“
Hold on to me!” Tedros yelled, hacking briars with his training sword.Dazed, Agatha clung to his chest as he withstood thorn lashes with moans of pain. Soon he had the upper hand and pulled Agatha from the Woods towards the spiked gates, which glowed in recognition and pulled apart, cleaving a narrow path for the two Evers. As the gates speared shut behind them,Agatha looked up at limping Tedros, crisscrossed with bloody scratches, blue shirt shredded away.
“Had a feeling Sophie was getting in through the Woods,” he panted, hauling her up into slashed arms before she could protest. “So Professor Dovey gave me permission to take some fairies and stakeout the outer gates. Should have known you’d be here trying to catch her yourself.”
Agatha gaped at him dumbly.
“Stupid idea for a princess to take on witches alone,” Tedros said, dripping sweat on her pink dress.
“Where is she?” Agatha croaked. “Is she safe?”
“Not a good idea for princesses to worry about witches either,” Tedros said, hands gripping her waist. Her stomach exploded with butterflies.
“Put me down,” she sputtered—
“More bad ideas from the princess.”
“Put me down!”Tedros obeyed and Agatha pulled away.
“I’m not a princess!” she snapped, fixing her collar.
“If you say so,” the prince said, eyes drifting downward.Agatha followed them to her gashed legs, waterfalls of brilliant blood. She saw blood blurring— Tedros smiled.
“One . . . two . . . three . . .”She fainted in his arms.
“Definitely a princess,” he said.
”
”
Soman Chainani (The School for Good and Evil (The School for Good and Evil, #1))
“
In middle school I played against you once. And lost. I was so frustrated that I continued practicing even after I retired... And then when I entered high school, hell yeah, I laughed. The guy I vowed to defeat no matter what was standing right in front of me as one of my own teammates. But now it's pointless to hold a grudge. Rather, I wanted to make you recognize me. (Takao Kazunari)
”
”
Tadatoshi Fujimaki
“
Patriotism is a thing difficult to put into words. It is neither precisely an emotion nor an opinion, nor a mandate, but a state of mind -- a reflection of our own personal sense of worth, and respect for our roots. Love of country plays a part, but it's not merely love. Neither is it pride, although pride too is one of the ingredients.
Patriotism is a commitment to what is best inside us all. And it's a recognition of that wondrous common essence in our greater surroundings -- our school, team, city, state, our immediate society -- often ultimately delineated by our ethnic roots and borders... but not always.
Indeed, these border lines are so fluid... And we do not pay allegiance as much as we resonate with a shared spirit.
We all feel an undeniable bond with the land where we were born. And yet, if we leave it for another, we grow to feel a similar bond, often of a more complex nature. Both are forms of patriotism -- the first, involuntary, by birth, the second by choice.
Neither is less worthy than the other.
But one is earned.
”
”
Vera Nazarian (The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration)
“
What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.
”
”
Harold Bloom (The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages)
“
The second reason is that schools reward being a generalist. There is little recognition of student passion or expertise. The real world, however, does the reverse.
”
”
Eric Barker (Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong)
“
But mortification - literally, "making death" - is what life is all about, a slow discovery of the mortality of all that is created so that we can appreciate its beauty without clinging to it as if it were a lasting possession. Our lives can indeed be seen as a process of becoming familiar with death, as a school in the art of dying . . . all these times have passed by like friendly visitors, leaving you with dear memories but also with the sad recognition of the shortness of life. In every arrival there is a leave-taking; in every reunion there is a separation; in each one's growing up there is a growing old; in every smile there is a tear; and in every success there is a loss. All living is dying and all celebration is mortification too.
”
”
Henri J.M. Nouwen (Show Me the Way: Daily Lenten Readings)
“
As a spirit schooled to power, his perception stems from one absolute. Universal harmony begins with recognition that the life in an ordinary pebble is as sacred as conscious selfhood.
”
”
Janny Wurts (The Curse of the Mistwraith (Wars of Light and Shadow, #1))
“
Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called “aesthetic dignity.” One of the ineluctable stigmata of the canonical is aesthetic dignity, which is not to be hired.
”
”
Harold Bloom (The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages)
“
I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E.M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold… These are not invisible men. Poor Bruce. Poor frightened Bruce. Once upon a time you wanted to be a soldier.
Bruce, did you know that an openly gay Englishman was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do — and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don't they teach any of this in the schools? If they did, maybe he wouldn't have killed himself and maybe you wouldn't be so terrified of who you are. The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there—all through history we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed. That's how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war.
”
”
Larry Kramer (The Normal Heart)
“
And I'll go even further and say that mathematics, this art of abstract pattern-making — even more than storytelling, painting, or music - is our most quintessentially human art form. This is what our brains do, whether we like it or not. We are biochemical pattern-recognition machines and mathematics is nothing less than the distilled essence of who we are.
”
”
Paul Lockhart (A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form)
“
Every type of political power presupposes some particular form of human slavery, for the maintenance of which it is called into being. Just as outwardly, that is, in relation to other states the state has to create certain artificial antagonisms in order to justify its existence, so also internally the cleavage of society into castes, ranks and classes is an essential condition of its continuance. The development of the Bolshevist bureaucracy in Russia under the alleged dictatorship of the proletariat (which has never been anything but the dictatorship of a small clique over the proletariat and the whole Russian people) is merely a new instance of an old historical experience which has repeated itself countless times. This new ruling class, which to-day is rapidly growing into a new aristocracy, is set apart from the great masses of the Russian peasants and workers just as clearly as are the privileged castes and classes in other countries from the mass of the people. And this situation becomes still more unbearable when a despotic state denies to the lower classes the right to complain of existing conditions, so that any protest is made at the risk of their lives.
But even a far greater degree of economic equality than that which exists in Russia would be no guarantee against political and social oppression. Economic equality alone is not social liberation. It is precisely this which all the schools of authoritarian Socialism have never understood. In the prison, in the cloister, or in the barracks one finds a fairly high degree of economic equality, as all the inmates are provided with the same dwelling, the same food, the same uniform, and the same tasks. The ancient Inca state in Peru and the Jesuit state in Paraguay had brought equal economic provision for every inhabitant to a fixed system, but in spite of this the vilest despotism prevailed there, and the human being was merely the automaton of a higher will on whose decisions he had not the slightest influence. It was not without reason that Proudhon saw in a "Socialism" without freedom the worst form of slavery. The urge for social justice can only develop properly and be effective when it grows out of man's sense of freedom and responsibility, and is based upon it. In other words, Socialism will be free or it will not be at all. In its recognition of this fact lies the genuine and profound justification of Anarchism.
