After School Programs Quotes

We did live in dire poverty. And one of the things that I hated was poverty. Some people hate spiders. Some people hate snakes. I hated poverty. I couldn't stand it. My mother couldn't stand the fact that we were doing poorly in school, and she prayed and she asked God to give her wisdom. What could she do to get her young sons to understand the importance of developing their minds so that they control their own lives? God gave her the wisdom. At least in her opinion. My brother and I didn't think it was that wise. Turn off the TV, let us watch only two or three TV programs during the week. And with all that spare time read two books a piece from the Detroit Public Libraries and submit to her written book reports, which she couldn't read but we didn't know that. I just hated this. My friends were out having a good time. Her friends would criticize her. My mother didn't care. But after a while I actually began to enjoy reading those books. Because we were very poor, but between the covers of those books I could go anywhere. I could be anybody. I could do anything. I began to read about people of great accomplishment. And as I read those stories, I began to see a connecting thread. I began to see that the person who has the most to do with you, and what happens to you in life, is you. You make decisions. You decide how much energy you want to put behind that decision. And I came to understand that I had control of my own destiny. And at that point I didn't hate poverty anymore, because I knew it was only temporary. I knew I could change that. It was incredibly liberating for me. Made all the difference.

You could choose to live in either America or Denmark. In high-tax Denmark, your disposable income after taxes and transfers would be around $15,000 lower than in the States. But in return for your higher tax bill, you would get universal health care (one with better outcomes than in the US), free education right up through the best graduate schools, worker retraining programs on which the state spends seventeen times more as a percentage of GDP than what is spent in America, as well as high-quality infrastructure, mass transit, and many beautiful public parks and other spaces. Danes also enjoy some 550 more hours of leisure time a year than Americans do. If the choice were put this way—you can take the extra $15,000 but have to work longer hours, take fewer vacation days, and fend for yourself on health care, education, retraining, and transport—I think most Americans would choose the Danish model.

In desperation, I’d tried to find a part-time after-school job, just to earn some walking-around money. I applied for dozens of tech support and programming jobs (mostly grunt construction work, coding parts of OASIS malls and office buildings), but it was completely hopeless. Millions of college-educated adults couldn’t get one of those jobs. The Great Recession was now entering its third decade, and unemployment was still at a record high. Even the fast-food joints in my neighborhood had a two-year waiting list for job applicants. So I remained stuck at school. I felt like a kid standing in the world’s greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.

Doing a geographic” is a term alcoholics often use for acting on the impulse to start over by moving to a new town, or state, instead of making any internal changes. It’s the anywhere-but-here part of the disease that says, “Remove yourself from this, go someplace new, and everything will be better.” Two years into our Florida stint, my mother pulled a geographic as radical as the move from Rochester. The new plan was to head for California. She enrolled in the mathematics graduate program at the University of California’s shiny new campus in San Diego, and as soon as our elementary school let out for the summer, she put us into a new Buick station wagon – a gift from her parents – and drove us across the country. You’d think we’d have protested at yet another move. After all, having been duped before, we were in no position to believe that the next move would be any different. But I have no memory of being unhappy about the news. Because that’s what often happens when an alcoholic parent is doing a geographic. She pulls you in and, before you know it, you, too, believe in the promise of the new place.

Driving and sex are both privileges granted at certain ages, both can do irreparable damage when done recklessly, but only driving requires tests, checkpoints and licences. I don’t understand why the government—at schools and through public education programs—doesn’t teach people about consent the way we teach them about drink-driving. After all, overconsumption of alcohol often leads to horrific consequences in both activities. Why can a man be charged with negligent, reckless driving after getting himself drunk, but he can argue that the same level of voluntary intoxication led him to honestly and mistakenly believe a woman consented to intercourse, and be acquitted of a rape charge accordingly?

The answers to these questions would include: homeschooling, baby sign language, after-school sporting programs, and drama.

The free kitchen, after-school programs, keeping porn out of libraries—all that needs done, but it’s dealing with the aftermath, not with the causes. I’m in the mood to deal with a cause.

In later years, your child will still appreciate having some time with you before he goes to sleep. He needs close, warm, personal time , something that simply watching television together, for instance, will not provide: even if the shows are not exciting or scary —which is unlikely— and even if you are sitting next to him, the lack of direct personal interaction makes this bedtime routine a poor one. Instead, use the time to discuss school events, plans for the weekend, soccer, dance class, after-school programs, or music lessons. It might also be helpful to talk about any worries your child may have, so he will be less likely to brood over them in bed.

We’ve all seen “quit smoking” advertisements on buses and subways. They don’t work. We’ve heard about school programs that teach kids to say no to drugs and alcohol. In many cases drug and alcohol use go up after these programs because they pique the curiosity of the adolescent students. The only thing that has been shown to work consistently is raising taxes on these products and placing limits on where and when they can be sold. When these measures are taken, use goes down.

twenty years after the program began, Mexico has achieved gender parity in education—not only at the primary school level but also in high school and college. And Mexico has the world’s highest percentage of computer science degrees awarded to women.

Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value of licenses. Certification constitutes a form of market manipulation and is plausible only to a schooled mind. Most teachers of arts and trades are less skillful, less inventive, and less communicative than the best craftsmen and tradesmen. Most high-school teachers of Spanish or French do not speak the language as correctly as their pupils might after half a year of competent drills. Experimentsconducted by Angel Quintero in Puerto Rico suggest that many young teen-agers, if given the proper incentives, programs, and access to tools, are better than most schoolteachers at introducing their peers to the scientific exploration of plants, stars, and matter, and to the discovery of how and why a motor or a radio functions.

One of her secret fantasies had been that, as a girl who could code, she would work in the one place where a geeky fat girl could get dates. It had not been entirely untrue. But as someone had pointed out to her in school, although the odds are good, the goods are odd.

So I will commit to showing up with deep humility and doing the best I can. I will keep getting it wrong, which is the closest I can come to getting it right. When I am corrected, I will stay open and keep learning. Not because I want to be the wokest woke who ever woked. But because people’s children are dying of racism, and there is no such thing as other people’s children. Hidden racism is destroying and ending lives. It’s making police officers kill black men at three times the rate of white men. It’s making lawmakers limit funding for clean water and poison children. It’s making doctors allow black women to die during or after childbirth at three to four times the rate of white women. It’s making school officials suspend and expel black students at three times the rate of white students. It’s making judges incarcerate black drug users at nearly six times the rate of white drug users. And—because of my complicity in this system that dehumanizes others—it is dehumanizing me. The fact that the programmed poison of racism was pumped into us may not be our fault, but getting it out is sure as hell our responsibility.

In the summer of 2007, I was sitting in a studio in Dublin, debating with a lay spokesman of the Roman Catholic Church who turned out to be the only believing Christian on a discussion panel of five people. He was a perfectly nice and rather modest logic-chopping polemicist, happy enough to go for a glass of refreshment after the program, and I suddenly felt a piercing stab of pity for him. A generation ago in Ireland, the Church did not have to lower itself in this way. It raised its voice only slightly, and was instantly obeyed by the Parliament, the schools, and the media. It could and did forbid divorce, contraception, the publication of certain books, and the utterance of certain opinions. Now it is discredited and in decline. Its once-absolute doctrines appear ridiculous:

Here’s the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. Leaving a note requesting that your family and friends travel to the Ganges or ship your body to a plastination lab in Michigan is a way of exerting influence after you’re gone—of still being there, in a sense. I imagine it is a symptom of the fear, the dread, of being gone, of the refusal to accept that you no longer control, or even participate in, anything that happens on earth. I spoke about this with funeral director Kevin McCabe, who believes that decisions concerning the disposition of a body should be made by the survivors, not the dead. “It’s none of their business what happens to them when they die,” he said to me. While I wouldn’t go that far, I do understand what he was getting at: that the survivors shouldn’t have to do something they’re uncomfortable with or ethically opposed to. Mourning and moving on are hard enough. Why add to the burden? If someone wants to arrange a balloon launch of the deceased’s ashes into inner space, that’s fine. But if it is burdensome or troubling for any reason, then perhaps they shouldn’t have to. McCabe’s policy is to honor the wishes of the family over the wishes of the dead. Willed body program coordinators feel similarly. “I’ve had kids object to their dad’s wishes [to donate],” says Ronn Wade, director of the Anatomical Services Division of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “I tell them, ‘Do what’s best for you. You’re the one who has to live with it.

Still, we’ve gone soft since those days of wartime sacrifice, haven’t we? Contemporary humans are too self-centered, too addicted to gratification to live without the full freedom to satisfy our every whim—or so our culture tells us every day. And yet the truth is that we continue to make collective sacrifices in the name of an abstract greater good all the time. We sacrifice our pensions, our hard-won labor rights, our arts and after-school programs. We send our kids to learn in ever more crowded classrooms, led by ever more harried teachers. We accept that we have to pay dramatically more for the destructive energy sources that power our transportation and our lives. We accept that bus and subway fares go up and up while service fails to improve or degenerates. We accept that a public university education should result in a debt that will take half a lifetime to pay off when such a thing was unheard of a generation ago.

A note about me: I do not think stress is a legitimate topic of conversation, in public anyway. No one ever wants to hear how stressed out anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out. Going on and on in detail about how stressed out I am isn’t conversation. It’ll never lead anywhere. No one is going to say, “Wow, Mindy, you really have it especially bad. I have heard some stories of stress, but this just takes the cake.” This is entirely because my parents are immigrant professionals, and talking about one’s stress level was just totally outlandish to them. When I was three years old my mom was in the middle of her medical residency in Boston. She had been a practicing obstetrician and gynecologist in Nigeria, but in the United States she was required to do her residency all over again. She’d get up at 4:00 a.m. and prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner for my brother and me, because she knew she wouldn’t be home in time to have dinner with us. Then she’d leave by 5:30 a.m. to start rounds at the hospital. My dad, an architect, had a contract for a building in New Haven, Connecticut, which was two hours and forty-five minutes away. It would’ve been easier for him to move to New Haven for the time of the construction of the building, but then who would have taken care of us when my mom was at the hospital at night? In my parents’ vivid imaginations, lack of at least one parent’s supervision was a gateway to drugs, kidnapping, or at the very minimum, too much television watching. In order to spend time with us and save money for our family, my dad dropped us off at school, commuted the two hours and forty-five minutes every morning, and then returned in time to pick us up from our after-school program. Then he came home and boiled us hot dogs as an after-school snack, even though he was a vegetarian and had never eaten a hot dog before. In my entire life, I never once heard either of my parents say they were stressed. That was just not a phrase I grew up being allowed to say. That, and the concept of “Me time.

