games.

Books of the Old Testament (oh, those minor prophets!)  Also New Testament, Apostles, Seven Deadly Sins, Roman and Greek gods.

U.S. Presidents:  easy version (in order), hard version (random, by term of office).

Elements of the Periodic Table (accepts either "aluminum" or "aluminium").

Here's one for parents:  can you name all the words in The Cat in the Hat?

Interesting trivia:  common U.S. street names.

There's lots more, some more interesting and useful than others.  I find the music category almost useless, although there are a few good ones if you dig, like Symphony Orchestra Instruments. Composers by Country was kind of fun.

Enjoy!  And please post a comment here if you find good quizzes I haven't mentioned.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves:  The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss (Gotham Books, New York, 2003)

Many thanks to DSTB for giving me this book, and thereby redeeming a past mistake on my part, made in response to a mistake on the part of our library.

I’d heard that Eats, Shoots & Leaves was a good book—though I knew little about it, as you will see—and so one day when I found it on tape at our library, I checked it out.  I obviously was not paying attention when I put the cassette in our player, because apparently the wrong tape had been returned to the Eats, Shoots & Leaves packaging.  What I heard was so uninteresting to me that I didn’t even finish the book, and don’t remember it now; it certainly wasn’t about punctuation.

“What?”  you ask.  “There’s something more boring than punctuation?”

Read Eats, Shoots & Leaves.  You’ll never call punctuation boring again.  You’ll laugh, and you’ll also learn.

One thing I learned is something I’ve suspected for a while now:  the rules change when you cross the Atlantic.  It’s not just the spelling (and pronunciation) of that metal out of which we make soda cans and “tin” foil.  Truss encourages us to be sticklers for proper punctuation (hear, hear!)—a difficult enough task when bad examples surround us—but also cautions that sometimes what looks incorrect may be merely a cultural difference.

Be that as it may, the only thing that annoyed me about this short and pleasant book—and only as much as fingernails on a blackboard—was this British author’s persistent use of the British way of combining punctuation and quotation marks.

Many words require hyphens to avoid ambiguity:  words such as “co-respondent”, “re-formed”, “re-mark”.

I would have called that plain wrong, but it turns out that putting the punctuation inside the quotation marks (<ahem> where it belongs!) is an Americanism.

Many words require hyphens to avoid ambiguity:  words such as “co-respondent,” “re-formed,” “re-mark.”

I see the logic of the British system, but it still grates.

I also learned that there’s a reason for another annoyance ; this one is found in my beloved collection of George MacDonald books : What ?  Colons, semicolons, question marks, and exclamation points ! find themselves preceded as well as followed by spaces.  Truss provided the answer to my puzzlement:  these books are facsimile editions, and that now strange punctuation procedure was at one time the Way Things Are Done.

Are you confused by the Way Things Are (or Should Be) Done Now?  Check out Eats, Shoots & Leaves for some seriously amusing enlightenment.

A headline recently provided by my Google News feed illustrates the importance of correct punctuation.

Ratko Mladic arrested, Hillary Clinton in Pakistan

Imagine it now, without the comma:

Ratko Mladic arrested Hillary Clinton in Pakistan

Punctuation matters.  So read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest—and enjoy!

Outliers:  The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown & Co., New York, 2008)

Malcolm Gladwell’s books always turn my mind upside down.  He may not always be right, but he’s always exciting.

What makes a superstar?  What differentiates Bill Gates from the average computer geek, the Beatles from a garage band, the top athletes from the wannabes?  Talent, certainly, and hard work—but Outliers reveals that the most critical factors are often surprising, even random.

The 10,000 hour rule  Talent, we generally believe, is something we are born with.  Intelligence, musical ability, athletic skill:  you either have it, or you don’t.  There is more excuse than truth there, however.  There is a threshold of talent required in any field, but beyond that, experience is the all-important key.

Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good.  It’s the thing that makes you good.

Study after study has shown that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve world-class expertise in any field.  That’s 2,000 hours per year—the equivalent of a full-time job—for five years.  The opportunity to get those 10,000 hours, at the right place and time, makes superstars.  For Bill Gates it was a series of unusual circumstances, beginning in middle school, that gave him access to computers that even most college students did not have.  Before he dropped out of Harvard to make history, Gates had been programming for well over 10,000 hours.

Thanks to a chance encounter—and some illicit incentive—the Beatles found themselves in a set of gigs that required an extraordinarily long performance commitment:  up to eight hours per night, seven days a week.  It was the making of the group.  By the time they came to America in 1964, they had some 1200 live performances under their guitar straps.

Or, as Shinichi Suzuki said, “Skill equals knowledge plus 10,000 times.”  Another gem from the Suzuki world (though I’ve seen it attributed in several ways, most commonly to Vince Lombardi):  Practice doesn’t make perfect.  Only perfect practice makes perfect.  Clearly one must put more into those 10,000 hours than just time.