”
”
Rudolf Rocker (Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism (Anarchist Classics))
“
There is a saturation of books on Amazon due to a sudden get-rich-quick surge in "everyone can be authors" seminars similar to the house flipping ones in the early 2000s which led to the housing bubble and an economic slowdown in the U.S. To distinguish quality books from those get-rich-quick ones, look at the author's track record - worldwide recognition as books that garnered credible awards, authors who speak at book industry events, authors who speak at schools, authors whose books are reference materials and reading sources at school and libraries. Get-rich books have a system to get over 500 reviews quickly, manipulates the Kindle Unlimited algorithm, and encourage collusion in the marketplace to knock out rivals. Be wary of trolls who are utilized to knock down the rankings of rival's books too. Once people have heard there is money to be made as a self-published author, just like house flipping, a cottage industry has risen to take advantage of it and turn book publishing into a get rich scheme, which is a shame for all the book publishers and authors, like me, who had published for the love of books, to write to help society, and for the love of literature. Kailin Gow, Parents and Books
”
”
Kailin Gow
“
Trees constitute the environmental quality committee—running air and water purification service 24-7. They’re on every task force, from the historical society picnic to the highway department, school board, and library. When it comes to civic beautification, they alone create the crimson fall with little recognition.
”
”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants)
“
Impatiently I waited for evening, when I might summon you to my presence. An unusual– to me– a perfectly new character, I suspected was yours; I desired to search it deeper, and know it better. You entered the room with a look and air at once shy and independent; you were quaintly dress– much as you are now. I made you talk; ere long I found you full of strange contrasts. Your garb and manner were restricted by rule; your air was often diffident, and altogether that of one refined by nature, but absolutely unused to society, and a good deal afraid of making herself disadvantageously conspicuous by some solecism or blunder; yet, when addressed, you lifted a keen, a daring, and a glowing eye to your interlocutor’s face; there was penetration and power in each glance you gave; when plied by close questions, you found ready and round answers. Very soon you seemed to get used to me – I believe you felt the existence of sympathy between you and your grim and cross master, Jane; for it was astonishing to see how quickly a certain pleasant ease tranquilized your manner; snarl as I would, you showed no surprise, fear, annoyance, or displeasure, at my moroseness; you watched me, and now and then smiled at me with a simple yet sagacious grace I cannot describe. I was at once content and stimulated with what I saw; I liked what I had seen, and wished to see more. Yet, for a long time, I treated you distantly, and sought your company rarely, I was an intellectual epicure, and wished to prolong the gratification of making this novel and piquant acquaintance; besides, I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade – the sweet charm of freshness would leave it. I did not then know that it was no transitory blossom, but rather the radiant resemblance of one, cut in an indestructible gem. Moreover, I wished to see whether you would seek me if I shunned you – but you did not; you kept in the school-room as still as your own desk and easel; if by chance I met you, you passed me as soon, and with as little token of recognition, as was consistent with respect. Your habitual expression in those days, Jane, was a thoughtful look; not despondent, fro you were not sickly; but not buoyant, for you had little hope, and no actual pleasure. I wondered what you thought of me– or if you ever thought of me; to find this out, I resumed my notice of you. There was something glad in your glance, and genial in your manner, when you conversed; I saw you had a social heart; it was the silent school-room– it was the tedium of your life that made you mournful. I permitted myself the delight of being kind to you; kindness stirred emotion soon; your face became soft in expression, your tones gentle; I liked my name pronounced by your lips in a grateful, happy accent. I used to enjoy a chance meeting with you, Jane, at this time; there was a curious hesitation in your manner; you glanced at me with a slight trouble– a hovering doubt; you did not know what my caprice might be– whether I was going to play the master, and be stern– or the friend, and be benignant. I was now too fond of you often to stimulate the first whim; and, when I stretched my hand out cordially, such bloom, and light, and bliss, rose to your young, wistful features, I had much ado often to avoid straining you then and there to my heart.
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
“
The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in fine, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.
”
”
Mark Twain
“
At present, a good many men engaged in scientific pursuits, and who have signally failed in gaining recognition among their fellows, are endeavoring to make reputations among the churches by delivering weak and vapid lectures upon the 'harmony of Genesis and Geology.' Like all hypocrites, these men overstate the case to such a degree, and so turn and pervert facts and words that they succeed only in gaining the applause of other hypocrites like themselves. Among the great scientists they are regarded as generals regard sutlers who trade with both armies.
Surely the time must come when the wealth of the world will not be wasted in the propagation of ignorant creeds and miraculous mistakes. The time must come when churches and cathedrals will be dedicated to the use of man; when minister and priest will deem the discoveries of the living of more importance than the errors of the dead; when the truths of Nature will outrank the 'sacred' falsehoods of the past, and when a single fact will outweigh all the miracles of Holy Writ.
Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?
When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then, and not until then, will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher, become a real and blessed truth.
”
”
Robert G. Ingersoll (Some Mistakes of Moses)
“
We may with a certain melancholic pride remove the job search engine from our bookmarks and cancel our subscription to a dating site in due recognition of the fact that – whatever we do – parts of our potential will have to go undeveloped and have to die without ever having had the chance to come to full maturity – for the sake of the benefits of focus and specialization.
”
”
The School of Life (The School of Life: An Emotional Education)
“
There should be a recognition that people don't change when they are told what's wrong with them, they change when they feel sufficiently supported to undertake the change they almost always already know is due.
”
”
The School of Life
“
Phidias and the achievements of Greek art are foreshadowed in Homer: Dante prefigures for us the passion and colour and intensity of Italian painting: the modern love of landscape dates from Rousseau, and it is in Keats that one discerns the beginning of the artistic renaissance of England. Byron was a rebel and Shelley a dreamer; but in the calmness and clearness of his vision, his perfect self-control, his unerring sense of beauty and his recognition of a separate realm for the imagination, Keats was the pure and serene artist, the forerunner of the pre-Raphaelite school, and so of the great romantic movement of which I am to speak.
”
”
Oscar Wilde (The English Renaissance of Art)
“
The question then was not what other countries were doing, but why. Why did these countries have this consensus around rigor? In the education superpowers, every child knew the importance of an education. These countries had experienced national failure in recent memory; they knew what an existential crisis felt like. In many U.S. schools, however, the priorities were muddled beyond recognition. Sports were central to American students’ lives and school cultures in a way in which they were not in most education superpowers. Exchange students agreed almost universally on this point. Nine out of ten international students I surveyed said that U.S. kids placed a higher priority on sports, and six out of ten American exchange students agreed with them. Even in middle school, other researchers had found, American students spent double the amount of time playing sports as Koreans.
