I have just finished reading the following short article on a way to improve our schools:
Frauenfelder, M. (October, 2010). School for Hackers. The Atlantic. Retrieved 9/20/2010 from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/10/school-for-hackers/8218.
Poverty is perhaps the best single predictor of future lack of success in our school system. A good introduction to this topic is available at:
Berliner, D.C. (March, 2009). Poverty and potential: Out-of-school factors and school success. Great Lakes Center for Education Research & Practice. Retrieved 9/19/2010 from http://greatlakescenter.org/docs/Policy_Briefs/Berliner_NonSchool.pdf.
Recently I read a business magazine article reporting that China is importing 1 million tons of iron ore from Australia per day. I tried to wrap my head around the meaning of a million tons (2 billion pounds) of iron ore. Well, that is a little less than 5 ounces per day for each person on earth. In a year, this is about 114 pounds for each person on earth. Hmm. The yearly weight of iron ore being moved from Australia to China is perhaps 2/3 weight of the entire world’s population. I try to imagine 4.4 billion people a year moving to China.
All of this deep thinking reminded me of the “Sixteen Tons” song. Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons:
I think of a pithy quote as a very short story. Such a short story can capture an important idea in a very few words, and such quotes tend to remain "fresh" over many years—and even over the centuries.
I have created two personal collections of such quotes for the IAE-pedia. See my general quotes at http://iae-pedia.org/Quotations_Collected_by_David_Moursund and my math education quotes at http://iae-pedia.org/Math_Education_Quotations. [These collections were revised and updated in March 2013.]
I can still remember when I was taking English Composition as a freshman at the University of Oregon. We often had in-class writing tests. My spelling abilities were not very good. I would compose a sentence in my head, check to see if I could spell all of the words, and edit the sentence so that it avoided words I could not spell.
Many years later my quality of life was much improved by spell checkers becoming available on the computers I used.
