Computer Teacher Quotes

An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected.

I got zero on a maths test once," I said. "The teacher said he'd wanted to give me a minus number, but the computer wouldn't let him.

I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.

You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.

In a classical joke a child stays behind after school to ask a personal question. "Teacher, what did I learn today? " The surprised teacher asks, "Why do you ask that?" and the child replies, "Daddy always asks me and I never know what to say".

I never loved anyone else and never desired to. She was my companion, my lover, and my teacher.

But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you? People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.

Let’s face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren’t invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren’t sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it? If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm goes off by going on. English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race (which, of course, isn’t a race at all). That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible. And finally, why doesn't "buick" rhyme with "quick"?

Public education does not serve a public. It creates a public. And in creating the right kind of public, the schools contribute toward strengthening the spiritual basis of the American Creed. That is how Jefferson understood it, how Horace Mann understood it, how John Dewey understood it, and in fact, there is no other way to understand it. The question is not, Does or doesn't public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things, and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling.

Geeks = Know more about computers than their computer teacher, so everyone comes to them for computer problems. Nerds = Have no life and only worries about school, no one talks to them. Jocks = Know a lot about sports but not much else. Geek's Wife: Completely depend on the geek for tech support. Tend to be pretty good looking. Nerd's Wife: nonexistent Jock's Wife: only there for money, most likely having an affair with another jock See Geeks are the best!

writing it down on paper or on a computer where you can see it is because the brain, unlikely as it may sound, is no place for serious thinking. Any time you have serious thinking to do, the first step is to get the whole shootin’ match out of your head and set it up someplace where you can walk around it and see it from all sides. Attack, switch sides and counter-attack. You can’t do that while it’s still in your head. Writing it out allows you to act as your own teacher, your own critic, your own opponent. By externalizing your thoughts, you can become your own guru; judging yourself, giving feedback, providing a more objective and elevated perspective.

You may know how to operate computers. You may know a lot about aliens or robots. You may be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, teacher, specialist… BUT if you don’t know how you operate, why your life is the way it is and how to increase fulfillment, love and peace in your life then all the knowledge and degrees aren’t much worth having!

My wife, Rohini, visits a lot of government schools as part of her NGO reach-out. One of the questions she most likes to ask the kids is what they would like to be when they grow up. The answers are varied--'engineer,' 'teacher,' 'policeman' and, increasingly, 'computer' [sic]. But even in the rural schools, one aspiration that they never express is 'farmer

This is not education my friend. It is a process of manufacturing computation devices that look like Homo sapiens, and thereby falsely labeled as Education.

Progressive teachers knew very well how to use the computer for their own ends as an instrument of change; School knew very well how to nip this subversion in the bud.

Yet the possibility of information storage, beyond what men and governments ever had before, can make available at the touch of a button a man's total history (including remarks put on his record by his kindergarten teacher about his ability and character). And with the computer must be placed the modern scientific technical capability which exists for wholesale monitoring of telephone, cable, Telex and microwave transmissions which carry much of today's spoken and written communications. The combined use of the technical capability of listening in on all these forms of communications with the high-speed computer literally leaves no place to hide and little room for privacy.

Still another factor is compatibility with vested interests. This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60 years.

The question is not, Does or doesn't public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling.

You see, my Apple loyalty started early, for no reason other than the fact that my mother is a teacher, and grade schools back then seemed to be stocked almost exclusively with Apples—we bought this second computer with my mother’s educator discount.

For dinner Jade microwaves some Stars-n-Flags. They're addictive. They put sugar in the sauce and sugar in the meat nuggets. I think also caffeine. Someone told me the brown streaks in the Flags are caffeine. We have like five bowls each. After dinner the babies get fussy and Min puts a mush of ice cream and Hershey's syrup in their bottles and we watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half hour computer simulation of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves. A man cuts his hand off chopping wood and while he's wandering around screaming for help is picked up by a tornado and dropped on a preschool during recess and lands on a pregnant teacher.

Given the asymmetrical effects of career obsolescence on woman and men, it is hardly surprising that women tend to work in fields with lower rates of obsolescence—as teachers and librarians, for example, rather than as computer engineers or tax accountants.

I try not to hate anybody. "Hate is a four-letter word," like the bumper sticker says. But I hate book reviewers. Book reviewers are the most despicable, loathsome order of swine that ever rooted about the earth. They are sniveling, revolting creatures who feed their own appetites for bile by gnawing apart other people's work. They are human garbage. They all deserve to be struck down by awful diseases described in the most obscure dermatology journals. Book reviewers live in tiny studios that stink of mothballs and rotting paper. Their breath reeks of stale coffee. From time to time they put on too-tight shirts and pants with buckles and shuffle out of their lairs to shove heaping mayonnaise-laden sandwiches into their faces, which are worn in to permanent snarls. Then they go back to their computers and with fat stubby fingers they hammer out "reviews." Periodically they are halted as they burst into porcine squeals, gleefully rejoicing in their cruelty. Even when being "kindly," book reviewers reveal their true nature as condescending jerks. "We look forward to hearing more from the author," a book reviewer might say. The prissy tones sound like a second-grade piano teacher, offering you a piece of years-old strawberry hard candy and telling you to practice more. But a bad book review is just disgusting. Ask yourself: of all the jobs available to literate people, what monster chooses the job of "telling people how bad different books are"? What twisted fetishist chooses such a life?

As we're told that 10 percent of all high school education will be computer-based by 2014 and rise to 50 percent by 2019, and as the PowerPoint throws up aphoristic bromides by the corporate heroes of the digitally driven 'global economy' -- the implication being that 'great companies' know what they're doing, while most schools don't -- and as we're goaded mercilessly to the conclusion that everything we are, know, and do is bound for the dustbin of history, I want to ask what kind of schooling Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had. Wasn't it at bottom the very sort of book-based, content-driven education that we declare obsolete in the name of their achievements?

Theater gives them what a computer takes away, what no classroom teacher can teach. They learn to work with other people. They learn patience and tolerance and how to be deferential to each other. They learn to be good citizens. It’s unifying. It has an impact on kids that can’t be quantified. Educators don’t know how to measure it.

When no one was going to pay for the public schools anymore and they were all like filled with guns and drugs and English teachers who were really pimps and stuff, some of the big media congloms got together and gave all this money and bought the schools so that all of them could have computers and pizza for lunch and stuff, which they gave for free, and now we do stuff in classes about how to work technology and how to find bargains and what’s the best way to get a job and how to decorate our bedroom.

Harper’s brow furrowed. “Why are you even asking me questions? I know you did your research on me.” “I did,” he admitted unrepentantly. “I learned a lot about you. For instance, I learned that you’re responsible for the breakdown of an ex-boyfriend’s bank account—” “Allegedly.” “—that you hacked a human police database and messed up their filing system when your friend was unjustly arrested—” “Hearsay.” “—that you beat up a male demon who hurt your cousin—” “I have an alibi for that.” “—and that you infected an old teacher’s computer with a virus that caused clips of gay porn to pop up on his screen every thirty seconds.” “Closet gays do the strangest things when the pressure gets too much.

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens.

Solitairians. We have reached 2000 followers. Your reward is the destruction of all of today’s IT lessons at Higgs, à la Gyllenhaal. For those of you who do not attend Higgs, we are sure you will appreciate The Gyllenhaal regardless. Patience Kills The teachers are practically hurling people out of the computer rooms, and all IT lessons are canceled until further notice. I applaud Solitaire for its efforts.