”
”
Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way)
“
The paradox of being a professional artist. How we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell. We want creativity to be a system of cause and effect. Results. Marketable product. We want dedication and discipline to equal recognition and reward. We get on our art school treadmill, our graduate program for a master's in fine arts, and practice, practice, practice. With all our excellent skills, we have nothing special to document. .... Nothing pisses us off more than when some strung-out drug addict, a lazy bum, or a slobbering pervert creates a masterpiece. As if by accident. Some idiot who's not afraid to say what they really love.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
“
The attempt to establish this separate Muslim identity is growing more and more intense, with persistent pressure for official recognition of Islamic family law, the rise of a de facto parallel Islamic legal system not recognised by the state, demands for highly politicised Islamic dress codes, prayer meetings or halal food to be provided by schools and other institutions, and so on. No other minority attempts to impose its values on the host society like this. Behind it lies the premise that Islamic values trump British ones,
”
”
Melanie Phillips (Londonistan: Britain's Terror State from Within)
“
How will letting same-sex couples marry affect your marriage? It won't, but it will have an impact on how marriage will be taught in schools and how children understand its meaning and purpose as the foundation of the family. Changing the law to accommodate same-sex couples requires marriage to be taught in schools as merely the public recognition of a committed relationship with no connection to children and family. . . . This will affect the attitudes young people will have about marriage and family and will likely affect decisions they make about marriage, children and family in their lives.
”
”
William B. May (Getting the Marriage Conversation Right: A Guide for Effective Dialogue)
“
Confidence isn't the belief that we won't meet obstacles: it is the recognition that difficulties are an inescapable part of all worthwhile contributions. We need to ensure we have plenty of narratives to hand that normalise the role of pain, anxiety and disappointment in even the best and most successful lives.
”
”
The School of Life (On Confidence)
“
My belated recognition of his desire actually served the purpose of provoking me to consider him, if only for a moment. It was like high school when just to hear that a boy liked you was sufficient encouragement to agree to go steady with him by the end of the day. Now that I think of it, it is just like life. Not high school.
”
”
Susanna Moore (In the Cut)
“
More pertinent, however, is that capitalism tends to stultify the worker’s creativity, his human urge for self-expression, freedom, mutually respectful interaction with others, recognition of his self-determined sense of self, recognition of himself as a self rather than an object, a means to an end. Karl Marx called it “alienation.” Capitalism alienates the worker—and the capitalist—from his “fundamental human need” for “self-fulfilling and creative work,” “the exercise of skill and craftsmanship,”8 in addition to his fundamental desire to determine himself (whence comes the desire to dismantle oppressive power-relations and replace them with democracy). Alternative visions of social organization thus arise, including Robert Owen’s communitarian socialism, Charles Fourier’s associationist communalism, Proudhon’s mutualism (a kind of anarchism), Marx’s communism, Bakunin’s collectivist anarchism, Kropotkin’s anarchist communism, Anton Pannekoek’s council communism, and more recently, Murray Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, Michael Albert’s participatory economics, Takis Fotopoulos’s inclusive democracy, Paul Hirst’s associationalism, and so on. Each of these schools of thought differs from the others in more or less defined ways, but they all have in common the privileging of economic and social cooperation and egalitarianism.
”
”
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
“
The school song at Accrington High School for Girls was 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,' a terrible choice for an all-girls' school, but one that helped turn me into a feminist. Where were the famous women--indeed any women--and why weren't we praising them? I vowed to myself that I would be famous and that I would come back and be praised.
”
”
Jeanette Winterson (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?)
“
Introductory paragraph incorporating the thesis: After a challenging childhood marked by adversity, Adam Parrish has become a successful freshman at Harvard University. In the past, he had spent his time doubting himself, fearing he would become like his father, obsessing that others could see his trailer-park roots, and idealizing wealth, but now he has built a new future where no one has to know where he's come from. Before becoming a self-actualized young man at Harvard, Adam had been deeply fascinated by the concept of the ley lines and also supernaturally entangled with one of the uncanny forests located along one, but he has now focused on the real world, using only the ghost of magic to fleece other students with parlor trick tarot card readings. He hasn't felt like himself for months, but he is going to be just fine.
Followed by three paragraphs with information that supports the thesis. First: Adam understands that suffering is often transient, even when it feels permanent. This too shall pass, etc. Although college seems like a lifetime, it is only four years. Four years is only a lifetime if one is a guinea pig.
Second paragraph, building on the first point: Magic has not always been good for Adam. During high school, he frequently immersed himself in it as a form of avoidance. Deep down, he fears that he is prone to it as his father is prone to abuse, and that it will eventually make him unsuitable for society. By depriving himself of magic, he forces himself to become someone valuable to the unmagic world, i.e. the Crying Club.
Third paragraph, with the most persuasive point: Harvard is a place Ronan Lynch cannot be, because he cannot survive there, either physically or socially. Without such hard barriers, Adam will surely continue to return to Ronan Lynch again and again, and thus fall back in with bad habits. He will never achieve the life of financial security and recognition he planned.
Thesis restated, bringing together all the information to prove it: Although life is unbearable now, and Adam Parrish seems to have lost everything important to him in the present by pursuing the things important to him in the past, he will be fine.
Concluding paragraph describing what the reader just learned and why it is important for them to have learned it: He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (Greywaren (Dreamer Trilogy, #3))
“
In the early nineteenth century, a young man in London aspired to be a writer. But everything seemed to be against him. He had never been able to attend school more than four years. His father had been flung in jail because he couldn’t pay his debts, and this young man often knew the pangs of hunger. Finally, he got a job pasting labels on bottles of blacking in a rat-infested warehouse, and he slept at night in a dismal attic room with two other boys—guttersnipes from the slums of London. He had so little confidence in his ability to write that he sneaked out and mailed his first manuscript in the dead of night so nobody would laugh at him. Story after story was refused. Finally the great day came when one was accepted. True, he wasn’t paid a shilling for it, but one editor had praised him. One editor had given him recognition. He was so thrilled that he wandered aimlessly around the streets with tears rolling down his cheeks. The praise, the recognition that he received through getting one story in print, changed his whole life, for if it hadn’t been for that encouragement, he might have spent his entire life working in rat-infested factories. You may have heard of that boy. His name was Charles Dickens.
”
”
Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People)
“
People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly un-charted territory—whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the "fag hag" label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are -patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our-parents or schools or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends' tricks and tricks' bar friends and gal pals and companions "in the life," queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from many straight people. Who among us would give them up?
Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room. (In some circles this is a common party sport already.) You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends.
