German vs. American schools

Why I Dread Returning to an American Public School

By Firoozeh Dumas, NY Times

After almost six years in Munich, my family and I will soon be returning to California, and there are a few things I already know I will miss. I am not talking about the obvious (fresh pretzels, fresh pretzels with cheese, fresh pretzels with cheese and pumpkin seeds, no potholes, universal health care) but the less known differences that come with spending time in schools.

We are fortunate to live in a part of Munich with top-notch public schools, similar to where we lived in America. We pay a few percentage points more in taxes than we paid in California, but holy Betsy DeVos, do we get more!

Our daughter’s elementary school, which she graduated from a few years ago, offered a rich curriculum, from math and sciences to arts and languages. After school, in addition to the more traditional offerings of chess, theater and computers, she could take circus lessons, where children learned to juggle, walk on a tightrope and ride a unicycle. Since her school did not have a pool, students were bused every week to a nearby sports club for swim lessons, at no extra charge.

Are modern kids too stupid to play with lego? Don't know how to hold a pencil?

Infants 'unable to use building blocks" due to i-phone addiction

By Graeme Paton, Daily Telegraph

Rising numbers of infants lack the motor skills needed to play with building blocks because of an “addiction” to tablet computers and smartphones, according to teachers.

Why Children need Chores

By Jennifer Breheny Wallace, WSJ

Today’s demands for measurable childhood success—from the Common Core to college placement—have chased household chores from the to-do lists of many young people. In a survey of 1,001 U.S. adults released last fall by Braun Research, 82% reported having regular chores growing up, but only 28% said that they require their own children to do them.

Preschoolers’ Innate Knowledge Means They Can Probably Do Algebra

Alice Park, TIME

Give a three-year old a smartphone and she’ll likely figure out how to turn it on and operate a few simple functions. But confront her with an algebra problem and ask her to solve for x? Not likely.

Lego turned itself around by analyzing overbearing parents

by Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen

After decades of growth and innovation—in 2000, the company was the fifth-largest toy maker in the world—LEGO hit a major slump. In January 2004, it announced a huge deficit. It was, by its own accounts, bleeding cash to the tune of $1 million a day. Owner and CEO Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, grandson of founder Ole Kirk Christiansen, was at the helm of a strategy to turn the company around. He stepped down and appointed Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, a former McKinsey consultant, as new CEO of the company.

Encouraging the Next Generation

 By Susan Cramm, strategy + business

About a month ago, I was sitting on the patio of a local coffee shop with a wonderful 14-year-old young lady who we’ll call Alyssa. Full of love and life, she easily connects with others, is compassionate with children, and is starting to demonstrate an artistic bent. But when we met, she was feeling a bit depressed. I asked her to consider her gifts and strengths, to help her refocus on the positive. But instead, she grew quiet and looked at me blank faced, seemingly dumbstruck and unable to see what is easily apparent to others.

How Robert Redford’s family are changing our thinking on dyslexia

Elizabeth Day, The Observer

On the face of it, Dylan Redford has everything going for him—he is a handsome, intelligent and artistic 22-year-old who happens to be the grandson of Robert Redford. But he is also severely dyslexic and, at the age of 10, could barely read or write.

The Granny Cloud

Have you heard about a social innovation initiative called, ‘The Granny Cloud’? It is where U.K.-based grandmothers volunteer to help teach children in India. This project is the brainchild of Prof Sugata Mitra, who is known for his hole-in-the-wall computer scheme which put basic PCs into some of the poorest parts of India. Prof Mitra installed the first computer on the wall of his Delhi office, opposite a slum, and was amazed to see that the children, initially curious about the machine, soon became self-taught experts. Within days they were able to browse the Internet, cut and paste copy, drag and drop items and create folders.

How Italy’s Famed Educator Shaped Silicon Valley

Montessori In Mountain View

By Marco Bardazzi, La Stampa

The life stories of great people who have changed America can often be traced back to a common starting point: a boat from Europe sailing into the New York harbor with a salute toward the Statue of Liberty and an obligatory passage with the immigration officials at Ellis Island.

Nonprofit’s gift of bikes helps Cambodian girls get to school safely

By Michelle Gienow, The Chronicle of Philanthropy

For young girls in rural parts of Cambodia, the road to school is often not only long but also perilous.