But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steelworkers, vegetable-store owners, teachers, garage mechanics, musicians, bricklayers, dentists, and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? Their private matters have been made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; are subjected to more examinations; are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them; are often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are inundated by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organizations. The schools teach their children to operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more valuable to children. In a word, almost nothing that they need happens to the losers. Which is why they are losers.

The School Now we come to the school. The responsibility of the school is to educate a child and at the same time, not to vanquish all the virtues that a child is born with. A child is born with virtues and a school should see that it protects their virtues, that innocence, the sense of belongingness, love, and trust which every child is born with. Often in the educational system, the school only caters as an information bureau, but not as a personality-building center. Most schools can produce great computers but only a few good human beings. We have brilliant students. They have information about the world. Just by one question they can answer all the information that is needed. But are they good human beings? Do they know how to behave well? Are they cultured, civilized, compassionate human beings? This is a question that every school and every teacher should ask.

Don't pressure your daughter or your son to conform to gender stereotypes. If your son wants to take ballet classes, cheer him on. If your daughter wants to study marshal arts and computer programming, sign her up. Teach your son that there are all kinds of man in the world including men who excel at ballet and macrame. Teach your daughter that there are all kinds of women in the world, including women who are masters of karate and computer programming.

If my input was flawed, the output was flawed; if my input was flawless, the computer's output was too. So consistent and fair, so unequivocally unbiased. No teacher had been so patient, yet so responsive. I have never felt so in control.

After dinner the babies get fussy and Min puts a mush of ice cream and Hershey's syrup in their bottles and we watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves. A man cuts his hand off chopping wood and while wandering around screaming for help is picked up by a tornado and dropped on a preschool during recess and lands on a pregnant teacher. ("Sea Oak")

By the time I was in fourth grade, the teacher had already called my parents more than once to say they did not think I could tell fantasy from reality. I could tell. I could. I just didn’t want to. I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I wailed, marched out to the hallway bench. Again.

Randall kept his eyes glued to the computer screen as she approached. A stranger might have mistaken him for a dedicated Information Sciences professional getting an early start on some important research, but Ruth knew that he was actually scouring eBay for vintage Hasbro action figures…

Parents and teachers complain that today’s children, plugged into computers, tablets, consoles, and other devices, constantly zap from one activity to the next and have lost the capacity to concentrate—but this is untrue. Far from reducing our ability to concentrate, video games can actually increase it.

Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.

You may know how to operate computers. You may know a lot about medicine or robots. You may be a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or specialist… but, if you don’t know how YOU operate, why your life is the way it is, and how to increase fulfillment, love, and peace in your life - then all the knowledge and degrees aren’t really worth much!

Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. Like the Warby Parker crew, the entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company’s recent most innovative lists typically stayed in their day jobs even after they launched. Former track star Phil Knight started selling running shoes out of the trunk of his car in 1964, yet kept working as an accountant until 1969. After inventing the original Apple I computer, Steve Wozniak started the company with Steve Jobs in 1976 but continued working full time in his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard until 1977. And although Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to dramatically improve internet searches in 1996, they didn’t go on leave from their graduate studies at Stanford until 1998. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says, because we “were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program.” In 1997, concerned that their fledgling search engine was distracting them from their research, they tried to sell Google for less than $2 million in cash and stock. Luckily for them, the potential buyer rejected the offer. This habit of keeping one’s day job isn’t limited to successful entrepreneurs. Many influential creative minds have stayed in full-time employment or education even after earning income from major projects. Selma director Ava DuVernay made her first three films while working in her day job as a publicist, only pursuing filmmaking full time after working at it for four years and winning multiple awards. Brian May was in the middle of doctoral studies in astrophysics when he started playing guitar in a new band, but he didn’t drop out until several years later to go all in with Queen. Soon thereafter he wrote “We Will Rock You.” Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night. Thriller master Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, and gas station attendant for seven years after writing his first story, only quitting a year after his first novel, Carrie, was published. Dilbert author Scott Adams worked at Pacific Bell for seven years after his first comic strip hit newspapers. Why did all these originals play it safe instead of risking it all?

the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There

Until you get the family unit back together, we have no hope and we’ll never dig ourselves out of this hole. No matter how great the school is, how excellent the teachers are, how many computers, field trips, or other window dressing there is, until you have intact families that give a s***, we’re doomed. If you have chalk, pencils, and a roof that doesn’t leak, you’ve got a school. Back in the day people would do stuff by candlelight on the prairie and are a f***load smarter than kids now despite all the iPads and online homework. Why? Because if they didn’t read their assignment, their parents would take the ruler they were supposed to be using for that assignment and smack them with it. We don’t need to keep throwing money at the problem, we need to throw parents at the problem.

What did we talk about? I don't remember. We talked so hard and sat so still that I got cramps in my knee. We had too many cups of tea and then didn't want to leave the table to go to the bathroom because we didn't want to stop talking. You will think we talked of revolution but we didn't. Nor did we talk of our own souls. Nor of sewing. Nor of babies. Nor of departmental intrigue. It was political if by politics you mean the laboratory talk that characters in bad movies are perpetually trying to convey (unsuccessfully) when they Wrinkle Their Wee Brows and say (valiantly--dutifully--after all, they didn't write it) "But, Doctor, doesn't that violate Finagle's Constant?" I staggered to the bathroom, released floods of tea, and returned to the kitchen to talk. It was professional talk. It left my grey-faced and with such concentration that I began to develop a headache. We talked about Mary Ann Evans' loss of faith, about Emily Brontë's isolation, about Charlotte Brontë's blinding cloud, about the split in Virginia Woolf's head and the split in her economic condition. We talked about Lady Murasaki, who wrote in a form that no respectable man would touch, Hroswit, a little name whose plays "may perhaps amuse myself," Miss Austen, who had no more expression in society than a firescreen or a poker. They did not all write letters, write memoirs, or go on the stage. Sappho--only an ambiguous, somewhat disagreeable name. Corinna? The teacher of Pindar. Olive Schriener, growing up on the veldt, wrote on book, married happily, and ever wrote another. Kate Chopin wrote a scandalous book and never wrote another. (Jean has written nothing.). There was M-ry Sh-ll-y who wrote you know what and Ch-rl-tt- P-rk-ns G-lm-an, who wrote one superb horror study and lots of sludge (was it sludge?) and Ph-ll-s Wh--tl-y who was black and wrote eighteenth century odes (but it was the eighteenth century) and Mrs. -nn R-dcl-ff- S-thw-rth and Mrs. G--rg- Sh-ld-n and (Miss?) G--rg-tt- H-y-r and B-rb-r- C-rtl-nd and the legion of those, who writing, write not, like the dead Miss B--l-y of the poem who was seduced into bad practices (fudging her endings) and hanged herself in her garter. The sun was going down. I was blind and stiff. It's at this point that the computer (which has run amok and eaten Los Angeles) is defeated by some scientifically transcendent version of pulling the plug; the furniture stood around unknowing (though we had just pulled out the plug) and Lady, who got restless when people talked at suck length because she couldn't understand it, stuck her head out from under the couch, looking for things to herd. We had talked for six hours, from one in the afternoon until seven; I had at that moment an impression of our act of creation so strong, so sharp, so extraordinarily vivid, that I could not believe all our talking hadn't led to something more tangible--mightn't you expect at least a little blue pyramid sitting in the middle of the floor?