”
”
Michael Warner (The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life)
“
Moments of pride commemorate people’s achievements. We feel our chest puff out and our chin lift. 2. There are three practical principles we can use to create more moments of pride: (1) Recognize others; (2) Multiply meaningful milestones; (3) Practice courage. The first principle creates defining moments for others; the latter two allow us to create defining moments for ourselves. 3. We dramatically underinvest in recognition. • Researcher Wiley: 80% of supervisors say they frequently express appreciation, while less than 20% of employees agree. 4. Effective recognition is personal, not programmatic. (“ Employee of the Month” doesn’t cut it.) • Risinger at Eli Lilly used “tailored rewards” (e.g., Bose headphones) to show his team: I saw what you did and I appreciate it. 5. Recognition is characterized by a disjunction: A small investment of effort yields a huge reward for the recipient. • Kira Sloop, the middle school student, had her life changed by a music teacher who told her that her voice was beautiful. 6. To create moments of pride for ourselves, we should multiply meaningful milestones—reframing a long journey so that it features many “finish lines.” • The author Kamb planned ways to “level up”—for instance “Learn how to play ‘Concerning Hobbits’ from The Fellowship of the Ring”—toward his long-term goal of mastering the fiddle.
”
”
Chip Heath (The Power of Moments: Why Certain Moments Have Extraordinary Impact)
“
The world is an estranged and untrue world so long as man does not destroy its dead objectivity and recognize himself and his own life 'behind' the fixed form of things and laws. When he finally wins this self-consciousness, he is on his way not only to the truth of himself, but also of his world. And with the recognition goes the doing. He will try to put this truth into action, and make the world what it essentially is, namely, the fulfillment of man's self-consciousness.
”
”
Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society)
“
Coriolanus thought it was quite a display for Arachne, disproportionate to both her life and death, the latter of which could have been avoided if she'd refrained from being such an exhibitionist. So many people had died heroically in the war, with so little recognition, that it grated on him. He was relieved that he was singing instead of having to praise her talents, which, if memory served, were limited to being loud enough to fill the school auditorium without a mic and the ability to balance a spoon on her nose.
”
”
Suzanne Collins (The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0))
“
The "intellectual decompression chamber" of the Satanic temple might be considered a training school for temporary ignorance, as are ALL religious services! The difference is that the Satanist KNOWS he is practicing a form of contrived ignorance in order to expand his will, whereas another religionist doesn't - or if he does know, he practices that form of self-deceit which forbids such recognition. His ego is already too shaky from his religious inculcation to allow himself to admit to such a thing as self-imposed ignorance!
”
”
Anton Szandor LaVey (The Satanic Bible)
“
While there is widespread recognition that the War on Drugs is racist and that politicians have refused to invest in jobs or schools in their communities, parents of offenders and ex-offenders still feel intense shame—shame that their children have turned to crime despite the lack of obvious alternatives. One mother of an incarcerated teen, Constance, described her angst this way: “Regardless of what you feel like you’ve done for your kid, it still comes back on you, and you feel like, ‘Well, maybe I did something wrong. Maybe I messed up. You know, maybe if I had a did it this way, then it wouldn’t a happened that way.’” After her son’s arrest, she could not bring herself to tell friends and relatives and kept the family’s suffering private. Constance is not alone.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
We did not undertake systematic interviews with people now below the age of thirty-five, but in many of the interviews with their parents' generation we heard a bemused recognition that younger people who did not experience these events have very little interest in what happened in that long-ago time; and may even express hostility toward parents who dreamed of a new society. They are interested in the same activities and ideas as young people the world over - dancing, loving, listening to (mostly American) music, dressing in fashion, buying the latest gadgets, attending school and developing career ambitions. The past - even though it is the immediate past of their parents - holds for them no appeal, and they have little sympathy for its victims. Consumerism, not politics, is their passion; consumption, not citizenship, motivates them.
”
”
Patricia Marchak (God's Assassins: State Terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s)
“
But in hallowing King we have hollowed him. From Montgomery to Chicago, along those streets named Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Highway and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, poverty and segregation rates remain much higher than the local and national averages, according to recent studies. In those schools named for King, and in almost every school in America, King's life and lessons and often smooth and polished beyond recognition. Young people hear his dream of brotherhood and his wish for children to be judged by the content of their character, but not his cry for an end to the triple evils of materialism, militarism, and racism. [...] Our simplified celebration of King comes at a cost. It saps the strength of his philosophical and intellectual contributions. It undercuts his power to inspire change.
”
”
Jonathan Eig (King: A Life)
“
Rather, part of the argument is that with so much graduate unemployment, juvenile delinquency and high-school absenteeism, there could be practical alternatives to what we have now. A case could be made for a return to apprenticeships in trades such as car mechanics. Another would be to rearrange our priorities during workplace hiring. Less dependency might be placed on easily-achieved academic certificates - and more public recognition be given to hard-won experience. Other possibilities include early entry into the armed forces or police - via military finishing schools or junior police academies, instead of book-obsessed senior high schools and colleges of the woolly-minded humanities. But, for sure, a campaign of objections to this broader model would be publicly raised by the very groups who stand to lose financially from the decrease in municipal funding. That is, well-heeled academics and comfortably-off teaching unions.
”
”
Jon Lee Junior (England's Rise and Decline: And What It Means, Today)
“
Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which, summed up in brief, may be epitomized thus: for some fifteen million dollars, beside the sums spent before 1865, and the dole of benevolent societies, this Bureau set going a system of free labor, established a beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the free common school in the South. On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and freedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry out to any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen with land. Its successes were the result of hard work, supplemented by the aid of philanthropists and the eager striving of black men. Its failures were the result of bad local agents, the inherent difficulties of the work, and national neglect.
”
”
W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk)
“
And then, as slowly as the light fades on a calm winter evening, something went out of our relationship. I say that selfishly. Perhaps I started to look for something which had never been there in the first place: passion, romance. I aresay that as I entered my forties I had a sense that somehow life was going past me. I had hardly experienced those emotions which for me have mostly come from reading books or watching television. I suppose that if there was anything unsatisfactory in our marriage, it was in my perception of it—the reality was unchanged. Perhaps I grew up from childhood to manhood too quickly. One minute I was cutting up frogs in the science lab at school, the next I was working for the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence and counting freshwater mussel populations on riverbeds. Somewhere in between, something had passed me by: adolescence, perhaps? Something immature, foolish yet intensely emotive, like those favourite songs I had recalled dimly as if being played on a distant radio, almost too far away to make out the words. I had doubts, yearnings, but I did not know why or what for.
Whenever I tried to analyse our lives, and talk about it with Mary, she would say, ‘Darling, you are on the way to becoming one of the leading authorities in the world on caddis fly larvae. Don’t allow anything to deflect you from that. You may be rather inadequately paid, certainly compared with me you are, but excellence in any field is an achievement beyond value.’
I don’t know when we started drifting apart.
When I told Mary about the project—I mean about researching the possibility of a salmon fishery in the Yemen—something changed. If there was a defining moment in our marriage, then that was it. It was ironical, in a sense. For the first time in my life I was doing something which might bring me international recognition and certainly would make me considerably better off—I could live for years off the lecture circuit alone, if the project was even half successful.