Because girls risk rape or abduction by sex traffickers, many parents prefer to keep their daughters at home rather than exposing them to danger on the daily journey to school. Attendance figures bear out the result: Only 11 percent of girls in Cambodia reach secondary school.

Bedtime Math: A Problem a Day Keeps Fear of Arithmetic Away

By Bonnie Rochman, TIME

For many parents with young children, the bedtime routine is a firmly entrenched system involving a warm bath, a good book, a kiss and a hug. Toying with that equation borders on sacrilege, but Laura Overdeck thinks it’s time to make room for a math problem alongside the nightly story.

New Rules

By Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times, September 8, 2012
I just arrived in Shanghai, but I’m thinking about Estonia and wondering about something Presidents Clinton and Obama have been saying.

Wired magazine reported last week that public schools in Estonia are establishing a program for teaching first graders—and kids in all other grades—how to do computer programming. Wired said that the curriculum was created “because of the difficulty Estonian companies face in hiring programmers. Estonia has a burgeoning tech industry thanks in part to the success of Skype, which was developed in Estonia in 2003.”

The news from Estonia prompted The Guardian newspaper of London to publish an online poll asking its readers: “Children aged 7 to 16 are being given the opportunity to learn how to code in schools in Estonia, should U.K. school children be taught programming as part of their school day?” It’s fascinating to read about all this while visiting Shanghai, whose public school system in 2010 beat the rest of the world in math, science and reading in the global PISA exam of 15-year-olds. Will the Chinese respond by teaching programming to preschoolers?

All of this made me think Obama should stop using the phrase—first minted by Bill Clinton in 1992—that if you just “work hard and play by the rules” you should expect that the American system will deliver you a decent life and a chance for your children to have a better one. That mantra really resonates with me and, I am sure, with many voters. There is just one problem: It’s out of date.

The truth is, if you want a decent job that will lead to a decent life today you have to work harder, regularly reinvent yourself, obtain at least some form of postsecondary education, make sure that you’re engaged in lifelong learning and play by the rules.

Why? Because when Clinton first employed his phrase in 1992, the Internet was just emerging, virtually no one had e-mail and the cold war was just ending. In other words, we were still living in a closed system, a world of walls, which were just starting to come down. It was a world before Nafta and the full merger of globalization and the information technology revolution, a world in which unions and blue-collar manufacturing were still relatively strong, and where America could still write a lot of the rules that people played by.

That world is gone. It is now a more open system. Technology and globalization are wiping out lower-skilled jobs faster, while steadily raising the skill level required for new jobs. More than ever now, lifelong learning is the key to getting into, and staying in, the middle class.

There is a quote attributed to the futurist Alvin Toffler that captures this new reality: In the future “illiteracy will not be defined by those who cannot read and write, but by those who cannot learn and relearn.” Any form of standing still is deadly.

I covered the Republican convention, and I was impressed in watching my Times colleagues at how much their jobs have changed. Here’s what a reporter does in a typical day: report, file for the Web edition, file for The International Herald Tribune, tweet, update for the Web edition, report more, track other people’s tweets, do a Web-video spot and then write the story for the print paper. You want to be a Times reporter today? That’s your day. You have to work harder and smarter and develop new skills faster.