Too soon the two weeks were over and we were back in Lugano, and there we learned about Disaster. We weren’t completely ignorant. We knew about disaster from our previous schools and previous lives. We’d had access to televisions and newspapers. But the return to Lugano marked the beginning of Global Awareness Month, and in each of our classes, we talked about disaster: disaster man-made and natural. We talked about ozone depletion and the extinction of species and depleted rain forests and war and poverty and AIDS. We talked about refugees and slaughter and famine. We were in the middle school and were getting, according to Uncle Max, a diluted version of what the upper-schoolers were facing. An Iraqi boy from the upper school came to our history class and talked about what it felt like when the Americans bombed his country. Keisuke talked about how he felt responsible for World War II, and a German student said she felt the same. We got into heated discussions over the neglect of infant females in some cultures, and horrific cases of child abuse worldwide. We fasted one day each week to raise our consciousness about hunger, and we sent money and canned goods and clothing to charities. In one class, after we watched a movie about traumas in Rwanda, and a Rwandan student told us about seeing his mother killed, Mari threw up. We were all having nightmares. At home, Aunt Sandy pleaded with Uncle Max. “This is too much!” she said. “You can’t dump all the world’s problems on these kids in one lump!” And he agreed. He was bewildered by it all, but the program had been set up the previous year, and he was the new headmaster, reluctant to interfere. And though we were sick of it and about it, we were greedy for it. We felt privileged there in our protected world and we felt guilty, and this was our punishment.

The intelligent want self-control; children want candy. —RUMI INTRODUCTION Welcome to Willpower 101 Whenever I mention that I teach a course on willpower, the nearly universal response is, “Oh, that’s what I need.” Now more than ever, people realize that willpower—the ability to control their attention, emotions, and desires—influences their physical health, financial security, relationships, and professional success. We all know this. We know we’re supposed to be in control of every aspect of our lives, from what we eat to what we do, say, and buy. And yet, most people feel like willpower failures—in control one moment but overwhelmed and out of control the next. According to the American Psychological Association, Americans name lack of willpower as the number-one reason they struggle to meet their goals. Many feel guilty about letting themselves and others down. Others feel at the mercy of their thoughts, emotions, and cravings, their lives dictated by impulses rather than conscious choices. Even the best-controlled feel a kind of exhaustion at keeping it all together and wonder if life is supposed to be such a struggle. As a health psychologist and educator for the Stanford School of Medicine’s Health Improvement Program, my job is to help people manage stress and make healthy choices. After years of watching people struggle to change their thoughts, emotions, bodies, and habits, I realized that much of what people believed about willpower was sabotaging their success and creating unnecessary stress. Although scientific research had much to say that could help them, it was clear that these insights had not yet become part of public understanding. Instead, people continued to rely on worn-out strategies for self-control. I saw again and again that the strategies most people use weren’t just ineffective—they actually backfired, leading to self-sabotage and losing control. This led me to create “The Science of Willpower,” a class offered to the public through Stanford University’s Continuing Studies program. The course brings together the newest insights about self-control from psychology, economics, neuroscience, and medicine to explain how we can break old habits and create healthy habits, conquer procrastination, find our focus, and manage stress. It illuminates why we give in to temptation and how we can find the strength to resist. It demonstrates the importance of understanding the limits of self-control,

Hidden racism is destroying and ending lives. It’s making police officers kill black men at three times the rate of white men. It’s making lawmakers limit funding for clean water and poison children. It’s making doctors allow black women to die during or after childbirth at three to four times the rate of white women. It’s making school officials suspend and expel black students at three times the rate of white students. It’s making judges incarcerate black drug users at nearly six times the rate of white drug users. And—because of my complicity in this system that dehumanizes others—it is dehumanizing me. The fact that the programmed poison of racism was pumped into us may not be our fault, but getting it out is sure as hell our responsibility.

In May 2012—a year after the Arab awakening erupted—the United States made two financial commitments to the Arab world that each began with the numbers 1 and 3. The U.S. gave Egypt’s military regime $1.3 billion worth of tanks and fighter jets. It also gave Lebanese public school students a $13.5 million merit-based college scholarship program, putting 117 Lebanese kids through local American-style colleges that promote tolerance, gender and social equality, and critical thinking. Having visited both countries at that time, I noted in a column that the $13.5 million in full scholarships bought the Lebanese more capacity and America more friendship and stability than the $1.3 billion in tanks and fighter jets ever would. So how about we stop being stupid?

Kids used to have a whole lot of spare time, middle-class kids anyhow. Outside of school and if they weren’t into a sport, most of their time was spare, and they figured out more or less successfully what to do with it. I had whole spare summers when I was a teenager. Three spare months. No stated occupation whatsoever. Much of after-school was spare time too. I read, I wrote, I hung out with Jean and Shirley and Joyce, I moseyed around having thoughts and feelings, oh lord, deep thoughts, deep feelings… I hope some kids still have time like that. The ones I know seem to be on a treadmill of programming, rushing on without pause to the next event on their schedule, the soccer practice the playdate the whatever. I hope they find interstices and wriggle into them. Sometimes I notice that a teenager in the family group is present in body — smiling, polite, apparently attentive — but absent. I think, I hope she has found an interstice, made herself some spare time, wriggled into it, and is alone there, deep down there, thinking, feeling.

How do you get into making video games anyway? Sadie hated answering this question, especially after a person told her he hadn't heard of Ichigo. "Well, I learned to program computers in middle school, I got an 800 on my math SAT, won a Westinghouse and a Leipzig, and then I went to MIT, which, by the way, is highly competitive, even for a lowly female like myself, and studied computer science. At MIT, I learned four or five more programming languages and studied psychology with an emphasis on ludic techniques and persuasive designs, and English, including narrative structures, the classics, and the history of interactive storytelling. Got myself a great mentor. Regrettably made him my boyfriend. Suffice it to say, I was young. And then I dropped out of school for a time to make a game because my best frenemy wanted me to. That game became the game you never heard of. But yeah, it sold around two and a half million copies, just in the U.S., so...." Instead, she said, "I like to play games a lot, so I thought I'd see if I could make them.

Agreeable even though the rector, when he arrived some years earlier, had looked around, seen a fair number of Bajians and Barbadians, who were Church of England—many of them domestics working for East Orange’s white rich, many of them island people who knew their place and sat at the back and thought they were accepted—leaned on his pulpit, and, before beginning the sermon on his first Sunday, said, “I see we have some colored families here. We’ll have to do something about that.” After consulting with the seminary in New York, he had seen to it that various services and Sunday schools for the colored were conducted, outside basic church law, in the colored families’ houses. Later, the swimming pool at the high school was shut down by the school superintendent so that the white kids wouldn’t have to swim with the colored kids. A big swimming pool, used for swimming classes and a swimming team, a part of the physical education program for years, but since there were objections from some of the white kids’ parents who were employers of the black kids’ parents—the ones working as maids and housemen and chauffeurs and gardeners and yardmen—the pool was drained and covered over.

Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitrary barriers (such as those based on race, and more recently on sexual orientation). But their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital. For example, the urge to help the inner-city poor led to welfare programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage, increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families.72 The urge to empower students by giving them the right to sue their teachers and schools in the 1970s has eroded authority and moral capital in schools, creating disorderly environments that harm the poor above all.73 The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.74 On issue after issue, it’s as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive. Such “reforms” may lower the overall welfare of a society, and sometimes they even hurt the very victims liberals were trying to help.

Before I walked into the door, the room got shades darker as a cloud did a summersault in front of the sun. I turned my head up to the sky and saw Gauss in the glass smirking down at me. In that moment I was reminded of a story about Gauss. 
 When he was in the fifth grade, his teacher wanted some quiet, so he asked his class to add up all the numbers from 1-100. Thinking he had plenty of time to relax, he was shocked that within minutes Gauss had an answer. Gauss had cleverly noticed that the numbers 1 and 100 added up to 101, and 2 and 99 also added up to 101 and on down until you hit 50 and 51. So there are 50 pairs of 101, and a simple multiplication problem by Gauss left his teacher perplexed.
 The recollection of this story reminded me about my own fifth grade experience. Thor was the volunteer at my school for the “Math Superstar” program. After each assignment, stars of various colors signifying degrees of excellence were stuck on all the papers handed in. Like the Olympics, gold was the highest honor. 
 Wendy, the girl who sat next to me, was baffled that no matter how many wrong answers I got (usually all of them), I consistently had gold stars on my papers. She thought Thor was showing a personal bias towards me, but the truth is that I knew where he kept his boxes of stars, so I simply awarded myself what I thought I deserved. Hey, Gauss, how’s that for clever?

up with work I found meaningful. As a young person, I’d explored exactly nothing. Barack’s maturity, I realized, came in part from the years he’d logged as a community organizer and even, prior to that, a decidedly unfulfilling year he’d spent as a researcher at a Manhattan business consulting firm immediately after college. He’d tried out some things, gotten to know all sorts of people, and learned his own priorities along the way. I, meanwhile, had been so afraid of floundering, so eager for respectability and a way to pay the bills, that I’d marched myself unthinkingly into the law. In the span of a year, I’d gained Barack and lost Suzanne, and the power of those two things together had left me spinning. Suzanne’s sudden death had awakened me to the idea that I wanted more joy and meaning in my life. I couldn’t continue to live with my own complacency. I both credited and blamed Barack for the confusion. “If there were not a man in my life constantly questioning me about what drives me and what pains me,” I wrote in my journal, “would I be doing it on my own?” I mused about what I might do, what skills I might possibly have. Could I be a teacher? A college administrator? Could I run some sort of after-school program, a professionalized version of what I’d done for Czerny at Princeton? I was interested in possibly working for a foundation or a nonprofit. I was interested in helping underprivileged kids. I wondered if I could find a job that engaged my mind and still left me enough time to do volunteer work, or appreciate art, or have children. I wanted a life, basically. I wanted to feel whole. I made a list of issues that interested me: education, teen pregnancy, black self-esteem. A more virtuous

Why, he asked, do all of our policing efforts have to be so reactive, so negative, and so after the fact? What if, instead of just focusing on catching criminals—and serving up ever harsher punishments—after they committed the crime, the police devoted significant resources and effort to eliminating criminal behavior before it happens? To quote Tony Blair, what if they could be tough on crime but also tough on the causes of crime?3 Out of these questions came the novel idea for Positive Tickets, a program whereby police, instead of focusing on catching young people perpetrating crimes, would focus on catching youth doing something good—something as simple as throwing litter away in a bin rather than on the ground, wearing a helmet while riding their bike, skateboarding in the designated area, or getting to school on time—and would give them a ticket for positive behavior. The ticket, of course, wouldn’t carry a fine like a parking ticket but instead would be redeemable for some kind of small reward, like free entry to the movies or to an event at a local youth center—wholesome activities that also had the bonus of keeping the young people off the streets and out of trouble. So how well did Richmond’s unconventional effort to reimagine policing work? Amazingly well, as it turned out. It took some time, but they invested in the approach as a long-term strategy, and after a decade the Positive Tickets system had reduced recidivism from 60 percent to 8 percent. You might not think of a police department as a place where you would expect to see Essentialism at work, but in fact Ward’s system of Positive Tickets is a lesson in the practice of effortless execution. The way of the Nonessentialist is to go big on everything: to try to do it all, have it all, fit it all in. The Nonessentialist operates under the false logic that the more he strives, the more he will achieve, but the reality is, the more we reach for the stars, the harder it is to get ourselves off the ground. The way of the Essentialist is different. Instead of trying to accomplish it all—and all at once—and flaring out, the Essentialist starts small and celebrates progress. Instead of going for the big, flashy wins that don’t really matter, the Essentialist pursues small and simple wins in areas that are essential.