Mary didn’t like it. I don’t know what part she didn’t like: the fact I might become more famous than her, the fact I might even become better paid than her. That makes her sound carping.
”
”
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
“
Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut. This principle is also true, ultimately, in human behavior, in human relationships. They, too, are natural systems based on the law of the harvest. In the short run, in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to “play the game.” In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success. Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you’ll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.” There are, of course, situations where people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well. But the effects are still secondary. In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. We all know it. There are people we trust absolutely because we know their character. Whether they’re eloquent or not, whether they have the human relations techniques or not, we trust them, and we work successfully with them. In the words of William George Jordan, “Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.
”
”
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
“
Could it be that we lose some of the visual functions that we inherited from our evolution as we learn to read? Or, at the very least, are these functions massively reorganized? This counterintuitive prediction is precisely what my colleagues and I tested in a series of experiments. To draw a complete map of the brain regions that are changed by literacy, we scanned illiterate adults in Portugal and Brazil, and we compared them to people from the same villages who had had the good fortune of learning to read in school, either as children or adults.41 Unsurprisingly perhaps, the results revealed that, with reading acquisition, an extensive map of areas had become responsive to written words (see figure 14 in the color insert). Flash a sentence, word by word, to an illiterate individual, and you will find that their brain does not respond much: activity spreads to early visual areas, but it stops there, because the letters cannot be recognized. Present the same sequence of written words to an adult who has learned to read, and a much more extended cortical circuit now lights up, in direct proportion to the person’s reading score. The areas activated include the letter box area, in the left occipitotemporal cortex, as well as all the classical language regions associated with language comprehension. Even the earliest visual areas increase their response: with reading acquisition, they seem to become attuned to the recognition of small print.42 The more fluent a person is, the more these regions are activated by written words, and the more they strengthen their links: as reading becomes increasingly automatic, the translation of letters into sounds speeds up.
”
”
Stanislas Dehaene (How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now)
“
Ever since the 1960s, upon the urging of Dr. T. Berry Brazelton and the all-knowing Dr. Spock,* mothers have been encouraged to read to their children at a very early age. For toddlers and preschoolers who relish this early diet of literacy, libraries become a second home, story hour is never long enough, and parents can’t finish a book without hearing a little voice beg, “Again… again.” For most literary geek girls, it’s at this age that they discover their passion for reading. Whether it’s Harold and the Purple Crayon or Strega Nona, books provide the budding literary she-geek with a glimpse into an all-new world of magic and make-believe—and once she visits, she immediately wants to apply for full-time citizenship. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” —author Joan Didion, in The White Album While some children spend their summers sweating on community sports teams or learning Indigo Girls songs at sleep-away camp, our beloved bookworms are more interested in joining their local library’s summer reading program, completing twenty-five books during vacation, and earning a certificate of recognition signed by their city’s mayor. (Plus, that Sony Bloggie Touch the library is giving away to the person who logs the most hours reading isn’t the worst incentive, either. It’ll come in handy for that book review YouTube channel she’s been thinking about starting!) When school starts back up again, her friends will inevitably show off their tan lines and pony bead friendship bracelets, and our geek girl will politely oblige by oohing and aahing accordingly. But secretly she’s bursting with pride over her summer’s battle scars—the numerous paper cuts she got while feverishly turning the pages of all seven Harry Potter books.
”
”
Leslie Simon (Geek Girls Unite: Why Fangirls, Bookworms, Indie Chicks, and Other Misfits Will Inherit the Earth)
“
Her mother cleaved him, cracking open like a peach pit split the tender centre mewling, a monster turned a baby. They snatched up the infant, innocent, beastly, from Half World they fled, they fled to the Realm of Flesh. Gee could not stop the words in the terrible book from popping up in his mind. The images that formed filled him with fear and fascination. Confusion. A creeping sense of recognition. The déjà vu of dreams…. Half World. The words whispered, echoed inside him. Like something almost familiar. Something he’d forgotten— How could Popo do this to him? Gee pounded the heels of his fists on the thick table. He pounded and pounded until he could feel the physical pain. Maybe Popo had written this book herself…. Maybe it was an elaborate psychological experiment? Maybe she was a psychotic, abusive person. Those irregularities in his adoption…. There were no papers. He had no birth certificate. His grandmother had found someone to forge documents. It had cost a lot of money. Popo had kidnapped him from somewhere and his real parents were still looking for him, far far away. That made more sense than the gibberish book. He wasn’t a murderous monster from a different Realm! Ridiculous! Mad. Popo! he raged. You did this to me! It’s all your fault! That’s why he didn’t have a real name. Baby G. Like a foundling in a basket. Baby X. John Doe. Why hadn’t she given him a proper name? The school had written his name as “Gee” when they saw Ms. Wei, saw that his papers identified him only as “G.” They must have thought she was illiterate. Did the teachers think it would make him more Asian? Because it hadn’t! When he’d finally asked his popo about his real name, she had been silent for a long time. You must seek your own name, she finally said. When the time comes.
”
”
Hiromi Goto (Darkest Light)
“
It used to be that you could get a lot of recognition by writing about Canada, as long as it was about small towns and nature.'
'Really?'
'Yeah. You could have canoes and the prairies or, also, sad women, very sad women who were fat or whose husbands had left them or something. There was a lady who wrote about fucking a bear, which was like a union with the land. There was a lady who wrote about mystical experiences she had at a cottage in northern Ontario. I was never sure what that was about. They were very important at one time, very stern and important. I had to study them in school. Anyway, he was one of them. He concentrated on the prairies, with a lot of native names, and wise native people, like there's a young boy with an Ojibway grandmother who will teach him the ways of the forest, sort of thing, and there's a lot of history, like a lot of the Riel rebellion for example.'
'The what?'
'History. And there's a lot of disaster, on the prairies, like people having to rebuild their sod houses after floods and so on.'
They drove on the humming highway for a while.
Then Nicola said, 'So you haven't answered my question.'
'What question?'
'Do you think he's any good?'
'Oh. The thing is... it's not, it doesn't matter. It's important. So it doesn't matter if I think it's good or not.'
'Okay. So it doesn't matter. So I'm asking you. What you think. Do. You. Think. It's. Good.' She slapped her bare thigh.
James paused for a long moment... He said, 'There's one Boben book, I think it's Cold Season, or maybe it's Comfort of Winter, which ends with the line, "a story which Canadians must never tire of telling." What do you think of that line? A story which Canadians must never tire of telling.'
She shrugged. 'I have no idea.'
'I'll tell you what you think of it. You don't give a shit. I'll tell you what I think of it. I don't give a shit either. But I also think it's the worst bullshit I've ever heard. I think,' he said, accelerating, 'that Ludwig Boben is a fucking asshole.