The fact is that life is not a race: success in life isn’t determined by how well you do compared to other people. It’s determined by whether you are able to achieve whatever hopes and dreams you set for yourself: to build a great company, to write a great book, to excel as a computer programmer, to be a great teacher or a great plumber. None of that requires besting others; the favorable circumstances they enjoy can’t hold you back. Exactly the reverse is true.

Practically from the moment they’re born, kids have all these forces clamoring for their attention, begging to entertain them and sell them something. Then they come to school, where they and their parents tell administrators that it’s the teachers’ job to engage them and break through all that other stuff. As far as the kids are concerned, they’ve done their part if they show up. They sit in front of the teacher the same way they sit in front of a computer screen, waiting for that instant message.

FAILURE CAN BE A GREAT TEACHER “When I was in tenth grade I decided to take an AP computer science class. I ended up failing the AP exam. But I would not accept the failure, so I took the class and the test again the following year. Somehow, staying away from programming for nearly a year and then coming back to it made me realize how much I truly enjoyed it. I passed the test easily on the second try. If I had been too afraid of failure to take the computer science class the first time, and then a second time, I would certainly not be what I am today, a passionate and happy computer scientist.

He and Egan also spoke for hours on the phone many nights. One topic they wrestled with was his belief, which came from his Buddhist studies, that it was important to avoid attachment to material objects. Our consumer desires are unhealthy, he told her, and to attain enlightenment you need to develop a life of nonattachment and nonmaterialism. He even sent her a tape of Kobun Chino, his Zen teacher, lecturing about the problems caused by craving and obtaining things. Egan pushed back. Wasn’t he defying that philosophy, she asked, by making computers and other products that people coveted? “He was irritated by the dichotomy, and we had exuberant debates about it,” Egan recalled.

It’s easy to raise graduation rates, for example, by lowering standards. Many students struggle with math and science prerequisites and foreign languages. Water down those requirements, and more students will graduate. But if one goal of our educational system is to produce more scientists and technologists for a global economy, how smart is that? It would also be a cinch to pump up the income numbers for graduates. All colleges would have to do is shrink their liberal arts programs, and get rid of education departments and social work departments while they’re at it, since teachers and social workers make less money than engineers, chemists, and computer scientists. But they’re no less valuable to society.

By failing to make the obvious connection between an openly misogynistic culture and the mysterious lack of women, Levy contributed to the myth of innately talented hackers being implicitly male. And, today, it’s hard to think of a profession more in thrall to brilliance bias than computer science. ‘Where are the girls that love to program?’ asked a high-school teacher who took part in a summer programme for advanced-placement computer-science teachers at Carnegie Mellon; ‘I have any number of boys who really really love computers,’ he mused. ‘Several parents have told me their sons would be on the computer programming all night if they could. I have yet to run into a girl like that.’ This may be true, but as one of his fellow teachers pointed out, failing to exhibit this behaviour doesn’t mean that his female students don’t love computer science. Recalling her own student experience, she explained how she ‘fell in love’ with programming when she took her first course in college. But she didn’t stay up all night, or even spend a majority of her time programming. ‘Staying up all night doing something is a sign of single-mindedness and possibly immaturity as well as love for the subject. The girls may show their love for computers and computer science very differently. If you are looking for this type of obsessive behavior, then you are looking for a typically young, male behavior. While some girls will exhibit it, most won’t.

Well, at least you’ll have Bob the Copying Machine to keep you warm at night.” “Um. His name is Franklin,” Monty said, holding up a hand. “Get it right.” Seeing a blinking light on the machine, I pointed to it. “Looks like Franklin is out of paper. You should fix that.” “Oh, I’ll stuff him real good,” Monty said, before grabbing paper from the pack and slowly sticking it into the slot. “Damn, he’s all nice and tight now.” I cleared my throat. Sherry, the computer lab teacher, had walked into the lounge. Monty flipped around, the smile vanishing instantly as he spotted her. “I, uh, was just refilling the paper,” he said, pointing to the machine. “Good job,” Sherry said, looking at him like he belonged in a mental ward.

(Saying groaning!) Do you remember your fifth-grade classes? The only thing that I recall is my teachers saying one word over and over again. The hair, the face, and the fiery eyes, still creeps into my mind. This person makes my skin crawl. Let’s go way on back then… Welcome to classroom 202 that I called ‘The Mind Warp.’ Miss. Caballero's teaching style was to hand me a worksheet that I did not know how to do, at the time. Then scream at me saying quote- ‘fix, fix, and fix.’ ‘How do I fix something that I never learned how to do?’ How about instead of playing Solitaire on your computer, why don’t you do your task, to motivate and educate. This is your obligation and occupation to do so! So, damn-it just do it already, and stop wasting my time, because, in all honesty, I don’t give a shit…! Fix- it is just a dick-faced word!

(The neighborhood) Parents are afraid to let their children play outside… parents are afraid to let their children go to school; why? Because the higher authority does not protect them and the kids are becoming nothing but hell raisers. So, we want the computers to become the teachers for the children, and the PlayStation's to be the main form of entertainment… Just look around, Joe Walsh he tells it like it is saying quote- ‘Violence and murder is rated PG, too bad for the children they are what they see!’ On the other hand, it all could be that they are afraid of me, and what they think I will do to them; I do not know- do you? The parents in ‘The Land of Many Steeples’ are getting welfare, and have ten different boyfriends or girlfriends a night to satisfy their needs. Then they just keep popping out kids. Yap and it is our tax dollars, which pays for it all.

Evan was attracted to technology early on, building his first computer in sixth grade and experimenting with Photoshop in the Crossroads computer lab. He would later describe the computer teacher, Dan, as his best friend. Evan dove into journalism as well, writing for the school newspaper, Crossfire. One journalism class required students to sell a certain amount of advertising for Crossfire as part of their grade. Evan walked around the neighborhood asking local businesses to buy ads; once he had exceeded his sales goals, he helped coach his peers on how to pitch businesses and ask adults for money. By high school, the group of 20 students Evan had started with in kindergarten had grown to around 120. Charming, charismatic, and smart, Evan threw parties at his dad’s house that were “notorious” in his words. Evan’s outsized personality could rub people the wrong way at times, but his energy, organizing skills, and enthusiasm made him an exceptional party thrower. He possessed a bravado that could be frustrating and off-putting but was great for convincing everyone that the night’s party was going to be the greatest of all time. Obsessed with the energy drink Red Bull and the lifestyle the brand cultivated, Evan talked his way into an internship at the company as a senior in high school. The job involved throwing parties and other events sponsored by Red Bull. Clarence Carter, the head of the company’s security team, would give Evan advice that would stand him well in the years to come: pay attention to who helps you clean up after the party. Later recalling the story, Evan said, “When everyone is tired and the night is over, who stays and helps out? Because those are your true friends. Those are the hard workers, the people that believe that working hard is the right thing to do.