And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the fashion of a common layman, and what does he find his situation to be, in this blessed year of our Lord 1906? He wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur and not an independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and professionals whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of you here present, possibly a majority of you, are amateurs of just this sort. Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough. If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole tough-minded program in operation, and the 'conflict between science and religion' in full blast. The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of 'nothing but'—nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the tough-minded find themselves congenially at home.If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do you find? Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat. By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce. This philosophy has greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry. It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of the traditional theism in protestantism at large. That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers of the 'Absolute,' on the one hand, and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus vivendi above all things. It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence; whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of it.

WHOM DO YOU SPEND MORE time with: your best friend or your Blackberry? Thought so. Technology allows you to be constantly connected, but that doesn’t mean you have to stay available to everyone at all times. To give yourself time to recharge, get in the habit of setting aside time to literally unplug, says Linda Lantieri, director of The Inner Resilience Program, an organization focused on building emotional strength in school teachers. “I try not to turn on my computer at least one day a weekend,” says Lantieri. “At the end of a stressful week, I need to shift out of work mode in order to be present during my time off.” If taking a technology break isn’t an option, set some boundaries for yourself, like not viewing work e-mails after 8 p.m., or avoiding social networking sites on the weekend. By limiting your online distractions, you’ll be better able to engage with the friends and family who are physically—not virtually—with you, and make time for activities you enjoy, like reading or playing a sport, which help you recharge and beat burnout.

Benefits of Improv To the Editor: Re “Inmate Improv,” by Anna Clark (Op-Ed, Dec. 31): It was not surprising to me that an improvisational theater workshop would help a prison inmate adjust to life after his release. Pretend play has been shown to improve the executive-function skills in preschool and school-age children. These skills include the ability to control emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exercise self-control and discipline. As poor executive-function skills are associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime, it would behoove all adults involved in child-rearing to encourage role-playing or “improv.” STEVEN ROSENBERG Fairfield, Conn., Dec. 31, 2014 The writer is director of the Elementary Reading Program at the University of Bridgeport School of Education.

While we sat at the bar, Dave told me the most important advice about talking to women I had ever received, and that was to be as relaxed as possible and not fear rejection. Dave then began hooking up with some girl who looked like a hybrid of Rosie O’Donnell and Miss Piggy, leaving me alone to ponder his words.” “When I was in 8th grade, there was this girl named Sandra who I used to ride the school bus with. Sandra was about 5’2, 120 lbs, and looked like the Hamburglar. She was the prettiest girl in my class.” “In my mind I was the life of the party and felt as though I could do no wrong when it came to interacting with the opposite sex. That was until Marissa caught me red handed hooking up with some girl who looked like a combination of John Madden and Andre the Giant, tapping me on the shoulder and kicking me square in the nuts.” “I was starting to feel bad about how I treated women. Oh wait, no I wasn’t. The girls at Binghamton were nothing more than a bunch of dumb sluts that just wanted to get drunk and suck dick, and besides, they were all going to make a lot more money than me in the future. So I may as well catch brains while these bitches were dumb enough to blow me.” “Out of all the people I could’ve stumbled into blackout drunk, why did it have to be THE MOOSE? As son as she saw me her 300 lb frame waddled over, and she jammed her tongue down my throat, devouring me as though I were a Big Mac. This was embarrassing. Here I was making out with some girl who looked like Eric Cartman in a dress, and everybody was watching. My life was effectively over.” “After annihilating Ruben’s toilet, I looked over my shoulder for some much-needed toilet paper, when to my shock and dismay there was not a single sheet of paper in sight. There’s no way in hell I was rejoining the party covered in poop and I would have wiped my ass with anything. That’s when I noticed his New York Yankees bath towel.” “I spent the rest of my week off getting completely shitfaced with Chris, and that’s when I realized I might be developing a drinking problem. At Bar None, hooking up with some girl who looked like the Loch Ness Monster; this shit had to stop. Alcohol was turning me into a drunken mess, and I vowed right then and there to quit drinking and start smoking more weed immediately.” “I got a new roommate. His name was Erick and he was an ex-marine. Erick and I didn’t know each other, but he knew Kevin, and he also knew that I didn’t shower and that last semester I left a used condom on the floor for two weeks without throwing it away. Eric therefore did not want to live with me.” “Believe it or not, I got another job working with the disabled. See, Manny was nice enough to hook me up with a position as a job coach at the Lavelle School for the Blind. The kid’s name was Fred and he was blind with cerebral palsy. Fred loved dogs and I loved smoking week. Bad combination, and I was fired with 3 days left in the program after allowing Fred to run across the street into oncoming traffic, because I had smoked a bowl an hour earlier. Manny and I never spoke again.” “My life was a dream and a nightmare rolled into one. Here I was living this carefree existence, getting drunk, boning bitches, and playing Sega Genesis in between. Oh wait, what am I talking about? My life was awesome. It’s the rest of my life that’s going to suck.

Traffickers target victims on the telephone, on the Internet, through friends, at the mall, and in after-school programs.

Where I live, on the West Coast, most churches tend to be small and to have little influence in the culture. Stark and Finke explain, “A major reason for the lack of church membership in the West is high rates of mobility, which decrease the ability of all voluntary organizations, not just churches, to maintain membership. That is, people move so often that they lack the social ties needed to affiliate with churches.”25 To address this problem, one of the most effective church-planting networks in the United States began in Tacoma, Washington, by using a method of developing intensive community in neighborhoods. Soma Communities fosters deep and intense relationships by teaching church planters to get closely involved in their neighborhoods, opening their homes to neighbors, gathering friends together on a regular basis, and forming “missional communities” focused on discovering and meeting the needs of neighbors and the community. It is these relational bonds that make someone unfamiliar with Christianity want to try it out. Rick Richardson, who directs the evangelism and leadership program at Wheaton College Graduate School, argues that “belonging comes before believing.” He contrasts older methods of evangelism that focused on asking individuals to make a set of commitments. Today, asserts Richardson, presenting four spiritual laws and inviting people to make decisions for Christ is less effective. “Evangelism is about helping people belong so that they can come to believe. So our communities need to be places where people can connect before they have to commit.”26 The idea is held up by social science research showing that converts tend to sign on to a new faith only after their social ties become stronger to those in the new faith than to others outside it. “This often occurs before a convert knows much about what the group believes.

Only when schools create a tiered, systematic intervention program can the promise of certain access be realized. A systematic response begins with the school’s ability to identify students who need help. After students are identified, the school must determine the right intervention to meet the child’s learning needs, and then monitor each student’s progress to know if the intervention is working. If the evidence demonstrates that the intervention is not meeting the intended outcome for a specific student, the school must revise the student’s support by providing more intensive and targeted assistance; alternatively, if students reach grade-level expectations, the same flexible time and resources are used to extend students to even higher levels of achievement.

Remedies exist for correcting substantial departures from normality, but these remedies may make matters worse when departures from normality are minimal. The first course of action is to identify and remove any outliers that may affect the mean and standard deviation. The second course of action is variable transformation, which involves transforming the variable, often by taking log(x), of each observation, and then testing the transformed variable for normality. Variable transformation may address excessive skewness by adjusting the measurement scale, thereby helping variables to better approximate normality.8 Substantively, we strongly prefer to make conclusions that satisfy test assumptions, regardless of which measurement scale is chosen.9 Keep in mind that when variables are transformed, the units in which results are expressed are transformed, as well. An example of variable transformation is provided in the second working example. Typically, analysts have different ways to address test violations. Examination of the causes of assumption violations often helps analysts to better understand their data. Different approaches may be successful for addressing test assumptions. Analysts should not merely go by the result of one approach that supports their case, ignoring others that perhaps do not. Rather, analysts should rely on the weight of robust, converging results to support their final test conclusions. Working Example 1 Earlier we discussed efforts to reduce high school violence by enrolling violence-prone students into classes that address anger management. Now, after some time, administrators and managers want to know whether the program is effective. As part of this assessment, students are asked to report their perception of safety at school. An index variable is constructed from different items measuring safety (see Chapter 3). Each item is measured on a seven-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree), and the index is constructed such that a high value indicates that students feel safe.10 The survey was initially administered at the beginning of the program. Now, almost a year later, the survey is implemented again.11 Administrators want to know whether students who did not participate in the anger management program feel that the climate is now safer. The analysis included here focuses on 10th graders. For practical purposes, the samples of 10th graders at the beginning of the program and one year later are regarded as independent samples; the subjects are not matched. Descriptive analysis shows that the mean perception of

The point of school, after all, isn’t to do homework. The point of school is to learn. It was a mistake to assume that teachers—or anyone else, for that matter—automatically knew what was best for me. Rules are there to help us—to create a culture, to streamline productivity, and to promote success. But we’re not computers that need to be programmed. If you approach your bosses or colleagues with respect, and your goals are in alignment, there’s often room for a little customization and flexibility. And on the other side, those in positions of power shouldn’t force people to adhere to a plan for the sake of protocol. The solution, always, is to listen carefully—to your own needs and to those of the people around you.

The CIA again used public health workers in Pakistan in 2011. According to an editorial in Scientific American, titled “How the CIA’s Fake Vaccination Campaign Endangers Us All,” the CIA, hoping to identify Osama bin Laden’s family, used a sham hepatitis B vaccination project to collect DNA from residents in Abbottabad who were living close to bin Laden’s suspected hideout (1). After bin Laden’s capture and death on May 2, 2011, the fake scheme came to light, and villagers along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border chased off vaccination workers, accusing them of being spies. The misuse of public health workers had repercussions. In December 2012, nine female Pakistani workers were gunned down while administering polio vaccinations, prompting the UN to withdraw vaccination teams. A similar attack occurred in Nigeria in February 2013, when nine female vaccination workers were massacred. These attacks are presumed to be retaliation for the vaccinator ruse in the capture of bin Laden. In January 2013, several deans of US schools of public health signed a letter to President Barack Obama stating their belief that public health programs should not be used as cover for covert operations and urging the president to assure the public that this type of practice would not be repeated (2). The president did not respond.