”
”
Russell Smith (Noise)
“
Interestingly enough, creative geniuses seem to think a lot more like horses do. These people also spend a rather large amount of time engaging in that favorite equine pastime: doing nothing. In his book Fire in the Crucible: The Alchemy of Creative Genius, John Briggs gathers numerous studies illustrating how artists and inventors keep their thoughts pulsating in a field of nuance associated with the limbic system. In order to accomplish this feat against the influence of cultural conditioning, they tend to be outsiders who have trouble fitting into polite society. Many creative geniuses don’t do well in school and don’t speak until they’re older, thus increasing their awareness of nonverbal feelings, sensations, and body language cues. Einstein is a classic example. Like Kathleen Barry Ingram, he also failed his college entrance exams. As expected, these sensitive, often highly empathic people feel extremely uncomfortable around incongruent members of their own species, and tend to distance themselves from the cultural mainstream. Through their refusal to fit into a system focusing on outside authority, suppressed emotion, and secondhand thought, creative geniuses retain and enhance their ability to activate the entire brain. Information flows freely, strengthening pathways between the various brain functions. The tendency to separate thought from emotion, memory, and sensation is lessened. This gives birth to a powerful nonlinear process, a flood of sensations and images interacting with high-level thought functions and aspects of memory too complex and multifaceted to distill into words. These elements continue to influence and build on each other with increasing ferocity. Researchers emphasize that the entire process is so rapid the conscious mind barely registers that it is happening, let alone what is happening. Now a person — or a horse for that matter — can theoretically operate at this level his entire life and never receive recognition for the rich and innovative insights resulting from this process. Those called creative geniuses continuously struggle with the task of communicating their revelations to the world through the most amenable form of expression — music, visual art, poetry, mathematics. Their talent for innovation, however, stems from an ability to continually engage and process a complex, interconnected, nonlinear series of insights. Briggs also found that creative geniuses spend a large of amount of time “doing nothing,” alternating episodes of intense concentration on a project with periods of what he calls “creative indolence.” Albert Einstein once remarked that some of his greatest ideas came to him so suddenly while shaving that he was prone to cut himself with surprise.
”
”
Linda Kohanov (The Tao of Equus: A Woman's Journey of Healing and Transformation through the Way of the Horse)
“
Page 141:
Group Polarization Patterns
Political anger and demands for privileges are, of course, not limited to the less privileged. Indeed, even when demands are made in the name of less privileged racial or ethnic groups, often it is the more privileged members of such groups who make the demands and who benefit from policies designed to meet such demands. These demands may erupt suddenly in the wake of the creation (or sharp enlargement) of a newly educated class which sees its path to coveted middle-class professions blocked by competition of other groups--as in India, French Canada, or Lithuania, for example.
* * *
A rapid expansion of education is thus a factor in producing inter-group conflict, especially where the education is of a kind which produces diplomas rather than skills that have significant economic value in the marketplace. Education of a sort useful only for being a clerk, bureaucrat, school teacher--jobs whose numbers are relatively fixed in the short run and politically determined in the long run--tend to increase politicized inter-group strife. Yet newly emerging groups, whether in their own countries or abroad, tend to specialize precisely in such undemanding fields. Malay students, for example, have tended to specialize in Malay studies and Islamic studies, which provide them with no skills with which compete with the Chinese in the marketplace, either as businessmen, independent professionals, or technicians. Blacks and Hispanics in the United States follow a very similar pattern of specializing disproportionately in easier fields which offer less in the way of marketable skills. Such groups then have little choice but to turn to the government, not just for jobs but also for group preferences to be imposed in the market place, and for symbolic recognition in various forms.
***
While economic interests are sometimes significant in explaining political decisions, they are by no means universally valid explanations. Educated elites from less advanced groups may have ample economic incentives to promote polarization and preferential treatment policies, but the real question is why the uneducated masses from such groups give them the political support without which they would be impotent. Indeed, it is often the less educated masses who unleash the mob violence from which their elite compatriots ultimately benefit--as in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, or parts of India, Africa, or the United States, where such violence has led to group preference policies in employment, educational institutions, and elsewhere. The common denominator in these highly disparate societies seems to be not only resentment of other groups' success but also fear of an inability to compete with them, combined with a painful embarrassment at being so visibly "under-represented"--or missing entirely—in prestigious occupations and institutions. To remedy this within apolitically relevant time horizon requires not simply increased opportunities but earmarked benefits directly given on a racial or ethnic basis.
”
”
Thomas Sowell (Race And Culture)
“
6. CHRISTIAN REFORMED CHURCH Nor is this movement confined to liberal denominations. The Christian Reformed Church (CRC) is still thought to be largely evangelical, and it was only in 1995 that the CRC approved the ordination of women. But now the First Christian Reformed Church in Toronto has “opened church leadership to practicing homosexual members ‘living in committed relationships,’ a move that the denomination expressly prohibits.”24 In addition, Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the college of the Christian Reformed Church, has increasingly allowed expressions of support for homosexuals to be evident on its campus. World magazine reports: Calvin has since 2002 observed something called “Ribbon Week,” during which heterosexual students wear ribbons to show their support for those who desire to sleep with people of the same sex. Calvin President Gaylen Byker . . . [said], “. . . homosexuality is qualitatively different from other sexual sin. It is a disorder,” not chosen by the person. Having Ribbon Week, he said, “is like having cerebral palsy week.” Pro-homosexuality material has crept into Calvin’s curriculum. . . . At least some Calvin students have internalized the school’s thinking on homosexuality. . . . In January, campus newspaper editor Christian Bell crossed swords with Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association’s Michigan chapter, and an ardent foe of legislation that gives special rights to homosexuals. . . . In an e-mail exchange with Mr. Glenn before his visit, Mr. Bell called him “a hate-mongering, homophobic bigot . . . from a documented hate group.” Mr. Bell later issued a public apology.25 This article on Calvin College in World generated a barrage of pro and con letters to the editor in the following weeks, all of which can still be read online.26 Many writers expressed appreciation for a college like Calvin that is open to the expression of different viewpoints but still maintains a clear Christian commitment. No one claimed the quotes in the article were inaccurate, but some claimed they did not give a balanced view. Some letters from current and recent students confirmed the essential accuracy of the World article, such as this one: I commend Lynn Vincent for writing “Shifting sand?” (May 10). As a sophomore at Calvin, I have been exposed firsthand to the changing of Calvin’s foundation. Being a transfer student, I was not fully aware of the special events like “Ribbon Week.” I asked a classmate what her purple ribbon meant and she said it’s a sign of acceptance of all people. I later found out that “all people” meant gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. I have been appalled by posters advertising a support group for GLBs (as they are called) around campus. God condemned the practice, so why cannot God’s judgment against GLB be proclaimed at Calvin? I am glad Calvin’s lack of the morals it was founded on is being made known to the Christian community outside of Calvin. Much prayer and action is needed if a change is to take place.—Katie Wagenmaker, Coopersville, Mich.27 Then in June 2004, the Christian Reformed Church named as the editor of Banner, its denominational magazine, the Rev. Robert De Moor, who had earlier written an editorial supporting legal recognition for homosexuals as “domestic partners.” The CRC’s position paper on homosexuality states, “Christian homosexuals, like all Christians, are called to discipleship, to holy obedience, and to the use of their gifts in the cause of the kingdom. Opportunities to serve within the offices and the life of the congregation should be afforded to them as they are to heterosexual Christians.”28 This does not indicate that the Christian Reformed Church has approved of homosexual activity (it has not), but it does indicate the existence of a significant struggle within the denomination, and the likelihood of more to come.