As a society we are only now getting close to where Dogen was eight hundred years ago. We are watching all our most basic assumptions about life, the universe, and everything come undone, just like Dogen saw his world fall apart when his parents died. Religions don’t seem to mean much anymore, except maybe to small groups of fanatics. You can hardly get a full-time job, and even if you do, there’s no stability. A college degree means very little. The Internet has leveled things so much that the opinions of the greatest scientists in the world about global climate change are presented as being equal to those of some dude who read part of the Bible and took it literally. The news industry has collapsed so that it’s hard to tell a fake headline from a real one. Money isn’t money anymore; it’s numbers stored in computers. Everything is changing so rapidly that none of us can hope to keep up. All this uncertainty has a lot of us scrambling for something certain to hang on to. But if you think I’m gonna tell you that Dogen provides us with that certainty, think again. He actually gives us something far more useful. Dogen gives us a way to be okay with uncertainty. This isn’t just something Buddhists need; it’s something we all need. We humans can be certainty junkies. We’ll believe in the most ridiculous nonsense to avoid the suffering that comes from not knowing something. It’s like part of our brain is dedicated to compulsive dot-connecting. I think we’re wired to want to be certain. You have to know if that’s a rope or a snake, if the guy with the chains all over his chest is a gangster or a fan of bad seventies movies. Being certain means being safe. The downfall is that we humans think about a lot of stuff that’s not actually real. We crave certainty in areas where there can never be any. That’s when we start in with believing the crazy stuff. Dogen is interesting because he tries to cut right to the heart of this. He gets into what is real and what is not. Probably the main reason he’s so difficult to read is that Dogen is trying to say things that can’t actually be said. So he has to bend language to the point where it almost breaks. He’s often using language itself to show the limitations of language. Even the very first readers of his writings must have found them difficult. Dogen understood both that words always ultimately fail to describe reality and that we human beings must rely on words anyway. So he tried to use words to write about that which is beyond words. This isn’t really a discrepancy. You use words, but you remain aware of their limitations. My teacher used to say, “People like explanations.” We do. They’re comforting. When the explanation is reasonably correct, it’s useful.

When they enter the classroom, however, they may well discover that the algorithms have got there first. Companies such as Mindojo are developing interactive algorithms that will not only teach me maths, physics and history, but will also simultaneously study me and get to know exactly who I am. Digital teachers will closely monitor every answer I give, and how long it took me to give it. Over time, they will discern my unique weaknesses as well as my strengths and will identify what gets me excited, and what makes my eyelids droop. They could teach me thermodynamics or geometry in a way that suits my personality type, even if that particular method doesn’t suit 99 per cent of the other pupils. And these digital teachers will never lose their patience, never shout at me, and never go on strike. It remains unclear, however, why on earth I would need to know thermodynamics or geometry in a world containing such intelligent computer programs.

When they enter the classroom, however, they may well discover that the algorithms have got there first. Companies such as Mindojo are developing interactive algorithms that will not only teach me maths, physics and history, but will also simultaneously study me and get to know exactly who I am. Digital teachers will closely monitor every answer I give, and how long it took me to give it. Over time, they will discern my unique weaknesses as well as my strengths and will identify what gets me excited, and what makes my eyelids droop. They could teach me thermodynamics or geometry in a way that suits my personality type, even if that particular method doesn’t suit 99 per cent of the other pupils. And these digital teachers will never lose their patience, never shout at me, and never go on strike. It remains unclear, however, why on earth I would need to know thermodynamics or geometry in a world containing such intelligent computer programs.7

Music centers you,” I whispered to an empty car, staring at his front door. “You listened to your iPod between classes and while you sat on the bleachers before school every morning.” I smiled, letting more tears run down my cheeks and thinking back to him and his black hoodies, looking so dark. “You love popcorn. Almost every kind and flavor but especially with Tabasco sauce,” I said, remembering the times he would come into the theater where I worked. “You hold the door open for women—students, teachers, and even old ladies coming out of Baskin-Robbins. You love movies about natural disasters, but they have to have some comedy in them. Your favorite one is Armageddon.” I swallowed and thought about how little I’d ever seen Jax truly smile. “And while you love computers, it’s not your passion,” I concluded. “You love being outdoors. You love having space.” My whole face hurt, the last words barely audible. “And you deserve someone who makes you happy. I’m just not that person.

In the twenty-first century it sounds childish to compare the human psyche to a steam engine. Today we know of a far more sophisticated technology – the computer – so we explain the human psyche as if it were a computer processing data rather than a steam engine regulating pressure. But this new analogy may turn out to be just as naïve. After all, computers have no minds. They don’t crave anything even when they have a bug, and the Internet doesn’t feel pain even when authoritarian regimes sever entire countries from the Web. So why use computers as a model for understanding the mind? Well, are we really sure that computers have no sensations or desires? And even if they haven’t got any at present, perhaps once they become complex enough they might develop consciousness? If that were to happen, how could we ascertain it? When computers replace our bus driver, our teacher and our shrink, how could we determine whether they have feelings or whether they are just a collection of mindless algorithms? When

On the third day after all hell broke loose, I come upstairs to the apartment, finished with my shift and so looking forward to a hot shower. Well, lukewarm—but I’ll pretend it’s hot. But when I pass Ellie’s room, I hear cursing—Linda Blair-Exorcist-head-spinning-around kind of cursing. I push open her door and spot my sister at her little desk, yelling at her laptop. Even Bosco barks from the bed. “What’s going on?” I ask. “I just came up but Marty’s down there on his own—he won’t last longer than ten minutes.” “I know, I know.” She waves her hand. “I’m in a flame war with a toxic bitch on Twitter. Let me just huff and puff and burn her motherfucking house down…and then I’ll go sell some coffee.” “What happened?” I ask sarcastically. “Did she insult your makeup video?” Ellie sighs, long and tortured. “That’s Instagram, Liv—I seriously think you were born in the wrong century. And anyway, she didn’t insult me—she insulted you.” Her words pour over me like the ice-bucket challenge. “Me? I have like two followers on Twitter.” Ellie finishes typing. “Boo-ya. Take that, skank-a-licious!” Then she turns slowly my way. “You haven’t been online lately, have you?” This isn’t going to end well, I know it. My stomach knows it too—it whines and grumbles. “Ah, no?” Ellie nods and stands, gesturing to her computer. “You might want to check it out. Or not—ignorance is bliss, after all. If you do decide to take a peek, you might want to have some grain alcohol nearby.” Then she pats my shoulder and heads downstairs, her blond ponytail swaying behind her. I glance at the screen and my breath comes in quick, semi-panicked bursts and my blood rushes like a runaway train in my veins. I’ve never been in a fight, not in my whole life. The closest I came was sophomore year in high school, when Kimberly Willis told everyone she was going to kick the crap out of me. So I told my gym teacher, Coach Brewster—a giant lumberjack of a man—that I got my period unexpectedly and had to go home. He spent the rest of the school year avoiding eye contact with me. But it worked—by the next day, Kimberly found out Tara Hoffman was the one talking shit about her and kicked the crap out of her instead

The phrase “slow reading” goes back at least as far as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who in 1887 described himself as a “teacher of slow reading.” The way he phrased it, you know he thought he was bucking the tide. That makes sense, because the modern world, i.e., a world built upon the concept that fast is good and faster is better, was just getting up a full head of steam. In the century and a quarter since he wrote, we have seen the world fall in love with speed in all its guises, including reading—part of President John F. Kennedy’s legend was his ability to speed read through four or five newspapers every morning. And this was all long before computers became household gadgets and our BFFs. Now and then the Nietzsches of the world have fought back. Exponents of New Criticism captured the flag in the halls of academe around the middle of the last century and made “close reading” all the rage. Then came Slow Food, then Slow Travel, then Slow Money. And now there is Slow Reading. In all these initiatives, people have fought against the velocity of modern life by doing … less and doing it slower.

This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60 years. While the story of the QWERTY

In other words, the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging.5 Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.