Inequities  When it comes to sports, astrology would appear to rule:  the month of your birth will make or break you.  Because children’s sports leagues are sorted by age, and because a year’s growth makes a tremendous difference in a child’s physical strength and coordination, the oldest members of a team have a considerable advantage over the youngest.  They appear more talented, and are moved to the better leagues, where they get better coaching, and, significantly, more playing time.  The effect is cumulative, with the “rich” getting richer at each step.

In school, another institution segregated by age, the same effect is devastating to those who start kindergarten less mature than their classmates.  The achievement gap that appears then rarely closes.

At four-year colleges in the United States…students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are underrepresented by about 11.6 percent.

Such systems are tremendously wasteful of talent.  Potential hockey stars—and Nobel Prize winners—are being squandered merely because they were born at the end of the year.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

— Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

How much genius is necessary?  Christopher Langan is arguably one of the world’s most intelligent people, a genius from infancy—talking at six months, teaching himself to read at three—and he was not only intellectually gifted, but artistically and musically as well.  Yet his dysfunctional family left him without the life skills necessary to succeed in college and become the superstar he might have been.

I include this quote from Langan for Porter, who dreamt solutions to programming problems, and for Janet, whose hand would write the answers to math problems without apparent help from her brain.

I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind, all I have to do is concentrate on the question when I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in the morning. … Other times I just feel the answer, and I start typing and the answer emerges onto the page.

Above-average intelligence is a good predictor of academic success, but beyond a certain level, other factors become more important for success.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up their complex admissions process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold.

…

In 2008, 27,462 of the most highly qualified high school seniors in the world applied to Harvard University.  Of these students, 2,500 of them scored a perfect 800 on the SAT critical reading test and 3,300 had a perfect score on the SAT math exam.  More than 3,300 were ranked first in the high school class.  How many did Harvard accept?  About 1,600, which is to say they rejected 93 out of every 100 applicants.  Is it really possible to say that one student is Harvard material and another isn’t, when both have identical—and perfect—academic records?  Of course not.  Harvard is being dishonest.  Schwartz is right.  They should just have a lottery.

What about art?  Surely some people are born with musical or artistic talent, and the rest of us left out.  Well, no.  It’s like intelligence.  Yes, there is a range of abilities, but apparently many more of us could be really good if we were willing to put in the time.

Studies done in the 1990’s of violinists at an elite music school, and of amateur and professional pianists revealed the one critical factor in success was simply how much practice time the musicians put in.

[The researchers] couldn’t find any “naturals,” musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did.  Nor could they find any “grinds,” people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works.  That’s it.  And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else.  They work much, much harder.

This is incredibly good news:  We can all be much greater than we think.  But it comes with important questions (mine, not Gladwell’s):  Are we willing to do the work necessary to achieve greatness?  What must be sacrificed to reach that level?  Is it impossible for a Christian, or a parent, or anyone else with broad responsibilities, to be this good at anything without “gaining the whole world and losing his soul”?  Must the needed time be stolen from more important activities, or can it be reclaimed from wastage?  The average American watches 34 hours of television per week.  If we give up television for six years, could we all become excellent in some area?  Is there a level below the top at which we can all be much better at many things than we are now?  At what level is “good enough” better than perfect for most of us?

The language advantage, part 1  Why were so many Korean Airlines plane crashing?  Intensive analysis revealed no mechanical problems, and no lack of skill on the part of the pilots.  The source of the disasters was something called a Power-Distance Index.  Safe flying requires the cockpit crew to feel free to inform and correct the captain, and the input necessary to keep unusual situations from becoming critical was not coming forcefully enough to the Korean pilots from crews that had bowed to them before the flight.  They key to the airline’s remarkable turnaround?  Insisting that English be the language of the cockpit.

Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country’s cultural legacy.  They needed an opportunity to step outside those cultural roles when they sat in the cockpit, and language was the key to that transformation.  In English, they would be free of the sharply defined gradients [of formality in the Korean language]:  formal deference, informal deference, blunt, familiar, intimate, and plain.  Instead, the pilots could participate in a culture and language with a very different legacy.

The language advantage, part 2

[T]here is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers.  In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.

…

The number system in English is highly irregular.  Not so in China, Japan, and Korea.  They have a logical counting system.  Eleven is ten-one.  Twelve is ten-two.  Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.

That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children.  Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty.  American children at that age can count only to fifteen, and most don’t reach forty until they’re five.  By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily.  Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22).  Only then can she do the math….Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equations is right there, embedded in the sentence.  No number translation is necessary:  It’s five-tens-nine.

Meaningful work  What advantage did the late-18^th century New York garment industry confer on the children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and how is that related to rice farming in Asia?  Independence, meaningful work, and the conviction that success is a direct result of effort.  (Read the book to find out why.)

[A]utonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward…are, most people agree, the three qualities work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

Virtually every success story we’ve seen in this book so far involves someone or some group working harder than their peers.

Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.

Every four years, an international group of educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior high students around the world.

…  [The students] also have to fill out a questionnaire.  It asks them all kinds of things, such as what their parents’ level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friends are like.  It’s not a trivial exercise.  It’s about 120 questions long.  In fact, it’s so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.

… As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. … [C]ountries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.

The rankings aren’t just similar:  They are identical.

[W]e could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish [in a hypothetical Math Olympics] without asking a single math question.

I can’t agree with Gladwell on everything—for one thing, he has far too much admiration for the institution of school.  But Outliers is well-written, easy to read, and challenging.

It is not the brightest who succeed. … Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf.  It is, rather, a gift.  Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

… To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success … with a society that provides opportunities for all.

Those who would create their utopias at the level of society more often create dystopias, it would seem.  But at local, particular levels—school, community, soccer league, and most especially, family—it might be accomplished.

The Mother Tongue:  English and How It Got that Way (first published 1991, reissued by Perennial 2001) and Troublesome Words (first published 1984, revised 1997, reissued by Penguin Books 2009), both by Bill Bryson

My father and my sister-in-law became hooked on Bill Bryson as a writer; perhaps it is now my turn.

For the first twelve chapters, The Mother Tongue is an accessible, page-turning look at the English language:  where it came from, why it’s so popular, and how it came to be simultaneously one of the easiest and one of the hardest languages to learn.

Unfortunately, the book peters out a bit after that, with a few less interesting, apparently random diversions.  The chapter on swearing, for example, was dreary.  As a child I would have devoured it, such words being the kind with some magical power that required one to step over the square on the sidewalk where one occasionally saw them scrawled.  Graffiti was my only contact with profanity then:  no one I knew used such language, and it was certainly not in any books, movies, or TV shows of my experience—not even the dictionary (trust me, we looked).  But that was then, and this is decidedly now.  There is no longer anything rare, titillating, or even informative about bad language—at best it is irritating, and keeps me from giving The Mother Tongue the wholehearted recommendation it otherwise deserves.  With that caveat, however, this is still a delightful and worthwhile book.

One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees.  It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries.  To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will put new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the path of change.

But at the same time, it seems to me, there is a case for resisting change—at least slapdash change.  Even the most liberal descriptivist would accept that there must be some conventions of usage.  We must agree to spell cat c-a-t and not e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t, and we must agree that by that word we mean a small furry quadruped that goes meow and sits comfortably on one’s lap and not a large lumbering beast that grows tusks and is exceedingly difficult to housebreak.  In precisely the same way, clarity is generally better served if we agree to observe a distinction between imply and infer, forego and forgo, fortuitous and fortunate, uninterested and disinterested, and many others.  As John Ciardi observed, resistance may in the end prove futile, but at least it tests the changes and makes them prove their worth.

We in the English-speaking world have often been highly complacent in expecting others to learn English without our making anything like the same effort in return.  As of 1986, the number of American students studying Russian was 25,000.  The number of Russian students studying English was four million….  In 1986, the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung  investigated the studying of German as a foreign language around the world.  In the United States, the number of college students taking a German course was 120,000, down from 216,000 in 1966.  In the Soviet Union, the number was nine million.  The problem is unlikely to get better.  Between 1966 and 1986, 150 American colleges and universities canceled their German programs.  In 1989, some 77 percent of all new college graduates had taken no foreign language courses. 

A presidential commission under Ronald Reagan called the situation scandalous.  In 1987, in an effort to redress the balance Congress voted into law the Education for Economic Security Act, which provided an extra $2.45 million to promote the study of foreign languages—or a little over one cent per person in the country.  That should really turn the tables.

Granted, these figures are old—but somehow I doubt there’s been significant improvement since.  Personally, I think we need an Education for National Security Act, which would forbid going to war against people who speak a language for which we do not have a strong base of fluent translators.

Not only are we not doing terribly well at foreign languages, we’re not even doing terribly well at English.  The problem was well voiced by Professor Randolph Quirk, president of the British Academy and one of that country’s leading linguistic scholars, when he wrote:  “It would be ironic indeed if the millions of children in Germany, Japan and China who are diligently learning the language of Shakespeare and Eliot took more care in their use of English and showed more pride in their achievement than those for whom it is the native tongue.”

We might sometimes wonder if we are the most responsible custodians of our own tongue, especially when we reflect that the Oxford University Press sells as many copies of the Oxford English Dictionary in Japan as it does in America, and a third more than in Britain.

For those who care to be better custodians of our language, I can recommend Bryson’s Troublesome Words.  Although written in dictionary format, I found it enjoyable to read cover to cover.  Do you want to know when to use “fewer,” and when to use “less”?  Or how to spell the name of that pleasant airport in Amsterdam?  Or the crucial difference between “sensual” and “sensuous”?  Troublesome Words will let you know, and entertain you at the same time.

 (Thanks, Janet and Stephan!)