”
”
Wayne Grudem (Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism?)
“
How Long Will It Take? You can’t blame people for wanting instant results. Time is money, and quickness, especially quick OODA loops, is good. But when it comes to adopting maneuver conflict / Boyd’s principles to your business, there is a lot to be learned and a lot to be done. Consider that: • According to its principle creator, Taiichi Ohno, it took 28 years (1945-1973) to create and install the Toyota Production System, which is maneuver conflict applied to manufacturing. • It takes roughly 15 years of experience—and recognition as a leader in one’s technical field—to qualify as a susha (development manager) for a new Toyota vehicle.150 • Studies of people regarded as the top experts in a number of fields suggest that they practice about four hours a day, virtually every day, for 10 years before they achieve a recognized level of mastery.151 • It takes a minimum of 8 years beyond a bachelor’s degree to train a surgeon (4 years medical school and 4 or more years of residency.) • It takes four to six years on the average beyond a bachelor’s degree to complete a Ph.D. • It takes three years or so to earn a black belt (first degree) in the martial arts and four to six years beyond that to earn third degree, assuming you are in good physical condition to begin with. • It takes a bare minimum of five years military service to qualify for the Special Forces “Green Beret” (minimum rank of corporal / captain with airborne qualification, then a 1-2 year highly rigorous and selective training program.) • It takes three years to achieve proficiency as a first level leader in an infantry unit—a squad leader.152 It is no less difficult to learn to fashion an elite, highly competitive company. Yet for some reason, otherwise intelligent people sometimes feel they should be able to attend a three-day seminar and return home experts in maneuver conflict as applied to business. An intensive orientation session may get you started, but successful leaders study their art for years—Patton, Rommel, and Grant were all known for the intensity with which they studied military history and current campaigns. Then-LTC David Hackworth had commanded 10 other units before taking over the 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry in Vietnam in 1969, as he described in Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts. You may also recall the scene in We Were Soldiers where LTC Hal Moore unloaded armfuls of strategy and history books as he was moving into his quarters at Ft. Benning. At that point, he had been in the Army 20 years and had commanded at every level from platoon to battalion.
”
”
Chet Richards (Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business)
“
A couple of weeks after Mia’s bone graft surgery in January 2014, she received a letter from Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona on official United States congressional letterhead. Mia was so excited about the letter that she stood on the fireplace hearth (the living room stage) and proceeded to read it to the entire family. In the letter, Congressman Franks told Mia that he, too, was born with a cleft lip and palate and underwent many surgeries as a child. He told her he understood how she felt and told her not to get discouraged because he recognized how she is helping so many people. He invited her to Washington, DC, to receive an award from Congress for service to her community.
As soon as she had finished reading it to us, she exclaimed, “Can we go?”
Knowing how Jase puts little value on earthly awards and how he likes to travel even less, I responded with a phrase that most parents can understand and appreciate: “We’ll see.”
Mia immediately ran upstairs and tacked the letter to her bulletin board, full of hope and optimism. How could Jase say no to this?
Oh, she knew her daddy well. He couldn’t, and he didn’t.
That summer, Mia, Jase, Reed, Cole, and I spent a few days together visiting monuments and historical sites in Washington before meeting Congressman Franks on July 8 in his office on Capitol Hill. Mia’s favorite monument was the Lincoln Memorial because she had learned about it in school, so it was cool to see it “for real.” It was really crowded there, and people were taking pictures of us while we were trying to read about the monument and take photographs ourselves. Getting Jase out of there took a while because of so many fans wanting pictures--he’s very accommodating. That’s why it surprised me that this was Mia’s favorite site. I’m glad she remembers the impact of the monument and didn’t allow the circus of activity from the fans to put a damper on her experience.
Congressman Franks presented Mia with a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition for “outstanding and invaluable service to the community” at a press conference held at the foot of the Capitol steps. Both he and Mia made speeches that day to numerous cameras and reporters. Hearing my ten-year-old daughter speak about her condition and how she hopes people will look to God to help them get through their own problems was an unbelievably proud moment for me, Jase, and her brothers.
After the press conference, Congressman Franks took us into the House chamber where Congress was voting on a new bill. He took Mia down to the floor, introduced her to some of his colleagues, and let her push his voting button for him. When some of the other members of Congress saw this, they also asked her to push their voting buttons for them.
Of course, Mia wasn’t going to push any buttons without quizzing these representatives about what exactly she was voting for. She needed to know what was in the bill before she pushed the buttons. Once she realized she agreed with the bill and saw that some members were voting “no,” she commented, “That’s just rude.” Mia was thrilled with the experience and told us all how she helped make history. Little does she know just how much history she has made and continues to make.
”
”
Missy Robertson (Blessed, Blessed ... Blessed: The Untold Story of Our Family's Fight to Love Hard, Stay Strong, and Keep the Faith When Life Can't Be Fixed)
“
On a professional basis, when I’m asked what I want to be known for, my answer is simple: My work with children. I believe that every child is a leader and should be seen as such. When it comes to children, don’t define them by their behaviors. Visualize and affirm them as leaders. Leadership is affirming people’s worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves. We can raise a generation of leaders by teaching the children their innate worth and goodness, by helping them see within themselves the great power and potential they have. I am so pleased to see that thousands of schools around the world are now teaching the 7 Habits to children, teaching them who they really are and what they are capable of. We’re teaching them integrity, resourcefulness, self-discipline, the win-win way of life. We’re teaching them to welcome instead of distrust people who are different from them. We’re teaching them how to “sharpen the saw,” to never stop growing and improving and learning. This is being done through our The Leader in Me program that is being implemented in thousands of schools around the world. In these schools they learn that everyone is a leader, not just a few popular ones. They learn the difference between primary success that comes from real, honest achievement and secondary success—worldly recognition—and they learn to value primary success. They learn that they have this marvelous gift of choice, that they don’t have to be discouraged victims or cogs in a machine. Imagine the future if children grow up deeply connected to these principles, banishing victimism and dependency, suspicion and defensiveness—as fully responsible citizens who take very seriously their obligations to others. That future is possible. That’s what I want to be remembered for.