Unraveling how children become bilingual so easily

By Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press
WASHINGTON--The best time to learn a foreign language: Between birth and age 7.
New research is showing just how children's brains can become bilingual so easily, findings that scientists hope eventually could help the rest of us learn a new language a bit easier.
"We think the magic that kids apply to this learning situation, some of the principles, can be imported into learning programs for adults," says Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, who is part of an international team now trying to turn those lessons into more teachable technology.
Each language uses a unique set of sounds. Scientists now know babies are born with the ability to distinguish all of them, but that ability starts weakening even before they start talking, by the first birthday.
Kuhl offers an example: Japanese doesn't distinguish between the "L" and "R" sounds of English--"rake" and "lake" would sound the same. Her team proved that a 7-month-old in Tokyo and a 7-month-old in Seattle respond equally well to those different sounds. But by 11 months, the Japanese infant had lost a lot of that ability.
Time out--how do you test a baby? By tracking eye gaze. Make a fun toy appear on one side or the other whenever there's a particular sound. The baby quickly learns to look on that side whenever he or she hears a brand-new but similar sound. Noninvasive brain scans document how the brain is processing and imprinting language.
Mastering your dominant language gets in the way of learning a second, less familiar one, Kuhl's research suggests. The brain tunes out sounds that don't fit.
It's remarkable that babies being raised bilingual--by simply speaking to them in two languages--can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one.
On average, monolingual and bilingual babies start talking around age 1 and can say about 50 words by 18 months.
Italian researchers wondered why there wasn't a delay, and reported this month in the journal Science that being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible.
The researchers tested 44 12-month-olds to see how they recognized three-syllable patterns--nonsense words, just to test sound learning. Sure enough, gaze-tracking showed the bilingual babies learned two kinds of patterns at the same time--like lo-ba-lo or lo-lo-ba--while the one-language babies learned only one, concluded Agnes Melinda Kovacs of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies.
While new language learning is easiest by age 7, the ability markedly declines after puberty.
"We're seeing the brain as more plastic and ready to create new circuits before than after puberty," Kuhl says. As an adult, "it's a totally different process.
You won't learn it in the same way. You won't become (as good as) a native speaker."
What might help people who missed their childhood window? Baby brains need personal interaction to soak in a new language--TV or CDs alone don't work. So researchers are improving the technology that adults tend to use for language learning, to make it more social and possibly tap brain circuitry that tots would use.
Recall that Japanese "L" and "R" difficulty? Kuhl and scientists at Tokyo Denki University and the University of Minnesota helped develop a computer language program that pictures people speaking in "motherese," the slow exaggeration of sounds that parents use with babies.
Japanese college students who'd had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated "Ls" and "Rs" while watching the computerized instructor's face pronounce English words. Brain scans--a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography--that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage.
"It's our very first, preliminary crude attempt but the gains were phenomenal," says Kuhl.
But she'd rather see parents follow biology and expose youngsters early. If you speak a second language, speak it at home. Or find a play group or caregiver where your child can hear another language regularly.
"You'll be surprised," Kuhl says. "They do seem to pick it up like sponges."

Why Bilinguals Are Smarter

By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, NY Times, March 17, 2012
SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.

The collective evidence from a number of studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function—a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind—like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.

“Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often—you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompea Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.

The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life).

In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism—measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language—were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.

Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a staff writer at Science.

Don't like school? Here's good news for you:

Will Dropouts Save America?

By Michael Ellsberg, NY Times

Michael Ellsberg is the author of “The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think and It’s Not Too Late.”
I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook—invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.

American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.

In a recent speech promoting a jobs bill, President Obama told Congress, “Everyone here knows that small businesses are where most new jobs begin.”

Close, but not quite. In a detailed analysis, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that nearly all net job creation in America comes from start-up businesses, not small businesses per se. (Since most start-ups start small, we tend to conflate two variables—the size of a business and its age—and incorrectly assume the former was the relevant one, when in fact the latter is.

If start-up activity is the true engine of job creation in America, one thing is clear: our current educational system is acting as the brakes. Simply put, from kindergarten through undergraduate and grad school, you learn very few skills or attitudes that would ever help you start a business. Skills like sales, networking, creativity and comfort with failure.

No business in America—and therefore no job creation—happens without someone buying something. But most students learn nothing about sales in college; they are more likely to take a course on why sales (and capitalism) are evil.

Moreover, very few start-ups get off the ground without a wide, vibrant network of advisers and mentors, potential customers and clients, quality vendors and valuable talent to employ. You don’t learn how to network crouched over a desk studying for multiple-choice exams. You learn it outside the classroom, talking to fellow human beings face-to-face.

Start-ups are a creative endeavor by definition. Yet our current classrooms, geared toward tests on narrowly defined academic subjects, stifle creativity. If a young person happens to retain enough creative spirit to start a business upon graduation, she does so in spite of her schooling, not because of it.

Finally, entrepreneurs must embrace failure. I spent the last two years interviewing college dropouts who went on to become millionaires and billionaires. All spoke passionately about the importance of their business failures in leading them to success. Our education system encourages students to play it safe and retreat at the first sign of failure (assuming that any failure will look bad on their college applications and résumés).

Certainly, if you want to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer, then you must go to college. But, beyond regulated fields like these, the focus on higher education as the only path to stable employment is profoundly misguided, exacerbated by parents who see the classic professions as the best route to job security.