I would hear them say on the radio, that we need to hang them once they have been convicted for murder. I don’t think that some of them should have ever reached that stage. If we had prevented them from going on death row, it would not be a discussion about hanging them. Supt. Allerdyce Strachan, the first female officer to rise to the rank of superintendent on the Royal Bahamas Police Force.

The Chinese worker-students who had gone to France during the war had been as unlucky as Vietnamese and Indian soldiers. Still, they returned to China radicalized by their harsh exposure to Europe. Deng Xiaoping later recalled the ‘sufferings of life and the humiliations brought upon [us] by… the running dogs of capitalists.’ Upon arrival in France, I learned from those students studying on a work-study program who had come to France earlier than two years after World War I, labour was no longer as badly needed as in the war time… and it was hard to find jobs. Since wages were low, it was impossible to support study through work. Our later experiences proved that one could hardly live on the wages, let alone go to school for study. Thus, all those dreams of ‘saving the country by industrial development,’ ‘learning some skills,’ etc., came to nothing.

The DHS Child Care Assistance Program had finally approved my application. They were paying for daycare and after school care for my oldest three kids.

I would hear them say on the radio, that we need to hang them once they have been convicted for murder. I don’t think that some of them should have ever reached that stage. If we had prevented them from going on death row, it would not be a discussion about hanging them. Supt. Allerdyce Strachan, the first female officer to rise to the rank of superintendent on the Royal Bahamas Police Force. Hanging, death-row-inmates, crime prevention, gang intervention, talk shows, youth outreach, youth programs, convicted murderers, community policing, law enforcement, gang prevention, community outreach, at-risk-youth, police officers, convicted-for-murder, Rebellion Raiders, I would hear them say on the radio, that we need to hang them once they have been convicted for murder. I don’t think that some of them should have ever reached that stage. If we had prevented them from going on death row, it would not be a discussion about hanging them. Supt. Allerdyce Strachan, the first female officer to rise to the rank of superintendent on the Royal Bahamas Police Force.

I am SAM, and this is my first mission. Wish me luck. Actually, don’t bother. I’m that good. I need to move fast, but I have to be careful too.This high-tech fortress disguised as a middle school has security systems like Hershey, Pennsylvania, has chocolate. My biggest concern (and archnemesis) is Jan I. Tor. He’s the half-human, half-cyborg “cleaning service” they use for “light security” around here. Yeah, right. Tor’s definition of “light security” is that he only kills you once if he finds you. So I wait in super-stealthy silence while Tor hovers past my hiding spot with his motion detectors running, laser cannons loaded, and a big dust mop attachment on his robotic arm. He’s cleaning that floor to within an inch of its life, but it could be me next. As soon as Tor’s out of range, I slip off my tungsten gripper shoes. Believe me, once he’s been through here, you do not want to leave footprints behind. That would be like leaving a business card in Sergeant Stricker’s in-box. Stricker is the big cheese who runs this place, and she’s all human, but just as scary as Tor. I don’t want to rumble with either one of those two. So I program the shoes to self-destruct and drop them in the trash. FWOOM! The coast is clear now, and I sneak back into action. I work my way up the corridor in my spy socks, quiet as a ghost walking on cotton balls. Very, very puffy cotton balls—I’m that quiet. What I need is the perfect place to leave the package I came here to deliver. That’s the mission, but I can’t just do it anywhere. I have to choose wisely. Bathroom? Nah. Too echoey. Library? Nah. Only one exit, and I can’t take that risk. Main lobby? Hmm… maybe so. In fact, I wish I’d thought of that on my way in. I could have saved myself one very expensive pair of tungsten gripper shoes. Once my radar-enabled Rolex watch tells me the main lobby is clear, I slide in there and get right to work. I enter the access code on my briefcase, confirm with my thumbprint, and then pop the case open. After that, it takes exactly seven seconds and one ordinary roll of masking tape to secure my package to the wall. That’s it. Package delivered. Mission accomplished. Catch you next time—because there’s no way you’ll ever catch me. SAM out!

If they are looking for a rewarding long term business with a plumber to perform tasks There are many companies who are working to decide what kind of vocational schools, replacement or installation of higher education institutions. For your education initiative must be the only option that is able to provide intensive plumber work relevant by the classic Nationwide Plumbing Code. After completing the program, each providing accreditation to another relevant effort and hard work as a plumber. The program includes training in the relevant programs to install and configure resources. It also includes mechanical design, troubleshooting, piping plans and key ingredients. Bacteriology and sanitation is also part of an important program for plumbers exercise. Although few plumbing works carried out in the classroom, the most important part of the class exercise is comfortable on the stage. The most important bands in principle were supposed to be a plumber in the direction of the company to do the exercises. It is organized in such a way that the student really easy, because you need a plumber's apprentice as an assistant purchasing palms running plumbing parts training. The student gets serious compensated despite the hour discovery replacement rate. He always takes four-year students to get the name of the certificate. In this position, the plumber will be held against the craftsman marketing consultant. When the full study plumbing, plumber charges may choose the next action plan for the office or a plumber, or may be may decide to acquire its own plumber in person in the office. System officeholder has more tasks and also includes all However, more flexibility. He came to power to decide employment opportunities for leadership simply do not want to take, and it can also maintain services in other management plumbers enough to have a lot less work if you need a cute hat.

A young concert violinist was asked the secret of her success. She replied, “Planned neglect.” Then she explained, “When I was in school, there were many things that demanded my time. When I went to my room after breakfast, I made my bed, straightened the room, dusted the floor, and did whatever else came to my attention. Then I hurried to my violin practice. I found I wasn’t progressing as I thought I should, so I reversed things. Until my practice period was completed, I deliberately neglected everything else. That program of planned neglect, I believe, accounts for my success.”1

Families are finding that they are getting funding from a variety of sources. One typical family has counseling covered through their insurance for family counseling, and counseling funded by a federally funded adoption support program for their child. They receive respite care funded through the Division of Developmental Disabilities. They pay privately for Sibshop, a well-loved program for the siblings of their special needs children. Since the Sibshop is through a non-profit organization, it is particularly affordable. Their school district pays for tutoring. After they specifically requested a review, they received an adoption subsidy available to older children through their state. The cost of braces was partially reimbursed by the adoption support system, as well. The combination of resources and financial relief allowed the parents to enjoy some outings, plan a simple family vacation, and get some household help. They said, “Without this help, we would not have made it as an emotionally intact family. We would not have disrupted, but we would not have been the unit that we are today.

It was only after World War II that Stanford began to emerge as a center of technical excellence, owing largely to the campaigns of Frederick Terman, dean of the School of Engineering and architect-of-record of the military-industrial-academic complex that is Silicon Valley. During World War II Terman had been tapped by his own mentor, presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush, to run the secret Radio Research Lab at Harvard and was determined to capture a share of the defense funding the federal government was preparing to redirect toward postwar academic research. Within a decade he had succeeded in turning the governor’s stud farm into the Stanford Industrial Park, instituted a lucrative honors cooperative program that provided a camino real for local companies to put selected employees through a master’s degree program, and overseen major investments in the most promising areas of research. Enrollments rose by 20 percent, and over one-third of entering class of 1957 started in the School of Engineering—more than double the national average.4 As he rose from chairman to dean to provost, Terman was unwavering in his belief that engineering formed the heart of a liberal education and labored to erect his famous “steeples of excellence” with strategic appointments in areas such as semiconductors, microwave electronics, and aeronautics. Design, to the extent that it was a recognized field at all, remained on the margins, the province of an older generation of draftsmen and machine builders who were more at home in the shop than the research laboratory—a situation Terman hoped to remedy with a promising new hire from MIT: “The world has heard very little, if anything, of engineering design at Stanford,” he reported to President Wallace Sterling, “but they will be hearing about it in the future.

But if my own impact on Chicago was small, the city changed the arc of my life. For starters, it got me out of my own head. I had to listen to, and not just theorize about, what mattered to people. I had to ask strangers to join me and one another on real-life projects—fixing up a park, or removing asbestos from a housing project, or starting an after-school program. I experienced failure and learned to buck up so I could rally those who’d put their trust in me. I suffered rejections and insults often enough to stop fearing them. In other words, I grew up—and got my sense of humor back.

It didn’t make sense. My mom had three part-time jobs. My dad had two part-time jobs. You’d think that would add up to two whole actual jobs, but it didn’t seem to. My mom used to teach music at a middle school until they cut her job. Now she worked as a waitress at two restaurants and as a cashier at a drugstore. She wanted to get another job teaching music, but so far nothing had come up. After my dad had to quit construction work, he started a handyman business. He did small fix-it stuff, but sometimes he wasn’t feeling well and had to cancel appointments. He also gave private guitar lessons. And he was hoping to go to community college part-time to learn computer programming.

As the saying goes, "It's not who you know, but who knows you." How does that relate to getting a job? Lets look at 2 cases where "who knows you" resulted in landing the best job. Keep in mind: The great thing is that you can start right where you are right now! Case 1 In my first teaching job in Mexico in the early 1980's, we were half way through the semester, when the director called me into his office to tell me he had taken a job in Silicon Valley, California. What he said next floored me. "I'd like you to apply for my job." How could I apply to be the director of an English school when it was my first teaching job, all the teachers had more teaching experience than I did, and many of them had doctorate degrees. I only had a bachelors degree. "Don't worry," he said. "People like you, and I think you have what it takes to be a good director." The director knew me, or at least got to know me from teachers' meetings, seeing me teach, and noticing how I interacted with people. Case 2 Fast forward 3 years. After Mexico, I moved to Reno, Nevada, to work on my Master's degree in Teaching English as a Second Language. I applied for a teaching job at the community college, and half-way into the semester, a teacher had to leave and I got the job. I impressed the director enough that she asked me to be the Testing and Placement Coordinator the next year. At the end of that year, I wrote a final report about the testing and placement program. It so impressed the college administration that when a sister university was looking for a graduate student to head up a new language assessment program for new foreign graduate teaching assistants and International faculty, I got recommended. What Does This Mean? From these two examples, you can see that when people see what you can do, you have a greater chance of being seen and being known. When people see what you are capable of doing, there is less risk in hiring you. Why? Because they've seen you be successful before. Chances are you'll be successful with them, too. But, if people don't know you and haven't seen what you can do, there is much greater risk in hiring you. In fact, you may not even be on their radar screen. Get On Their Radar Screens To get on the radar screens for the best jobs, do the best job you can where you work right now. Don't wait for the job announcement to appear in the newspaper. Don't wait for something else to happen. Right now, invest all of you and your unique talents into what you're doing. Impress people with what you can do! Do that, and see the jobs you'll get!