It is a truism today, in this highly technologically-developed culture, that students need technical computer skills. Equally truistic (and, not incidentally, true) is that the workplace has become highly technological. Even more truistic – and far more disturbing – are the shifts in education over the last two decades as public elementary schools, public and private high schools, and colleges and universities have invested scores of billions of dollars on “digital infrastructure,” computers, monitors and printers, “smart classrooms,” all to “meet the demands” of this new technological workplace. "We won’t dwell on the fact – an inconvenient truth? – that those technological investments have coincided with a decline in American reading behaviors, in reading and reading comprehension scores, in overall academic achievement, in the phenomenon – all too familiar to us in academia – of “grade inflation,” in an alarming collapse of our students’ understanding of their own history (to say nothing of the history of the rest of the world), rising ignorance of world and American geography, with an abandonment of the idea of objectivity, and with an increasingly subjective, even solipsistic, emphasis on personal experience. Ignore all this. Or, if we find it impossible to ignore, then let’s blame the teachers...

Us in speech therapists office, Brandy says, “It helps to know you’re not anymore responsible for how you look than a car is,” Brandy says. “You’re a product just as much. A product of a product of a product. The people who design cars, they’re products. Your parents are products. Their parents were products. You’re teachers, products. The minister in your church, another product,” Brandy says. Sometimes your best way to deal with shirt, she says, is to not hold yourself as such precious little prize. “My point being,” Brandy says, “is you can’t escape the world, and you’re not responsible for how you look, if you look beauticious or butt ugly. You’re not responsible for how you feel or what you say or how you act or anything you do. It’s all out of your hands,” Brandy says. The same way a compact disk isn’t responsible for what’s recorded on it, that’s how we are. You’re about as free to act as a programmed computer. You’re about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill. “There isn’t any real you in you,” she says. ”Even your physical body, all your cells will be replaced within eight years.” Skin, bone, blood, and organs transplant from person to person. Even what’s inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you’d die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited. “Relax,” Brandy says, “Whatever you’re thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they’re doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort.

with his daughter.” “Incest?” Rainie looked at Quincy incredulously. “Jesus, SupSpAg, how do you sleep with that mind?” “I can’t be sure,” Quincy said modestly, “but it has all the classic signs. Domineering father alone with his young daughter for the first thirteen years of her life. Seems very doting on the outside. I’m sure if you conducted further interviews you’d find plenty of neighbors and teachers telling you how ‘close’ Mr. Avalon and his daughter were. How ‘involved’ he was in her life. But then she hits puberty and the jig is up. To continue risks pregnancy, plus she’s starting to get a woman’s body, and many of these men aren’t interested in that. So Mr. Avalon goes ahead and takes a wife, some poor, passive woman to serve as window dressing and help him appear suitable to the outside world. Now he clings to the fantasy of what he once had. And protects it jealously.” “Does Mr. Avalon have access to a computer?” Rainie asked Luke. “In his office.” She turned to Quincy. “If Mr. Avalon was involved with his daughter, would he have problems with her relationship with VanderZanden?” “He’ll have problems with any of her relationships. In his mind, she’s his.” “That’s it then. He found out, got angry—” “And got an alibi,” Luke interrupted flatly. They looked at him sharply. He was nearly apologetic. “I tried, Rainie. I stayed in town till eleven last night trying to break this guy’s story. I’ve probably pissed off every blue blood in the city and it still holds. Mr. Avalon was in a business meeting all day Tuesday. His secretary swears

Similarly, the brains of mice that have learned many tasks are slightly different from the brains of other mice that have not learned these tasks. It is not so much that the number of neurons has changed, but rather that the nature of the neural connections has been altered by the learning process. In other words, learning actually changes the structure of the brain. This raises the old adage “practice makes perfect.” Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald Hebb discovered an important fact about the wiring of the brain: the more we exercise certain skills, the more certain pathways in our brains become reinforced, so the task becomes easier. Unlike a digital computer, which is just as dumb today as it was yesterday, the brain is a learning machine with the ability to rewire its neural pathways every time it learns something. This is a fundamental difference between a digital computer and the brain. This lesson applies not only to London taxicab drivers, but also to accomplished concert musicians as well. According to psychologist Dr. K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues, who studied master violinists at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music, top concert violinists could easily rack up ten thousand hours of grueling practice by the time they were twenty years old, practicing more than thirty hours per week. By contrast, he found that students who were merely exceptional studied only eight thousand hours or fewer, and future music teachers practiced only a total of four thousand hours. Neurologist Daniel Levitin says, “The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything.… In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.” Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the book Outliers, calls this the “10,000-hour rule.

Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Fun They Had” describes a school of the future that uses advanced technology to revolutionize the educational experience, enhancing individualized learning and providing students with personalized instruction and robot teachers. Such science fiction has gone on to inspire very real innovation. In a 1984 Newsweek interview, Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs predicted computers were going to be a bicycle for our minds, extending our capabilities, knowledge, and creativity, much the way a ten-speed amplifies our physical abilities. For decades, we have been fascinated by the idea that we can use computers to help educate people. What connects these science fiction narratives is that they all imagined computers might eventually emulate what we view as intelligence. Real-life researchers have been working for more than sixty years to make this AI vision a reality. In 1962, the checkers master Robert Nealey played the game against an IBM 7094 computer, and the computer beat him. A few years prior, in 1957, the psychologist Frank Rosenblatt created Perceptron, the first artificial neural network, a computer simulation of a collection of neurons and synapses trained to perform certain tasks. In the decades following such innovations in early AI, we had the computation power to tackle systems only as complex as the brain of an earthworm or insect. We also had limited techniques and data to train these networks. The technology has come a long way in the ensuing decades, driving some of the most common products and apps today, from the recommendation engines on movie streaming services to voice-controlled personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa. AI has gotten so good at mimicking human behavior that oftentimes we cannot distinguish between human and machine responses. Meanwhile, not only has the computation power developed enough to tackle systems approaching the complexity of the human brain, but there have been significant breakthroughs in structuring and training these neural networks.

Although thrilled that the era of the personal computer had arrived, he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down seventy-five cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slushy snow to the Harvard dorm room of Bill Gates, his high school buddy and fellow computer fanatic from Seattle, who had convinced him to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. “Hey, this thing is happening without us,” Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business.1 Unlike the computer pioneers before him, Gates, who was born in 1955, had not grown up caring much about the hardware. He had never gotten his thrills by building Heathkit radios or soldering circuit boards. A high school physics teacher, annoyed by the arrogance Gates sometimes displayed while jockeying at the school’s timesharing terminal, had once assigned him the project of assembling a Radio Shack electronics kit. When Gates finally turned it in, the teacher recalled, “solder was dripping all over the back” and it didn’t work.2 For Gates, the magic of computers was not in their hardware circuits but in their software code. “We’re not hardware gurus, Paul,” he repeatedly pronounced whenever Allen proposed building a machine. “What we know is software.” Even his slightly older friend Allen, who had built shortwave radios, knew that the future belonged to the coders. “Hardware,” he admitted, “was not our area of expertise.”3 What Gates and Allen set out to do on that December day in 1974 when they first saw the Popular Electronics cover was to create the software for personal computers. More than that, they wanted to shift the balance in the emerging industry so that the hardware would become an interchangeable commodity, while those who created the operating system and application software would capture most of the profits.