That may have been true 50 years ago, but not now. In our chaotic, unpredictable economy, even young people who have no interest in starting a business, and who want to become professionals, still need to learn the entrepreneurial skills that will allow them to get ahead.

True, people with college degrees tend to earn more. But that could be because most ambitious people tend to go to college; there is little evidence to suggest that the same ambitious people would earn less without college degrees (particularly if they mastered true business and networking grit).

And while most people who end up starting businesses likely have college degrees, those degree-bearers should be well aware (as they learned in their freshman statistics classes) that correlation does not equal causation. Assuming that college was responsible for their success gives higher education more credit than it deserves.

AFTER all, there is not one job market in America, but two. The formal market we always hear about—jobs that get filled through cold résumé submissions in reply to posted ads—accounts for only about 20 percent of jobs.

The other 80 percent get filled in the informal job market. Any employer knows how the informal job market works: you need a position filled, so you ask your friends, colleagues and current employees if they know anyone who would do a good job.

In this informal job market, the academic requirements listed in job ads tend to be highly negotiable, and far less important than real-world results and the enthusiasm of the personal referral.

Classroom skills may put you at an advantage in the formal market, but in the informal market, street-smart skills and real-world networking are infinitely more important.

Yet our children grow up amid an echo chamber of voices telling them to get good grades, do well on their SATs, and spend an average of $45,000 on tuition—after accounting for scholarships—while taking on $23,000 in debt to get a private four-year college education.

It’s time that we as a nation accepted a basic—and seldom-mentioned—fact. You don’t need a degree (and certainly not an M.B.A.) to start a business and create jobs, nor is it even that helpful, compared with cheaper, faster alternatives.

Secrets of teaching kids how to handle money

5 Money Lessons Kids Will Remember

Angie Mohr, Yahoo
One of the most important skills kids can learn is how to handle money. It’s a skill that is rarely taught in schools and one that parents are often reluctant to teach because they’re not sure how to handle money either.

When my kids were small, they picked up lots of misconceptions about finances from their friends at school and what they saw on television. They eventually learned how to handle money through managing their own. If you want your children to learn money-skills for life, start with these important exercises:

Let your child spend frivolously—once. Nothing will help your son or daughter to budget and spend thoughtfully more than wasting money. If your kids work for their money, through allowance or other jobs, they will already have an appreciation of how difficult money is to earn. They may want to spend their money on silly things. My son went through a phase where all he wanted to buy were Pokemon trading cards. I allowed him to buy a whole bunch of them one time that tapped out his savings. A week later, when he wanted money for something else, he realized that buying all of those trading cards was a bad choice. Give your kids the room to make some of their own money mistakes in a contained environment.

Help your son or daughter start a business. A great way for kids to figure out how money works is to start their own business. Business owners have to deal with all aspects of money management: earning, spending and saving. Discuss with your children what type of business they would like to start. Depending on their ages, they could babysit, cut grass, pet sit or even set up the proverbial lemonade stand. Walk through the basics of running and accounting for the business with them. If you are not familiar with running a business, there are many great books on the market that can help both you and your child learn.

Put your kids in charge of one weekly grocery shopping trip. Planning and executing a grocery shopping expedition on a budget helps your child truly understand what sticking to a budget means. You can explain to them how you budget and how you shop, but having to stand in the aisle and decide which brand of rice is more economical brings home the lessons for kids. It teaches them that paying attention to every item bought means that you can get more for every dollar spent.

Volunteer with your child at a food bank. Volunteering has its own rewards and involving your child in helping others is a great lesson on its own. Volunteering at a food bank also teaches a lesson about money. Kids who live a comfortable lifestyle and have never had to worry about hunger or poverty often cannot fathom what that would be like. Volunteering at a food bank brings home the realities of not having money to buy food. To expand the lesson, give your child $20 and challenge them to get the most amount of food to bring to the food bank. This exercises both their creativity and money-management skills.

Allow your kids to save for something big. Kids should have both small and large savings goals. Small things like movies and video games can be saved for in a month or two. Larger goals like bikes and guitars take longer to save for and require more planning. The pay off when the goal is met and the item purchased is gratifying for kids and they will remember the feeling of seeing the tangible results of hard work. Help them set their goal and the timeframe in which it will be met. Review it with them frequently so that they can see the progress they are making.