With very rare exceptions, textbook after textbook adopts the same mythology. If middle and high school students are being taught a false history, is it any wonder that they come to believe that African Americans are segregated only because they don’t want to marry or because they prefer to live only among themselves? Is it any wonder that they grow up inclined to think that programs to ameliorate ghetto conditions are simply undeserved handouts?

The Javits legislation, reauthorized in 2001 as part of the No Child Left Behind Act (PL 107–110), was funded at $11.14 million in fiscal year 2004. Congress approved an appropriation of approximately $7.6 million for the Javits program in fiscal year 2008. The Javits funding was eliminated in 2010, curtailing research projects not yet completed. After a gap in funding, the Javits Act was funded again in 2013, and funding reached $12 million in 2016, the highest level in the history of the Javits Act. The National Center for Research on Gifted Education was also funded. Located at the University of Connecticut, the center has a partnership with the University of Virginia. In 2018, the Javits funding continued at $12 million. Academic standards have become increasingly important in the twenty-first century. The National Association for Gifted Children (2010) issued the Pre-K–Grade 12 Gifted Programming Standards. These standards focus on student outcomes and encourage collaboration among general education teachers, special educators, and teachers of the gifted in an effort to assist students in achieving projected outcomes. In 2010, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices in conjunction with the Council of Chief State School Officers put forth the Common Core State Standards Initiative (2019), which provided standards in mathematics and English/language arts for Grades K–12. In 2013, the Next Generation Science Standards (2019) became available and were adopted by several states.

We might all agree that everyone would be better off if there were less positional competition. It’s stressful, it’s wasteful, and it distorts people’s lives. Parents wanting only the best for their child encourage her to study hard so she can get into a good college. But everyone is doing that. So the parents push harder. But so does everybody else. So they send their child to after-school enrichment programs and educational summer camps. And so does everyone else. So now they borrow money to switch to private school. Again, others follow. So they nag at their youngster to become a great musician or athlete or something that will make her distinctive. They hire tutors and trainers. But, of course, so does everyone else, or at least everyone who has not gone broke trying to keep up. The poor child, meanwhile, has been so tortured by parental aspirations for her that she loses interest in all the things they have forced her to do for the sake of her future.

want to enter an electrical engineering program at a Japanese school…preferably Tohto Industrial College. Then after that, I’d like to get a job with Ra…with the Oceanic Resource Exploration & Research Institution.

As a counselor at Georgetown Elementary School explained, low-income and minority students, especially black boys, were less likely to be screened or referred to gifted placement than higher-income white students because their behavior was seen as “disruptive” and used as an indicator of low potential. In contrast, at Ivory Elementary School, minority students (Latinos and African Americans combined) were overrepresented in the gifted program because school staff had made a deliberate effort to change the way they viewed and assessed “disruptive” behavior: behaviors described as “overly social” and “showing signs of boredom” and “curiosity” were reframed as indications that a child might need more challenging curricular materials. According to school personnel, many of these students began to thrive academically and their classroom behavior improved after placement in the gifted program.

I had to ask strangers to join me and one another on real-life projects - fixing up a park, or removing asbestos from a housing project, or starting and after-school program.

After the Republican revolution in the twenties and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the new secular government had excluded religious education from the national curriculum program at schools. Most children educated during this Kemalist era had little interest in religion, but their national consciousness had been well-developed.

What programs would a prison need to utilize in order to maximize the likelihood that the people sent to it would renounce violence as a behavioral strategy? To begin with, it would need to be an anti-prison. Beginning with its architecture, it would need to convey an entirely different message. Current prisons are modeled architecturally after zoos — or rather, after the kinds of zoos that used to exist, but that have been replaced with zoological parks because the animals' keepers began to realize that the old zoos, with concrete floors and walls and steel bars were too inhumane for animals to survive in. Yet we still keep our human animals in zoos that no humane society would permit for animals. And the architecture itself conveys that message to the prisoners: "You are an animal, for this is a zoo, and zoos are what animals are put in." And then we act surprised when the men and women we treat that way actually behave like animals, both when they are in this human zoo and after they return to the community. So we would need to build an anti-prison that would actually look as if it had been built for human beings rather than animals, i.e. that was as home-like and pleasant and civilized and human as possible. Once we had done that, we could offer those who had been sent there the opportunity to acquire as much education and/or vocational training as they had the ability and energy and interest to obtain. We would of course need to provide treatment for whatever medical, dental, psychiatric, or substance-abuse problems they had, and would want to incorporate many of the principles of a therapeutic community into the everyday routines of this residential school, with frequent group discussions with the other residents and staff members with training in psychotherapy. The goal would be to replace the "monster factories" that most prisons now are with therapeutic communities designed to enable people who are deeply damaged, and damaging, to recover their humanity or to gain a degree of humanity they had never been able to acquire; in short, to help them heal themselves and learn, in the process, how to heal others and even repair some of the damage they have done.

Liked Following Message More Contact Us .. Status Photo / VideoOffer, Event + . Write something... . 1 Draft Created Saturday, November 5 at 4:05pm. See draft. . The Year of “Alphabetization In the Cuban post revolution era it was at “Che” Guevara who promoted educational and health reforms. 1961 became the “Year of Cuban Literacy” or the “Campaña Nacional de Alfabetización en Cuba,” meaning the “Year of Alphabetization in Cuba.” The illiteracy rate had increased throughout Cuba after the revolution. Fidel Castro in a speech told prospective literacy teachers, “You will teach, and you will learn,” meaning that this educational program would become a two-way street. Both public and private schools were closed two months earlier, for the summer than usual, so that both teachers and students could voluntarily participate in this special ambitious endeavor. A newly uniformed army of young teachers went out into the countryside, to help educate those in need of literacy education. It was the first time that a sexually commingled group would spend the summer together, raising the anxiety of many that had only known a more Victorian lifestyle. For the first time boys and girls, just coming of age, would be sharing living conditions together. This tended to make young people more self-sufficient and thought to give them a better understanding of the Revolution. It is estimated that a million Cubans took part in this educational program. Aside from the primary purpose of decreasing illiteracy, it gave the young people from urban areas an opportunity to see firsthand what conditions were like in the rural parts of Cuba. Since it was the government that provided books and supplies, as well as blankets, hammocks and uniforms, it is no surprise that the educational curriculum included the history of the Cuban Revolution, however it made Cuba the most literate countries in the world with a UNESCO literacy rate in 2015, of 99.7%. By Captain Hank Bracker, author of the award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba,” Follow Captain Hank Bracker on Facebook, Goodreads, his Website account and Twitter.

If I could redo college and choose any school, I’d choose Michigan again. Yes, the education was great. Yes, I made amazing friends. But the biggest reason for choosing Michigan again would be the aura of its collegiate football program. Auras naturally form around things like sports, religions, and political parties. But anything can have an aura. You should be looking for auras in every relationship you cultivate, every project you engage in, and every company you work for (or build). Different auras work for different people. You have to find one that works for you. While having an aura is a good thing, not having one is equally as bad. There are droves of companies with no aura. If you’re in one of these organizations, get out. I worked in a company with no aura for far too long. My department was the result of an acquisition that happened before I was hired, and the upper management never really knew what to do with our team. After two years of punching in and punching out, I quit. That’s when I started a company of my own, and I’m glad I took the risk. I found out recently that my department at the old company folded and, frankly, I’m not surprised. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I’m sure it had something to do with the aura, or lack thereof. When you’re part of an aura, you’re experiencing the essence of being alive. Caring. Believing. Feeling. Without it, you’re just showing up.

Humor Humor is a great social lubricator—it can make interacting go more smoothly. If you are good at telling jokes, try a few. Telling jokes is risky, however; do not tell ethnic, racist, or off-color jokes. And as always, pay careful attention to interactive chemistry. One high school student who attended my program reported that, although he tried to become part of a popular social group at his new school, playing on the football team and joining several clubs, he was not invited to socialize with the other kids off the field. He had become known for telling joke after joke, in vain hopes of being accepted. When we examined things more carefully, it became clear that his style of telling jokes—sometimes irrelevant, sometimes just plain corny—was not appealing to the peer group he was associating with. Quite simply, the chemistry was off. If you wish to inject humor and levity into an interaction, it’s better to tell funny stories. If the funny stories are about yourself, great: People enjoy mildly self-deprecating humor. You can also find amusing true stories in the newspaper.

At OBSS   An unexpected occurrence did come of this escapade, even though I didn’t care for the program. Andy, you may or may not be aware that Outward Bound teaches interpersonal and leadership skills, not to mention wilderness survival. The first two skillsets were not unlike our education at the Enlightened Royal Oracle Society (E.R.O.S.) or the Dale Carnegie course in which I had participated before leaving Malaya for school in England. It was the wilderness survival program I abhorred. Since I wasn’t rugged by nature (and remain that way to this day), this arduous experience was made worse by your absence. In 1970, OBSS was under the management of Singapore Ministry of Defence, and used primarily as a facility to prepare young men for compulsory ’National Service,’ commonly known as NS. All young and able 18+ Singaporean male citizens and second-generation permanent residents had to register for National Service compulsorily. They would serve either a two-year or twenty-two-month period as Full Time National Servicemen after completing the Outward Bound course. Pending on their individual physical and medical fitness, these young men would enter the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), Singapore Police Force (SPF), or the Singapore Civil Defense Force (SCDF). Father, through his extensive contacts, enrolled me into the twenty-one-day Outward Bound summer course. There were twenty boys in my class. We were divided into small units under the guidance of an instructor. During the first few days at the base camp, we trained for outdoor recreation activities such as adventure racing, backpacking, cycling, camping, canoeing, canyoning, fishing, hiking, kayaking, mountaineering, horseback riding, photography, rock climbing, running, sailing, skiing, swimming, and a variety of sporting activities.