I WANT TO end this list by talking a little more about the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman’s mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success—of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled—that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. This meant spending not only the time to find the best outside teachers but also the real cost of freeing people up during their workday to take the classes. So what exactly was Pixar getting out of all of this? It wasn’t that the class material directly enhanced our employees’ job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security—that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay, P.U. changed the culture for the better. It taught everyone at Pixar, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. And it made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea—that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge. I can understand that the leaders of many companies might wonder whether or not such classes would truly be useful, worth the expense. And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. That’s what P.U. lets our people do, and I believe it makes us stronger.

The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. What country do you want to live in?

Parental efforts to gain leverage generally take two forms: bribery or coercion. If a simple direction such as “I'd like you to set the table” doesn't do, we may add an incentive, for example, “If you set the table for me, I'll let you have your favorite dessert.” Or if it isn't enough to remind the child that it is time to do homework, we may threaten to withdraw some privilege. Or we may add a coercive tone to our voice or assume a more authoritarian demeanor. The search for leverage is never-ending: sanctions, rewards, abrogation of privileges; the forbidding of computer time, toys, or allowance; separation from the parent or separation from friends; the limitation or abolition of television time, car privileges, and so on and so on. It is not uncommon to hear someone complain about having run out of ideas for what still might remain to be taken away from the child. As our power to parent decreases, our preoccupation with leverage increases. Euphemisms abound: bribes are called variously rewards, incentives, and positive reinforcement; threats and punishments are rechristened warnings, natural consequences, and negative reinforcements; applying psychological force is often referred to as modifying behavior or teaching a lesson. These euphemisms camouflage attempts to motivate the child by external pressure because his intrinsic motivation is deemed inadequate. Attachment is natural and arises from within; leverage is contrived and imposed from without. In any other realm, we would see the use of leverage as manipulation. In parenting, such means of getting a child to follow our will have become embraced by many as normal and appropriate. All attempts to use leverage to motivate a child involve the use of psychological force, whether we employ “positive” force as in rewards or “negative” force as in punishments. We apply force whenever we trade on a child's likes or when we exploit a child's dislikes and insecurities in order to get her to do our will. We resort to leverage when we have nothing else to work with — no intrinsic motivation to tap, no attachment for us to lean on. Such tactics, if they are ever to be employed, should be a last resort, not our first response and certainly not our modus operandi. Unfortunately, when children become peer-oriented, we as parents are driven to leverage-seeking in desperation. Manipulation, whether in the form of rewards or punishments, may succeed in getting the child to comply temporarily, but we cannot by this method make the desired behavior become part of anyone's intrinsic personality. Whether it is to say thank-you or sorry, to share with another, to create a gift or card, to clean up a room, to be appreciative, to do homework, or to practice piano, the more the behavior has been coerced, the less likely it is to occur voluntarily. And the less the behavior occurs spontaneously, the more inclined parents and teachers are to contrive some leverage. Thus begins a spiraling cycle of force and counterwill that necessitates the use of more and more leverage. The true power base for parenting is eroded.

fantasy and imagination, which are so natural for the young child, form a better foundation for later creative thinking than early learning. Creative thinking is more needed in our highly technological world than four-year-olds who can push the buttons on the computer.

If physical classrooms forced students to be at their seats out of fear, virtual classrooms tempt students to be in front of their computers out of curiosity and eagerness. The baby steps of the teachers into the technological world have progressed into giants leaps now. Cut the flak and acknowledge the courage of teachers who evolved as digitally smart educators overnight with 21st century skill set.

Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.” Bill Gates went to one of the only high schools in the world that had a computer. The story of how Lakeside School, just outside Seattle, even got a computer is remarkable. Bill Dougall was a World War II navy pilot turned high school math and science teacher. “He believed that book study wasn’t enough without

Party time Part 1 After school, we go to Maddie’s. When we were little, like freshman year and even some of the sophomore year, we would sometimes stay in her room and put on x-out and pluck out eyebrows into that fine little line, and color our hair with highlights, and order pizza, cramming down as much as we could eat. Those days are going, we can’t get fat. Now Jenny hardly eats anything, and if she does, she can hardly keep it down. I think maybe that’s what I get so lightheaded, I only eat like once a day now. Jenny back then had a little extra around the middle, and now you can see her ribs, she even has that two-defined line on her tummy that goes into her underwear. I remember sneaking around late at night in her hose stealing a cookie from the jar on the top shelf in the old wood cabinet, that is also where her mom would hide her cigarettes that Jenny loved also, and the condoms were in a trinity box on top of the fridge, I sorry but I find that hilarious. At that time, we would stretch out on one of her, old enormous worn-out couches and watch, TV or movies until we fell asleep in our nightshirts’-the TV in Maddie’s living room is like 80 inches it’s like being in a movie theater our legs tangled together under an enormous fleece blanket. Maddie and liv are always entangled more passionately than Jenny and me on the loveseat! Maddie has an ancient TV in her room from the 1990s. It sucks and is small, it’s one of those with the big back on it, and the color is green, like looking into a fish tank. It’s funny her mom and dad don’t have money blinds on the windows, yet they have a big ass TV. You can sometimes see the people in the next condo overlooking us like we can see them get busy in their room! Yet nothing beats the hot guy taking a leak in room 302, he looks to be in his late twenties. He takes the boxes off at 10 pm and we get a free show. He knows we can see him because he makes it look inflexible and you are no more personable. Jenny and we girls love to press upon the glass, and just have fun and be a little crazy, like lifting our nighties and flashing the goods. Facebook stocking gets boring quickly anymore, so some nights the webcam comes out too. After her mom and dad are asleep… I like it’s more fun to be bad! Like we all have profiles and fake names because none of us are eighteen yet. Any- how’s mine is ‘Angel Pink Wings 01’ Maddie goes by: ‘Mad kitty 69’ Jenny goes by: ‘Ms. Little Lover 14’ Liv goes by: ‘Olivia O 123’ Yet everyone knows her by Liv so that name is okay- I guess. We make good money- ‘Double Clicking the Mouse.’ You would not believe all the pervs on this cam. the site, just wanting to see us doing it. Like old guys like our PE teacher! Man- that I didn’t even think about how to turn on a computer. Just like him, I guess they need too to see more of us close up. We have our checks mailed to Jenny's college boyfriend’s PO Box. Me this is what I do and yes- I come for you all, I just put in fake blue hair dye in, and have fake long lashes, and put in my blue contacts, and you don’t even know me. And then pen in more eyebrows. Fake, fake, fake, fake FAKE! Boys don’t like it when you fake it or do, they look at me, that's why I am Bi.