The Secret of Why We can't Stop Eating Certain Foods

Why Johnny Can't Eat Just One
Washington Post, April 27, 2009
U.S. law requires nutritional labels on retail groceries, but not on restaurant meals, so when former U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David A. Kessler asked to see the nutritional labels for foods he likes at Chili's restaurant, Chili's refused. An inveterate researcher, Kessler resorted to late-night dumpster-diving to obtain them. He discovered that a single serving of Chili's Southwestern Eggrolls contains a whopping 910 calories, 57 grams of fat and 1,960 milligrams of sodium. The labels mention salt eight different times, and sugars five times.
After leading efforts at FDA in the 1990s to regulate nicotine as a drug, Dr. Kessler is exploring the phenomenon of American overeating and the reasons behind the skyrocketing weight gain among the general U.S. population over the last three decades. Dr. Kessler, who has struggled with his own weight over his adult life, discovered that the combination of salt, sugar and fat in foods triggers a chemical change in people's brains that makes them crave more foods containing that same combination. Dr. Kessler sees a parallel between the food industry and the tobacco industry, in that that the food industry manipulates this special salt-sugar-fat combination to induce this neurological response. In his new book, The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, Dr. Kessler describes how the food industry tries to "hijack" peoples' brains to sell more food.

The Secret of why Children Become Bilingual so Easily

Unraveling how children become bilingual so easily
By Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press
WASHINGTON--The best time to learn a foreign language: Between birth and age 7.
New research is showing just how children's brains can become bilingual so easily, findings that scientists hope eventually could help the rest of us learn a new language a bit easier.
"We think the magic that kids apply to this learning situation, some of the principles, can be imported into learning programs for adults," says Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, who is part of an international team now trying to turn those lessons into more teachable technology.
Each language uses a unique set of sounds. Scientists now know babies are born with the ability to distinguish all of them, but that ability starts weakening even before they start talking, by the first birthday.
Kuhl offers an example: Japanese doesn't distinguish between the "L" and "R" sounds of English--"rake" and "lake" would sound the same. Her team proved that a 7-month-old in Tokyo and a 7-month-old in Seattle respond equally well to those different sounds. But by 11 months, the Japanese infant had lost a lot of that ability.
Time out--how do you test a baby? By tracking eye gaze. Make a fun toy appear on one side or the other whenever there's a particular sound. The baby quickly learns to look on that side whenever he or she hears a brand-new but similar sound. Noninvasive brain scans document how the brain is processing and imprinting language.
Mastering your dominant language gets in the way of learning a second, less familiar one, Kuhl's research suggests. The brain tunes out sounds that don't fit.
It's remarkable that babies being raised bilingual--by simply speaking to them in two languages--can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one.
On average, monolingual and bilingual babies start talking around age 1 and can say about 50 words by 18 months.
Italian researchers wondered why there wasn't a delay, and reported this month in the journal Science that being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible.
The researchers tested 44 12-month-olds to see how they recognized three-syllable patterns--nonsense words, just to test sound learning. Sure enough, gaze-tracking showed the bilingual babies learned two kinds of patterns at the same time--like lo-ba-lo or lo-lo-ba--while the one-language babies learned only one, concluded Agnes Melinda Kovacs of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies.
While new language learning is easiest by age 7, the ability markedly declines after puberty.
"We're seeing the brain as more plastic and ready to create new circuits before than after puberty," Kuhl says. As an adult, "it's a totally different process.
You won't learn it in the same way. You won't become (as good as) a native speaker."
What might help people who missed their childhood window? Baby brains need personal interaction to soak in a new language--TV or CDs alone don't work. So researchers are improving the technology that adults tend to use for language learning, to make it more social and possibly tap brain circuitry that tots would use.
Recall that Japanese "L" and "R" difficulty? Kuhl and scientists at Tokyo Denki University and the University of Minnesota helped develop a computer language program that pictures people speaking in "motherese," the slow exaggeration of sounds that parents use with babies.
Japanese college students who'd had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated "Ls" and "Rs" while watching the computerized instructor's face pronounce English words. Brain scans--a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography--that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage.
"It's our very first, preliminary crude attempt but the gains were phenomenal," says Kuhl.
But she'd rather see parents follow biology and expose youngsters early. If you speak a second language, speak it at home. Or find a play group or caregiver where your child can hear another language regularly.
"You'll be surprised," Kuhl says. "They do seem to pick it up like sponges."