Frank Fiorini, better known as Frank Sturgis, had an interesting career that started when he quit high school during his senior year to join the United States Marine Corps as an enlisted man. During World War II he served in the Pacific Theater of Operations with Edson’s Raiders, of the First Marine Raiders Battalion under Colonel “Red Mike.” In 1945 at the end of World War II, he received an honorable discharge and the following year joined the Norfolk, Virginia Police Department. Getting involved in an altercation with his sergeant, he resigned and found employment as the manager of the local Havana-Madrid Tavern, known to have had a clientele consisting primarily of Cuban seamen. In 1947 while still working at the tavern, he joined the U.S. Navy’s Flight Program. A year later, he received an honorable discharge and joined the U.S. Army as an Intelligence Officer. Again, in 1949, he received an honorable discharge, this time from the U.S. Army. Then in 1957, he moved to Miami where he met former Cuban President Carlos Prío, following which he joined a Cuban group opposing the Cuban dictator Batista. After this, Frank Sturgis went to Cuba and set up a training camp in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, teaching guerrilla warfare to Castro’s forces. He was appointed a Captain in Castro’s M 26 7 Brigade, and as such, he made use of some CIA connections that he apparently had cultivated, to supply Castro with weapons and ammunition. After they entered Havana as victors of the revolution, Sturgis was appointed to a high security, intelligence position within the reorganized Cuban air force. Strangely, Frank Sturgis returned to the United States after the Cuban Revolution, and mysteriously turned up as one of the Watergate burglars who were caught installing listening devices in the National Democratic Campaign offices. In 1973 Frank A. Sturgis, E. Howard Hunt, Eugenio R. Martínez, G. Gordon Liddy, Virgilio R. “Villo” González, Bernard L. Barker and James W. McCord, Jr. were convicted of conspiracy. While in prison, Sturgis feared for his life if anything he had done, regarding his associations and contacts, became public knowledge. In 1975, Sturgis admitted to being a spy, stating that he was involved in assassinations and plots to overthrow undisclosed foreign governments. However, at the Rockefeller Commission hearings in 1975, their concluding report stated that he was never a part of the CIA…. Go figure! In 1979, Sturgis surfaced in Angola where he trained and helped the rebels fight the Cuban-supported communists. Following this, he went to Honduras to train the Contras in their fight against the communist-supported Sandinista government. He also met with Yasser Arafat in Tunis, following which he was debriefed by the CIA. Furthermore, it is documented that he met and talked to the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or Carlos the Jackal, who is now serving a life sentence for murdering two French counter intelligence agents. On December 4, 1993, Sturgis suddenly died of lung cancer at the Veterans Hospital in Miami, Florida. He was buried in an unmarked grave south of Miami…. Or was he? In this murky underworld, anything is possible.

Another program that evolved from the Cultivating Emotional Balance project is Stress Management and Relaxation Techniques (SMART) in Education, an eight-week, 11-session program that involves after-school or evening sessions for a total of 36 contact hours. With the support of the Impact Foundation, this program was developed by Margaret Cullen, a licensed therapist, MBSR instructor, one of the developers of CEB, and a primary facilitator for CEB research.

The researchers consistently found that all kinds of mental abilities began to come back online—after as little as four months of aerobic exercise. A different study looked at school-age children. Children jogged for 30 minutes two or three times a week. After 12 weeks, their cognitive performance had improved significantly compared with prejogging levels. When the exercise program was withdrawn, the scores plummeted back to their preexperiment levels.

against the walls of the machine. After being slid in, I began to feel the first tremors of panic. In an instant, my world had gotten a lot smaller and darker and weirder. It seemed inevitable that in moments I’d be squealing for someone to get me the hell out of there and flailing my limbs (though to little effect, because one can only move so much in an MRI scanner only fifty-five centimeters wide). But just as quickly as the panic came, it vanished upon being lulled into boredom by the groan of the scanner. After two hours, the technologist pulled me out pink-faced and squinty-eyed. I sat on the scanner bed for a moment, trying to reorient myself to real life. That was awful. I told myself that I’d never do another MRI session, but after she handed me $50, I found myself asking how to sign up for more. I also interviewed to become a tutor at an inner-city elementary school for a work-study program called America Reads. I showed up in my least-wrinkled dress shirt and a pair of slacks that I’d worn

Darla, a third grader, was overweight, awkward, and a “crybaby.” She was such a prime target that half of the class bullied her, hitting her and calling her names on a daily basis—and winning one another’s approval for it. Several years later, because of Davis’s program, the bullying had stopped. Darla had learned better social skills and even had friends. Then Darla went to middle school and, after a year, came back to report what had happened. Her classmates from elementary school had seen her through. They’d helped her make friends and protected her from her new peers when they wanted to harass her. Davis also gets the bullies changing. In fact, some of the kids who rushed to Darla’s support in middle school were the same ones who had bullied her earlier. What Davis does is this. First, while enforcing consistent discipline, he doesn’t judge the bully as a person. No criticism is directed at traits. Instead, he makes them feel liked and welcome at school every day. Then he praises every step in the right direction. But again, he does not praise the person; he praises their effort. “I notice that you have been staying out of fights. That tells me you are working on getting along with people.” You can see that Davis is leading students directly to the growth mindset. He is helping them see their actions as part of an effort to improve. Even if the change was not intentional on the part of the bullies, they may now try to make it so.

research university that primarily awards master’s degrees and PhDs, JNU saw the number of seats offered to students wishing to enroll in a master’s or a doctoral program plummet by 84 percent, from 1,234 to 194 in one year.101 Furthermore, admissions committees were made up solely of experts appointed by the JNU vice-chancellor, flouting university statutes and guidelines followed by the University Grants Commission (UGC), which stipulate that academics should be involved.102 This made it possible to hire teachers from Hindu nationalist circles,103 with few qualifications,104 and some facing charges of plagiarism.105 In particular, several former ABVP student activists from JNU have been appointed as assistant professors even after being disqualified by the committee in charge of short-listing applicants.106 The vice-chancellor replaced deans in the School of Social Sciences without following appointment procedures, cutting the number of researchers by 80 percent and ceasing to apply rules JNU had set to ensure diversity through a mechanism taking into account the social background and geographic origin of its applicants.107 The new recruitment procedure strongly disadvantaged Dalits, Adivasis, and OBCs, who used to make up nearly 50 percent of the student intake and who now accounted for a mere 7 percent. The vice-chancellor also issued ad hoc promotions, nominating recently appointed faculty members to the post of full professor. Conversely, the freeze on promotions for “antigovernment” teachers who should have been promoted on the basis of seniority prompted some of the diktat’s victims to take the matter to court.108 However, even after the court—taking note of the illegality of the rejection procedure—ordered a reexamination of the claimants’ promotions, the latter were once again denied.109

Another completely different way that the contacts of a relay could fail was if dirt or an insect got trapped in the spacing between contacts. If a fly or a moth, for example, happened to be sitting on the make contact when the coil was energized, then it could be squashed and, after its smashed little body dried, the contacts would be covered with a very disgusting but quite effective insulator. To clean up such a disabled relay was called debugging, a term that has survived in the vocabulary of modern computer users trying to fix their faulty programs. This is not a joke—I heard it as a quite serious story in a lecture at the Naval Postgraduate School in 1982 from a legend in computer science, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (1906–1992), a Yale PhD mathematician who worked during the Second World War with Harvard’s five ton, 800 cubic foot Mark I relay computer, which when operating was described as sounding like a “roomful of ladies knitting.” To debug such a machine must have been an “interesting” job for someone;

After multiple suicide attempts Maria was placed in one of our residential treatment centers. Initially she was mute and withdrawn and became violent when people got too close to her. After other approaches failed to work, she was placed in an equine therapy program where she groomed her horse daily and learned simple dressage. Two years later I spoke with Maria at her high school graduation. She had been accepted by a four-year college. When I asked her what had helped her most, she answered, “The horse I took care of.” She told me that she first started to feel safe with her horse; he was there every day, patiently waiting for her, seemingly glad upon her approach. She started to feel a visceral connection with another creature and began to talk to him like a friend. Gradually she started talking with the other kids in the program and, eventually, with her counselor.

Chapter Five Monday. 12:50 PM. The wrestling room. Because of the assembly, classes for the rest of the day were shortened so school could still dismiss on time, which meant that my science class wasn’t going to start until one-o-clock. After I saw that it was ten ‘til, I rushed out of the assembly and headed straight for the wrestling room. It was the first day of training with my new ninja clan, and I was already behind schedule. A few months ago, during the week of the talent show, I stumbled upon a second gymnasium that wasn’t being used. It was the wrestling room. Coach Cooper, the gym teacher (same last name as me, but not related… or is he? Dun dun dunnnnnnn… no, I’m kidding. We’re not related), said that Buchanan School used to have a wrestling team, but cut it from the program because of money issues about ten years back. I asked if it was cool that I used the room for a martial arts club, and he said yeah.

We’d honed our mission at Team Sutton to focus on after-school programs for kids in elementary and middle school in lower-income areas, where the extracurricular activities were just too expensive. The skills the kids learned from such things as playing in sports, participating in plays, and getting some extra help with their reading had lasting impacts on the rest of their life.

The “sugar daddies” program simply informed students about what kind of people are more likely to be infected. Its effect was to sharply cut down sex with older men (the “sugar daddies”) but, also interestingly, to promote protected sex with boys their own age. After a year, the pregnancy rates were 5.5 percent in schools that had not received the program and 3.7 percent in schools that had received it. This reduction was mainly attributable to a reduction by two-thirds in pregnancies where an older male partner was involved.

In January 2017, Bloomberg reported that although Facebook had started giving recruiters an incentive to bring in more women, black, and Latino engineering candidates back in 2015, the program was netting few new hires. According to former Facebook recruiters, this was because the people responsible for final hiring approvals—twenty to thirty senior leaders who were almost entirely white and Asian men—still assessed candidates by using the same metrics as always: whether they had gone to the right school, already worked at a top tech company, or had friends at Facebook who gave them a positive referral.15 What this means is that, even after making it through round after round of interviews designed to prove their skills and merits, many diverse hires would be blocked at the final stage—all because they didn’t match the profile of the people already working at Facebook.

Back to School As surreal as being a grown adult in high school was, it was also brief: in only one semester I had completed enough credits to obtain my diploma. From there I went directly to the “Adult Entry Program” at my local university and enrolled. I would spend one semester in remedial classes to catch up on missing prerequisites and then college would begin in earnest. One might imagine that by now I would have learned that being a good student takes significant effort, but I continued to coast my first semester, missing classes, and skipping homework. Then, one time after missing a few days in a row, I returned to discover the professor handing back a midterm exam –– one that I had not written! Apparently, I had skipped class that day. Although it would not lead to me failing the class (and as a remedial class it would not affect my overall grade,) it did require a “mercy pass” on the part of the instructor to get me through. The approach I’d been following all along simply wasn’t working. I had the right goals now but evidently I still lacked the right approach. As I think it might be for many people, the fundamental shift in how I went about things came with the realization that I was not going to school because I had to. No one was making me go. I was there of my own accord, for my own purposes and reasons. This understanding completely transformed the way I went about school; from that point forward, I treated it as something I wanted for myself, and I worked accordingly. By the end of my next semester, I was on the academic Dean’s List, and I would graduate with Great Distinction from the Honors program four years later.