Party time Part 1 After school, we go to Maddie’s. When we were little, like freshman year and even some of the sophomore year, we would sometimes stay in her room and put on x-out and pluck out eyebrows into that fine little line, and color our hair with highlights, and order pizza, cramming down as much as we could eat. Those days are going, we can’t get fat. Now Jenny hardly eats anything, and if she does, she can hardly keep it down. I think maybe that’s what I get so lightheaded, I only eat like once a day now. Jenny back then had a little extra around the middle, and now you can see her ribs, she even has that two-defined line on her tummy that goes into her underwear. I remember sneaking around late at night in her hose stealing a cookie from the jar on the top shelf in the old wood cabinet, that is also where her mom would hide her cigarettes that Jenny loved also, and the condoms were in a trinity box on top of the fridge, I sorry but I find that hilarious. At that time, we would stretch out on one of her, old enormous worn-out couches and watch, TV or movies until we fell asleep in our nightshirts’-the TV in Maddie’s living room is like 80 inches it’s like being in a movie theater our legs tangled together under an enormous fleece blanket. Maddie and liv are always entangled more passionately than Jenny and me on the loveseat! Maddie has an ancient TV in her room from the 1990s. It sucks and is small, it’s one of those with the big back on it, and the color is green, like looking into a fish tank. It’s funny her mom and dad don’t have money blinds on the windows, yet they have a big ass TV. You can sometimes see the people in the next condo overlooking us like we can see them get busy in their room! Yet nothing beats the hot guy taking a leak in room 302, he looks to be in his late twenties. He takes the boxes off at 10 pm and we get a free show. He knows we can see him because he makes it look inflexible and you are no more personable. Jenny and we girls love to press upon the glass, and just have fun and be a little crazy, like lifting our nighties and flashing the goods. Facebook stocking gets boring quickly anymore, so some nights the webcam comes out too. After her mom and dad are asleep… I like it’s more fun to be bad! Like we all have profiles and fake names because none of us are eighteen yet. Any- how’s mine is ‘Angel Pink Wings 01’ Maddie goes by: ‘Mad kitty 69’ Jenny goes by: ‘Ms. Little Lover 14’ Liv goes by: ‘Olivia O 123’ Yet everyone knows her by Liv so that name is okay- I guess. We make good money- ‘Double Clicking the Mouse.’ You would not believe all the pervs on this cam the site, just wanting to see us doing it. Like old guys like our PE teacher! Man- that I didn’t even think about how to turn on a computer. Just like him, I guess they need too to see more of us close up. We have our checks mailed to Jenny's college boyfriend’s PO Box. Me this is what I do and yes- I come for you all, I just put in fake blue hair dye in, and have fake long lashes, and put in my blue contacts, and you don’t even know me. And then pen in more eyebrows. Fake, fake, fake, fake FAKE! Boys don’t like it when you fake it or do, they look at me, that's why I am Bi.

As computers gained new status and exploded in popularity, hacker conferences and computer clubs sprang up across the San Francisco Bay Area, and enrollment in computer science classes surged at universities across the country. Demand became so great that some departments began turning students away. There was an overall peak in bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer science in the mid-1980s, and a peak in the percentage of women receiving those degrees at nearly 40 percent. And then there was a steep decline in both. It wasn’t that students were inexplicably abandoning this exciting field. It was that universities couldn’t attract enough faculty to meet growing demand. They increased class size and retrained teachers—even brought in staff from other departments—but when that wasn’t enough, they started restricting admission to students based on grades. At Berkeley, only students with a 4.0 GPA were allowed to major in electrical engineering and computer science. Across the country, the number of degrees granted started to fall.

needed to get a new laptop. The damn thing ran so slow at the most crucial times. I was trying to submit my paper to the teacher’s website when my computer decided to take a break instead.

In 1968, Melvin Conway, a computer programmer and high school math and physics teacher, observed that systems tend to reflect the people and values who designed them. Conway was specifically looking at how organizations communicate internally, but later Harvard and MIT studies proved his idea more broadly. Harvard Business School analyzed different codebases, looking at software that was built for the same purpose but by different kinds of teams: those that were tightly controlled, and those that were more ad-hoc and open source.10 One of their key findings: design choices stem from how their teams are organized, and within those teams, bias and influence tends to go overlooked.

Many females have a problem not only with stereotypes, but with other people’s opinions of them in general. They trust them too much... This vulnerability afflicts many of the most able, high-achieving females. Why should this be? When they’re little, these girls are often so perfect, and they delight in everyone’s telling them so. They’re so well behaved, they’re so cute, they’re so helpful, and they’re so precocious. Girls learn to trust people’s estimates of them. “Gee, everyone’s so nice to me; if they criticize me, it must be true.” Even females at the top universities in the country say that other people’s opinions are a good way to know their abilities. Boys are constantly being scolded and punished. When we observed in grade school classrooms, we saw that boys got eight times more criticism than girls for their conduct. Boys are also constantly calling each other slobs and morons. The evaluations lose a lot of their power. Even when women reach the pinnacle of success, other people’s attitudes can get them... The fixed mindset, plus stereotyping, plus women’s trust in people’s assessments: I think we can begin to understand why there’s a gender gap in math and science. That gap is painfully evident in the world of high tech. Julie Lynch, a budding techie, was already writing computer code when she was in junior high school. Her father and two brothers worked in technology, and she loved it, too. Then her computer programming teacher criticized her. She had written a computer program and the program ran just fine, but he didn’t like a shortcut she had taken. Her interest evaporated. Instead, she went on to study recreation and public relations. Math and science need to be made more hospitable places for women. And women need all the growth mindset they can get to take their rightful places in these fields.

As much as I love computers, I can't imagine getting an excellent education from any multimedia system. Rather than augmenting the teacher, these machines steal limited class time and direct attention away from scholarship and toward pretty graphics.

Those who regard craft as a euphemism for elitism overlook the fact that craftsmanship need not be precious or effete; it can be practical, simple, an everyday thing: a well-made table, a sturdy chair, a butcher or tailor or travel agent who knows his or her business. A bricklayer or carpenter or teacher, a musician or salesperson, a writer of computer code—any and all can be craftsmen. Craftsmanship cements a relationship of trust between buyer and seller, worker and employer, and expects something of both. It is about caring about the work and its application. It is what distinguishes the work of humans from the work of machines, and it is everything that IKEA and other discounters are not.

So I went down to register at De Anza and saw that the classes for chemistry, physics, and calculus were all full. What? I couldn’t believe it. Here I was—the star science and math student at my high school and all set to be an engineer—and the three most important courses I needed were locked out. It was horrible. I called the chemistry teacher on the phone, who said if I showed up I could probably get in, but I couldn’t shake this terrible feeling that my future was shutting down. I could see it shutting down right in front of me. I felt my whole academic life was going to be messed up right from the start. And it was right then that I changed my mind, and decided to see if it was still possible to go to Colorado.

When Luo Ji began to think, he was surprised to find that his thoughts were already in progress. He remembered back to middle school and a lesson a teacher had taught him for language arts exams: First, take a look at the final essay question, then start the exam from the top, so that as you work on the exam, your subconscious will be thinking over the essay question, like a background process in a computer. Now he knew that from the moment he became a Wallfacer, his thinking had started up and had never stopped. The entire process was subconscious and he had never been aware of it.

The world is confused about how teaching occurs. You have been taught that teaching is accomplished through words in a classroom. The teacher spouts an idea, the students record it on paper or computer, they memorize it for the final exam, and if they repeat it well, they are assumed to have learned. Real teaching, A Course in Miracles tells us, occurs by the energy you broadcast through the quality of your being. At every moment you are teaching love or you are teaching fear. There are no other lessons. If you consider the teachers who have affected your life most profoundly, it was not the information they gave you that transformed you. It was how they treated you and how you felt in their presence. One of my greatest

a project in science class on a computer, she couldn’t do it because the screen distracted her. Instead of focusing on the computer screen, Helena worked by hand and did her project on paper. “The computer was distracting to me, and I couldn’t focus on what the teacher wanted me to do. Even though I didn’t get the credit for using a computer as everyone else did, I made my point and showed that I could do things not only differently but also just as well, if not better.