After you’ve decided on a place to study MBBS abroad, the following step is to choose the best medical university. MBBS abroad offers its students a plethora of alternatives and chances. Here are some pointers to help you choose the top medical university in the world to study MBBS. Learn about the university’s rating. The university’s experience in teaching MBBS The university’s recognition Fees for tuition and living expenses Whether or if the university provides FMGE coaching Indian cuisine is available at the hostel canteen. Examine the number of Indian students enrolled at the university. Admission Procedures for MBBS Programs Abroad MBBS overseas is increasingly a popular option for thousands of students. It does not necessitate any difficult procedures or fees. Admission to medical schools in other countries is a pretty straightforward procedure. MBBS abroad offers a plethora of chances to its students. The student must send the necessary paperwork to us, and we will begin the admissions process right away. The admission letter is issued once the following papers are submitted: Results of the 12th grade with eligibility matching according to the university. Passport photocopy Following the submission of the required papers, the student will get an invitation from the Ministry of Education of the particular nation. A representative is on hand at the airport to meet the students, and another is on hand at the destination airport to greet them, The University provides lodging for its students. The Cost of a Medical Degree in Abroad MBBS overseas offers a viable option for medical education studies. The cost of MBBS in Russia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, China, Bangladesh, Guyana, and other such nations is substantially lower than that of private medical institutions in India. Furthermore, the cost of living in these nations is quite low for international students. These colleges also provide scholarships to deserving students. Criteria for Eligibility to Study medical Abroad: The following admission requirements are reserved for Indian candidates seeking admission to MBBS programs at any of the Best Medical Universities in the World: Firtly, A non-reserved Indian medical candidate must have obtained a minimum of 50% in their 12th grade in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Secondly, Medical aspirants from the restricted categories (SC/ST/OBC) can apply with a minimum of 40% marks in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, according to NMC/MCI criteria (Medical Council of India). Medical students must take the NEET (National Eligibility and Entrance Test) starting in 2019.

Just as the United States helped create the prosperity that enabled the Party’s control, U.S. technology has been copied, repurposed, and enhanced to secure that control—sometimes with investment from U.S. venture capital. Across China, a program known as Police Cloud allows for the collection and integration of previously unimaginable amounts of information: who you’re in contact with, what you buy, where you travel, when you shop, whether you pay your parking tickets, and so on. A “social credit” system allows the government to affix a score to someone: How reliable are you? Could you pose a threat of some sort? You live your life with the knowledge that the sum total of your actions could be evaluated by someone, somewhere, with some purpose. This creates incentives and disincentives, given the reach of the Party into people’s lives. Disincentives are clear: Say the wrong thing, and you could end up detained. But the incentives may be even more powerful: Want a good job? Want your kids to get into a good school? You may have to consider those aspirations with everything you do.

Tugbug Children's Centers are one of the best play areas for kids. Play zones with fun after school programs that aid in sensory and emotional development in children.

On one particular night, I was determined to get a half-decent night of sleep because I had a big meeting at work the next morning, where I was talking to the school board about the special education program at our school. It was a really, really important meeting, and I didn’t think I could get through it on an hour of sleep. I pumped Emma full of two bottles of milk, hoping she’d conk out, but knowing it was a crapshoot. I told Noah about the meeting and emphasized how important it was. I had to get a decent night of sleep. He swore he understood. So when Emma woke up screaming at two in the morning, I expected him to get up with her. “I’ve got a headache, Claire,” he mumbled into his pillow. “Can’t you get her?” I had a headache too. I had a headache almost all the time these days, as well as big purple circles under my eyes. Skipping out on my parental duties was never an option. “You know I have a big meeting tomorrow.” Noah squeezed his eyes shut. After a long minute of Emma’s cries increasing in volume, he got out of bed. And slammed the door shut behind him when he left the bedroom. Just as the cries subsided and I started to drift off again, the screams abruptly started again. A few seconds later, Noah came back into the bedroom. He flopped down on the bed and covered his head with the pillow. “I can’t deal with her,” he said. “You have to do it.” “But I told you, I have a meeting tomorrow!” “Well, I have a headache. I’m not getting up.” And that was it, as far as he was concerned. He acted like Emma was my baby, he was doing me a favor by trying to help, but if he didn’t want to do it, he didn’t have to. I remember staring at him in the dark bedroom, waiting to see if he would change his mind. He didn’t budge. I had to get up and spend the rest of the night comforting Emma. He never apologized for that one. Even though I was a wreck at my meeting the next day, and he ended up sleeping in after I dropped Emma and Aidan off at daycare. It was so incredibly unfair. After that, it seemed like we were at war more and more frequently. He never carried his weight when it came to the children and the housework, and what’s worse, he didn’t care. He told me all I did was nag him. We stopped doing things together as a family—I preferred to go out with the kids myself so I didn’t have to watch him play with his phone instead of talking to me. And we never did anything together as a couple. I can’t remember our last date night. For a while, we were making an effort to get a babysitter and go out, but I can’t remember the last time either of us even suggested it. I kept telling myself things would get better as the kids got older. But now they’re older. And it turned out, our marriage got too broken to fix.

Families with nothing would sometimes sell their toddlers to indenture schools, where managers trained them to be submissive just like they were programming a bot. At least bots could earn their way out of ownership after a while, be upgraded, and go fully autonomous. Humans might earn their way out, but there was no autonomy key that could undo a childhood like that.

First, socialism — the belief that the earth belongs to labor — is my moral being. In fact, it is my religion, the values that anchor the commitments that define my life. Second, “old school” implies putting in work year after year for the good cause. In academia one runs across people who call themselves Marxists and go to lots of conferences but hardly ever march on a picket line, go to a union meeting, throw a brick or simply help wash the dishes after a benefit. What’s even worse, they deign to teach us the “real Marx” but lack the old Moor’s fundamental respect for individual working people and his readiness to become a poor outlaw on their behalf. Finally, plain “socialist” expresses identification with the broad movement and the dream rather than with a particular program or camp. I have strong, if idiosyncratic, opinions on all the traditional issues — for example, the necessity of an organization of organizers (call it Leninism, if you want) but also the evils of bureaucracy and permanent leaderships (call it anarchism if you wish) — but I try to remind myself that such positions need to be constantly reassessed and calibrated to the conjuncture. One is always negotiating the slippery dialectic between individual reason, which must be intransigently self-critical, and the fact that one needs to be part of a movement or a radical collective in order, as Sartre put it, to “be in history.” Moral dilemmas and hard choices come with the turf and they cannot be evaded with “correct lines.

Business schools don’t create wealthy and well-connected people. They accept them, then take credit for their success. If you get in, the school will do what it can to help you get a well-paying job within a few months of graduation, but making things happen will always be your responsibility. If you’re successful in the years after graduation, the school will hold you up as a shining example of the quality of their program and will use the “halo effect” of your name to recruit more students. If you lose your job and go broke, you’ll get neither publicity nor help, but the loan bills will keep rolling in. Sorry about your luck.

In my training programs, I use redacted local ePCRs as examples. When I identify ePCRs, like those above, to members of the agency that created them, the audience, who were laughing and enjoying the class just a minute ago, falls silent. Every time. After a few seconds of them pondering their feet like children who were just caught ditching class, I point out that these obviously substandard providers are their peers, their coworkers. As far as the public and the law are concerned, if they know about it and do nothing, these substandard providers are them.

The major TV networks at the time all aired some version of melodramatic afternoon programming for teens. ABC called its afternoon movie series After School Specials, and CBS called their version Schoolbreak. NBC went with Special Treat, which, given the content of these shows, strikes me now as darkly comic. I rarely managed to watch one of these programs in its entirety because I wasn’t allowed to turn on the television during homework time, but occasionally I’d sneak a half hour. They ranged from mild domestic drama, like “Divorced Kids’ Blues,” to more sensational stories, such as “Are You My Mother?,” in which a girl finds out the mom she thought was dead is actually alive and in some kind of institution. Then there were episodes like these: “One Too Many”—one of several specials about drunk-driving accidents. “Don’t Touch”—a variation on the theme that abuse can come at you from any direction: a sitter, a parent, an uncle, a family friend… (See also, and I swear I’m not making this up: “Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom.”) “Andrea’s Story: A Hitchhiking Tragedy”—What happened to Andrea when she accepted a ride from a stranger? Well, it wasn’t good at all, I can tell you that. “A Very Delicate Matter”—Guess what? The matter is gonorrhea. “Tattle: When to Tell on a Friend”—Answer: as soon as you notice their interest in cocaine.

In 1987, a rich donor in Philadelphia “adopted” 112 black sixth graders, few of whom had grown up with fathers in their home. He guaranteed them a fully funded education through college as long as they did not do drugs, have children before getting married, or commit crimes. He also gave them tutors, workshops, and after-school programs, kept them busy in summer programs, and provided them with counselors for when they had any kind of problem. Forty-five of the kids never made it through high school. Of the sixty-seven boys, nineteen became felons. Twelve years later, the forty-five girls had had sixty-three children between them, and more than half had become mothers before the age of eighteen. So what exactly was the “racism” that held these poor kids back that could have been erased at the time and created a different result for these children? The answer is none. Social history is too complex to yield to the either/or gestures of KenDiAngelonian propositions. What held those poor kids back was that they had been raised amid a different sense of what is normal than white kids in the burbs.

After breakfast, we join hands in the living room like we always do, under the framed poster of the Ten-Point Program, and Daddy leads us in prayer. “Black Jesus, watch over my babies today,” he says. “Keep them safe, steer them from wrong, and help them recognize snakes from friends. Give them the wisdom they need to be their own people. “Help Seven with this situation at his momma’s house, and let him know he can always come home. Thank you for Sekani’s miraculous, sudden healing that just so happened to come after he found out they’re having pizza at school today.

Evans was as skilled with computers as Gates and Allen. Lakeside once struggled to manually put together the school’s class schedule—a maze of complexity to get hundreds of students the classes they need at times that don’t conflict with other courses. The school tasked Bill and Kent—children, by any measure—to build a computer program to solve the problem. It worked. And unlike Paul Allen, Kent shared Bill’s business mind and endless ambition. “Kent always had the big briefcase, like a lawyer’s briefcase,” Gates recalls. “We were always scheming about what we’d be doing five or six years in the future. Should we go be CEOs? What kind of impact could you have? Should we go be generals? Should we go be ambassadors?” Whatever it was, Bill and Kent knew they’d do it together. After reminiscing on his friendship with Kent, Gates trails off. “We would have kept working together. I’m sure we would have gone to college together.” Kent could have been a founding partner of Microsoft with Gates and Allen. But it would never happen. Kent died in a mountaineering accident before he graduated high school.

Dear Teachers, I hope your school year is going pretty well. I hope your classes are not causing you too much trouble and your families are doing well. You might be wondering why you are tagged to this post and what this is all about. It’s Teachers’ Day, the day for being thankful to our teachers. Some of you I had over a decade ago, some of you might not even remember who the heck I am. But if you’re reading this, this is my way of officially thanking you. For what? Let me explain. To the ones who made me love learning as a whole – If you are an elementary school teacher, this goes out to you. You are the reason I am where I am today. If it weren’t for your hard work and dedication to teaching me and every other student what you know, my future would not be as bright as it is now. I chose to go to college because somewhere along the line, you taught me that education is important and I have to strive to help others by educating myself. This is not always easy, but you helped me understand that willingness to learn is one of the most important aspects of a person. For that, I am forever grateful for you and everything you have done for me and so many others. To the ones who helped me find my passions– Writing, training, and helping people are what I love. No matter what I have been through in my life, everything goes back to the fact that in the future, I want to help people and I want to change the world. Writing and creating training programs are what make that happen. It made me realize that in the future, I don’t just want a shiny car, big bungalow, and other material items. I want something that sticks with people for all time – and what better way to do that than to become a writer and write for those who can't write for themselves? Shout out to those teachers who helped me find my passion, and maybe even made an effort to help me pursue it as well. To the ones who taught me more than the textbooks – you honestly saved me. You taught me that learning isn’t always about getting 100s on every test and being the perfect student. You helped me realize that a part of learning means making mistakes. You taught me that brushing yourself off, getting back up, and trying again is essential to get anywhere in this world. I grew up being the smart kid who never had to study and when the going got tough, I didn’t always know how to respond. You helped me with my problem solving skills and fixing things that needed fixing. This isn’t necessarily always talking about school, but life in general. You taught me that my value was not depicted by my score on a test, but rather who I was as a person. It is hard to put into words, but some of you honestly are the reason I am here today – succeeding in my first semester of college, off to university before I know it. Thank you so much. To the ones who didn’t know I could talk – I’m sorry I didn’t speak up more in your class. Many of you knew I had a lot to say, but knew I did not know how to say it or how to get the thoughts out. I promise you, even though you could not hear it, I am thankful for you - thankful that you did not force me out of my comfort zone. I know that may not sound like much, but when you have as much of a fear of speaking out as I do, that is such a big deal. Thank you for working with me and realizing that someone does not need to speak in order to have knowledge in their mind. Thank you for not basing my intelligence on my ability to present that information. It means a lot more than you will ever realize. To the ones who don’t know why you made this list – Congratulations. Somewhere along the way, you impacted me in a way I felt was worth acknowledging you for. Maybe you said something in class that resonated with me and changed my outlook on a situation, or life in general. Maybe you just asked me if I was okay after class one day. If you’re sitting there scratching your head, wondering how you changed my life, please just know you did.

The Confident Kids® program is just what you and your family need if you would like to gain support for the positive wellbeing of a child or young person in your life, whether you're a parent, relative, school staff, after-school club owner or friend. It's a wonderful program, designed for proactive people like you who want to make a positive difference to a childs life and to the quality of family life or school community.

It is not as if officialdom gave up on Locke. On the contrary, the city hurled initiative after initiative at the school: a new attendance policy here, a fresh reading program there, a revamped code of discipline sometime after that, and so on. The trouble was that the authorities never took the time to look at the big picture.

After spending the day in a school vaccination clinic, a colleague of mine quipped: “Every time you add a question to a form, I want you to imagine the user filling it out with one hand while using the other to break up a brawl between toddlers.”6 Applications for government benefits might be completed under similarly chaotic circumstances. Users who have a lot else going on in their lives need to be able to apply for the service without an undue burden of time, technology, and cognitive overhead. If they’re asked for documentation, the documents need to be ones they have access to. If they need to correspond with the program, there has to be a way for them to do so even if they lack a stable mailing address. If they have family who are undocumented immigrants, they may need reassurance that applying for a program won’t get them or their relatives in trouble.

Did you know that if you’re a middle-aged woman, you have only a small window of opportunity between the beginning of perimenopause and the start of menopause to start estrogen replacement therapy to protect not only your brain but also your bones and cardiovascular system? I did not, until I dug into the science, because as a woman who was diagnosed with a stage 0 breast lump, I was scared off like so many of us from the results of the Women’s Health Initiative, which got blasted out all over the news and initially showed a link between estrogen replacement therapy and breast cancer, but guess what? That study had so many flaws, its findings are little more than useless and possibly harmful. Worse, women like me without uteri show a decrease in breast cancer with estrogen replacement therapy. But this information never made it either into the headlines or into our gynecologists’ offices. I had to find it in scientific publications such as The Lancet online. In fact, get this: Our medical system barely trains gynecologists in menopausal medicine. A recent study found that only 20 percent of ob-gyn residency programs in the U.S. provide any menopause training. Yes, any. Which means that 80 percent of all gynecological residents in school today are getting no training whatsoever in post-reproductive women’s health. These are people whose job it is to know everything going on in our ladyparts, but they have not been taught the basic tenets of how to care for either us or our plumbing after we stop menstruating. And by “us” I mean 30 percent of all women alive on earth at any given moment. Half of my middle-aged female friends deal with chronic urinary tract infections. Oh, well, we think, throwing up our hands in defeat and consuming far too many antibiotics than are rational or safe or even good for the future safety of humanity. It took Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist in Washington, D.C., reaching out to me over Twitter to explain that UTIs in menopausal women do not have to be recurrent. They can be mitigated with, yes, vaginal estrogen. Not once was I ever

destruction of the main campus of spy school, forcing us to decamp to Alaska. And that was all just in the last few weeks. Even more aggravating was the fact that Murray should have been in jail when he had done all this. Earlier that year, my friends and I had arrested him for multiple illegal acts, and then Cyrus had delivered him to the Falcon Ridge federal supermax penitentiary. However, unknown to us, Murray had quickly cut a deal with our own government, trading information about his previous associates in return for a place in the Federal Witness Protection Program. All of this had worked out like a charm for Murray, who got even with his enemies, avoided jail—and was allowed to move into a nice suburban community with a swimming pool. He had then promptly violated all the terms of his release by committing several crimes at once, almost all of which were against me. After an exceptionally harrowing adventure, my friends and I had recaptured Murray, and afterward, I had expected he would be sent back to jail, hopefully for the rest of his life. So it was a shock to hear that he had managed to weasel out of prison once again. “There were issues with sending him back,” Catherine explained. “He had a legally binding agreement

After completing their undergraduate degrees at NYU, both Mortimer and Raymond had applied to med school. But during the 1930s, many American medical programs had established quotas on the number of Jewish students who could be enrolled. By the mid-1930s, more than 60 percent of applicants to American medical schools were Jewish, and this perceived imbalance prompted sharp restrictions. At some schools, such as Yale, applications from prospective students who happened to be Jewish were marked with an H, for “Hebrew.” Mortimer, who applied to medical school first, found that he was effectively blacklisted on the basis of his ethnicity. He couldn’t find a medical school in the United States that would take him. So, in 1937, he

When these ancient parts of your brain are active or rehearsing the next disaster using the DMN, they effortlessly hijack your attention. You try to meditate and repetitive negative thinking takes over. In the cage match between Caveman Brain and Bliss Brain, Caveman Brain always wins. Survival is a more important need than happiness or self-actualization. You can’t self-actualize if you’re dead. In 2015 the US National Institutes of Health estimated that less than 10% of the US population meditates. One of the primary reasons for this is that meditation is hard. Most people who start a meditation program drop out. GETTING THE BEST OF ALL WORLDS When writing my first best-selling book, The Genie in Your Genes, I experimented with many schools of stress reduction and meditation. Heart coherence. Mindfulness. EFT tapping. Neurofeedback. Hypnosis. One day I had a Big Idea: What happens when you combine them all? I began playing with a routine that did just that. Here’s what I came up with: First, you tap on acupressure points to relieve stress. Second, you close your eyes and relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth. This sends a signal to your vagus nerve, which wanders all over your body, connecting all the major organ systems. It’s the key signaling component of the parasympathetic nervous system, which governs relaxation. 4.8. The vagus nerve connects with all the major organ systems of your body. Third, you imagine the volume of space inside your body, particularly between your eyes. This automatically generates big alpha in your brain, moving you toward the Awakened Mind. Fourth, you slow your breathing down to 6 seconds per inbreath and 6 seconds per outbreath. This puts you into heart coherence. Fifth, you imagine your breath coming in and going out from your heart area, and you picture a sphere of energy in your heart. Sixth, you send a beam of heart energy to a person or place that makes you feel wonderful. This puts you into deep coherence. After enjoying the connection for a while, you send compassion to everyone and everything in the universe. Feeling universal compassion produces the major brain changes seen in fMRI scans of longtime meditators. As we’ll see in Chapters 6 and 8, compassion moves the needle like nothing else. At this point, most people drop into Bliss Brain automatically. They’re in a combination of alpha, heart coherence, and parasympathetic dominance. They haven’t been asked to still their minds, sit cross-legged, follow a guru, or believe in a deity. They’ve just followed a sequence of simple physical steps. After a few minutes of universal compassion, you again focus your beam on a single person or place. You then gently disengage and draw the energy beam back into your own heart. Seventh, you direct your beam of compassion to a part of your body that is suffering or in pain. You end the meditation by returning your attention to the here and now.

— We saw more and more of each other, working together in the after-school daycare program and congregating in the school library with a crew of erudite girls from both of our grades, the kind of slightly-too-smart group that talked about Rent and gossip and foreign languages with equal passion, that dated only occasionally—as teenage boys are, by and large, a disappointment—and earned kind but clear reprimands from librarians for laughing too loud on a regular basis.

From the founding of the Republic to the founding of an after-school program in a public school, from the House of Representatives to a settlement house—it all hinged on how we reacted and interacted in small groups. Follett knew from both observation and participation that human energy could be created and kindled or smothered and killed based entirely on what mindset we each brought to the encounter. How you could create spaces where each person could at once stand out and fit in. How could we create unity among radically different people with divergent priorities without mandating uniformity? Follett wanted to revive the Constellation for a new time.

I keep mentioning television. Remember: There was no internet in the 1980s. What a child knew of the world was what immediately surrounded her in real life—her own family, friends, school, and home—and what glimpses she could get of the larger world through available windows. Television filled in the blanks, I thought, in my understanding of life. I had no way of knowing how many blanks remained unfilled or how correct or incorrect was the mental map I drew of the world based on that understanding. The major TV networks at the time all aired some version of melodramatic afternoon programming for teens. ABC called its afternoon movie series After

I’m just going to say it. Childhood has been lost. To video games, to sports leagues, to after-school programs, to day care, to mobile devices, to peer pressure, to Netflix, to “gifted” classes, to extracurricular activities, to homework, to being carted between split homes every other weekend, and to busy schedules, just like their parents.

We’ve all seen “quit smoking” advertisements on buses and subways. They don’t work. We’ve heard about school programs that teach kids to say no to drugs and alcohol. In many cases drug and alcohol use go up after these programs because they pique the curiosity of the adolescent students. The only thing that has been shown to work consistently is raising taxes on these products and placing limits on where and when they can be sold. When these measures are taken, use goes down.4