Geography lessons go virtual: Danish government creates Minecraft version of ENTIRE country to help teachers Geography lessons go virtual: Danish government creates Minecraft version of ENTIRE country to help teachers Entire country was recreated by government's mapping department Minecraft lesson plans for teachers also created in bid to make education more accessible By Mark Prigg Published: 22:06 GMT, 25 April 2014 | Updated: 23:01 GMT, 25 April 2014 The Danish government has recreated the entire country in the hit computer game Minecraft. The first country to be fully transplanted into the blocky Minecraft games, the government hopes it could help make lessons more fun for students. It has even produced a series of lesson plans for teachers to help them navigate the virtual version of their country. Scroll down for video Denmark's Ministry of the Environment has created a full-scale model of the country in Minecraft for players to explore. The downloadable model consists of 4,000 billion blocks and requires one terabyte of storage space.

Educators need to avoid the natural tendency to become defensive about “technology as teacher.” Teachers will never be replaced. When necessary but somewhat mundane knowledge, concepts, and skills can be taught as well or better by a computer, THEY SHOULD BE.

Anytime we can effectively move learning to the computer, we leave the “professional” teacher more time to teach the more important learner outcomes that require interaction, demonstration, and coaching.

South Carolina’s fourth-grade music exam, administered via computer, asks: “When singing a melody together with a friend, what dynamic level should you sing? A) Louder than your friend B) Not too loud and not too soft C) Softer than your friend or D) the same as your friend.” (The correct answer is D.) Students are then shown a measure of sheet music and asked to identify which of four electronic recordings matches the notation.

The reason is clear from the market share numbers. In the 1999 Euromoney poll, almost 48 per cent of market share was held by banks outside the top ten; by the 2006 poll, that number had halved to about 24 per cent. These banks did not have a business large enough to justify spending the money needed to automate. In fact, the collective market share decline of smaller banks masked a shift in behaviour that was even worse news for the career prospects of the traders who worked in them. Increasingly, FX giants like Deutsche would give these banks access to systems like Autobahn or the equivalent. Their salespeople would simply quote the Deutsche Bank (or Citibank, UBS or Barclays) rate to their customers with a small spread to offset the credit risk. No need for expensive traders. In effect, the smaller banks had shifted from ‘manufacturing’ FX rates to being distributors to clients with whom they had a strong relationship based on regional expertise or history. ‘You guys just sucked us dry,’ complained an old friend and adversary at the time – he was in his late thirties, from a smaller bank, and we were at his ‘leaving-the-industry’ drinks. ‘But,’ he added resignedly, with a slightly drunken grin, ‘I guess that’s just that old whore Capitalism for you.’ He became a maths teacher.

Smart entrepreneurs have grabbed this opportunity with a vengeance. Now online lesson-plan marketplaces such as Gooru Learning, Teachers Pay Teachers, and Share My Lesson allow teachers who want to devote more of their time to other tasks the ability to purchase high-quality (and many lesser-quality) lesson plans, ready to go. With sensors, data, and A.I., we can begin, even today, testing for the learning efficacy of different lectures, styles, and more. And, because humans do a poor job of incorporating massive amounts of information to make iterative decisions, in the very near future, computers will start doing more and more of the lesson planning. They will write the basic lessons and learn what works and what doesn’t for specific students. Creative teachers will continue, though, to be incredibly valuable: they will learn how to steer and curate algorithmic and heuristically updated lesson creation in ways that computers could not necessarily imagine. All of this is, of course, a somewhat bittersweet development. Teaching is an idealistic profession. You probably remember a special teacher who shaped your life, encouraged your interests, and made school exciting. The movies and pop culture are filled with paeans to unselfish, underpaid teachers fighting the good fight and helping their charges. But it is becoming clearer that teaching, like many other white-collar jobs that have resisted robots, is something that robots can do—possibly, in structured curricula, better than humans can. The

Computers and technology do not reduce the importance of the teacher. In fact, the exact opposite is true!

Today's Druids are artists, environmentalists, joiners, healers, teachers, fathers, students, unemployed, computer programmers, grandmothers; they come in all shapes, sizes, genders and colors and from all parts of the world. They

Today's Druids are artists, environmentalists, joiners, healers, teachers, fathers, students, unemployed, computer programmers, grandmothers; they come in all shapes, sizes, genders and colors and from all parts of the world.

He had taped up an enlargement of Sci-Tron’s final moments on the wall facing his desk, where he could see it all the time. He offered us chairs, booted up his computer, and pulled up the video of our interrogation of Connor Grant that morning. The three of us watched it together, looking for something we’d missed. Something we should have asked. We strained for something useful or revealing. Straining through the nothing Grant had given us for any kind of lead. Brady said, “One more time.” He reversed the video, hit Play. We watched again. Then we kicked it around for a while, concluding that, based on our combined decades of cop experience and gut instinct, the science teacher was not a team player. He

East Side High became well known some years ago when its former principal, a colorful and controversial figure named Joe Clark, was given special praise by U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett. Bennett called the school “a mecca of education” and paid tribute to Joe Clark for throwing out 300 students who were thought to be involved with violence or drugs. “He was a perfect hero,” says a school official who has dinner with me the next evening, “for an age in which the ethos was to cut down on the carrots and increase the sticks. The day that Bennett made his visit, Clark came out and walked the hallways with a bullhorn and a bat. If you didn’t know he was a principal, you would have thought he was the warden of a jail. Bennett created Joe Clark as a hero for white people. He was on the cover of Time magazine. Parents and kids were held in thrall after the president endorsed him. “In certain respects, this set a pattern for the national agenda. Find black principals who don’t identify with civil rights concerns but are prepared to whip black children into line. Throw out the kids who cause you trouble. It’s an easy way to raise the average scores. Where do you put these kids once they’re expelled? You build more prisons. Two thirds of the kids that Clark threw out are in Passaic County Jail. “This is a very popular approach in the United States today. Don’t provide the kids with a new building. Don’t provide them with more teachers or more books or more computers. Don’t even breathe a whisper of desegregation. Keep them in confinement so they can’t subvert the education of the suburbs. Don’t permit them ‘frills’ like art or poetry or theater. Carry a bat and tell them they’re no good if they can’t pass the state exam. Then, when they are ruined, throw them into prison. Will it surprise you to be told that Paterson destroyed a library because it needed space to build a jail?

Just how are the black schools bad? Not, interestingly, in the ways that schools are traditionally measured. In terms of class size, teachers’ education, and computer-to-student ratio, the schools attended by blacks and whites are similar. But the typical black student’s school has a far higher rate of troublesome indicators, such as gang problems, nonstudents loitering in front of the school, and lack of PTA funding. These schools

Teachers are being replaced by interactive algorithms that can teach students on a far more customized level, such as the ones being developed by companies like Mindojo. Doctors are under attack from the job replacing algorithms, such as IBM’s Jeopardy game show winning Watson computer, which is now being groomed as a medical diagnosis machine. And unlike with spending years training just one doctor at a time, every technical challenge that is beaten while training Watson will ultimately produce an infinite number of well trained doctor “machines.” Algorithms are already being appointed to fill seats on company boards, such as in May 2014 when a Hong Kong venture-capital firm, Deep Knowledge Ventures, appointed the algorithm VITAL to its board. VITAL studies vast amounts of data then gets to vote on whether the firm makes an investment in a specific company or not.

deliberate practice” to describe this style of serious study, defining it formally as an “activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.”4 As hundreds of follow-up studies have since shown, deliberate practice provides the key to excellence in a diverse array of fields, among which are chess, medicine, auditing, computer programming, bridge, physics, sports, typing, juggling, dance, and music.

Why do computer teachers never get sick? A: Because an apple a day keeps the doctor away!