”
”
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
“
January 31: Norma Jeane is awarded a certificate “in recognition of the personal service rendered by her as a member of the [Sawtelle Boulevard] School Safety Committee.
”
”
Carl Rollyson (Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events)
“
Dewey espoused, school is “real life,” not simply a place to take courses, earn grades, amass credits, and compete against others for recognition. There
”
”
Will Richardson (Why School?: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere)
“
the school leadership team should specifically: • Build consensus for the school’s mission of collective responsibility • Create a master schedule that provides sufficient time for team collaboration, core instruction, supplemental interventions, and intensive interventions • Coordinate schoolwide human resources to best support core instruction and interventions, including the site counselor, psychologist, speech and language pathologist, special education teacher, librarian, health services, subject specialists, instructional aides, and other classified staff • Allocate the school’s fiscal resources to best support core instruction and interventions, including school categorical funding • Assist with articulating essential learning outcomes across grade levels and subjects • Lead the school’s universal screening efforts to identify students in need of Tier 3 intensive interventions before they fail • Lead the school’s efforts at Tier 1 for schoolwide behavior expectations, including attendance policies and awards and recognitions (the team may create a separate behavior team to oversee these behavioral policies) • Ensure that all students have access to grade-level core instruction • Ensure that sufficient, effective resources are available to provide Tier 2 interventions for students in need of supplemental support in motivation, attendance, and behavior • Ensure that sufficient, effective resources are available to provide Tier 3 interventions for students in need of intensive support in the universal skills of reading, writing, number sense, English language, motivation, attendance, and behavior • Continually monitor schoolwide evidence of student learning
”
”
Austin Buffum (Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles (What Principals Need to Know))
“
Elizabeth succeeded at last with Record of a School because she was performing a literary version of what she was beginning to recognize as her vocation in life: to nurture and promote the men she admired, helping them to achieve a greater range of action than she could ever hope to attain as a woman. Elizabeth didn’t receive the same recognition from Record of a School that she would have if it had been her school, her theory. But the men whose minds she hoped to capture would not have paid attention to a woman’s book about a girls’ school. And she might never have had the self-assurance to write such a book about a school of her own. Playing the role of facilitator—or “Recorder,” as she referred to herself in later editions—freed Elizabeth first to produce and then to promote the book more vigorously than she ever had one of her own, without appearing unfeminine or immodest in character, an aspect of her reputation that she continued to care about even as she habitually disregarded the niceties of dress. To
”
”
Megan Marshall (The Peabody Sisters)
“
Revering God Fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Only fools despise wisdom and discipline. Proverbs 1:7 As we look at the state of the world around us, at what has happened in the past and what we may face in the year ahead, there is much to fear: Will a sniper terrorize our community as has happened in other areas? Will the bottom fall out of the economy? Will my job be jeopardized? Will there be violence at my child’s school? Fear about possibilities like these can consume us, producing increased stress and even illness. But today’s verse tells us that there is only one thing to fear—God himself. This fear is not an unhealthy fear that leads to cringing and hiding as Adam and Eve did after they had disobeyed God. Rather, it is a humble and honest recognition of God’s beauty, sovereignty, and preeminence so that worshiping and serving him take first place in our lives. It is a healthy reverence that leads to intimacy and an understanding that the power of God residing in us by his Spirit is greater than the power of our fears or of our enemy Satan. A deep sense of awe about who God is leads to the true knowledge and wisdom we desperately need for our lives today and in the year ahead. LORD, develop in me a deep reverence of you that leads to life, wisdom, and greater intimacy with you. Open my heart to be teachable and to receive correction and discipline willingly. Grant that I would fear you, Father, and not my circumstances in the present or the what-ifs of the future. May I be so filled with your love that faith would replace my fear. WHILE WE MUST NEVER ON THE ONE HAND LOSE THE FREEDOM TO ENTER BOLDLY AND JOYFULLY BY FAITH INTO GOD’S PRESENCE DURING OUR LIVES ON EARTH, WE MUST ALSO LEARN HOW TO REVERE GOD IN OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH HIM. . . . INTIMACY CANNOT OCCUR WITHOUT RESPECT. John White
”
”
Cheri Fuller (The One Year Praying through the Bible: Experience the Power of the Bible Through Prayer (One Year Bible))
“
Whether they learn it from their family, school, or athletics, many people establish an identity by comparing themselves with others. When they see others gain power, information, money, or recognition, for instance, they experience what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called “a feeling of deficiency”—a sense that something is being taken from them. That makes it hard for them to be genuinely happy about the success of others—even of their loved ones.
”
”
Harvard Business Publishing (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself (with bonus article "How Will You Measure Your Life?" by Clayton M. Christensen))
“
Expressive association
In the United States, expressive associations are groups that engage in activities protected by the First Amendment – speech, assembly, press, petitioning government for a redress of grievances, and the free exercise of religion. In Roberts v. United States Jaycees, the U.S. Supreme Court held that associations may not exclude people for reasons unrelated to the group's expression. However, in the subsequent decisions of Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, the Court ruled that a group may exclude people from membership if their presence would affect the group's ability to advocate a particular point of view. The government cannot, through the use of anti-discrimination laws, force groups to include a message that they do not wish to convey.
However, this concept does not now apply in the University setting due to the Supreme Court's ruling in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), which upheld Hastings College of Law policy that the school's conditions on recognizing student groups were viewpoint neutral and reasonable. The policy requires student organizations to allow "any student to participate, become a member, or seek leadership positions, regardless of their status or beliefs" and so, can be used to deny the group recognition as an official student organization because it had required its members to attest in writing that "I believe in: The Bible as the inspired word of God; The Deity of our Lord, Jesus Christ, God's son; The vicarious death of Jesus Christ for our sins; His bodily resurrection and His personal return; The presence and power of the Holy Spirit in the work of regeneration; [and] Jesus Christ, God's son, is Lord of my life." The Court reasoned that because this constitutional inquiry occurs in the education context the same considerations that have led the Court to apply a less restrictive level of scrutiny to speech in limited public forums applies. Thus, the college's all-comers policy is a reasonable, viewpoint-neutral condition on access to the student organization forum.
”
”
Wikipedia: Freedom of Association
“
In her fantasy, the unknown actress cast herself as a celebrity coping with the chore of recognition and being pestered for photos.117 In reality, little had changed since she left school.
”
”
Tom Bower (Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the war between the Windsors)
“
At the root of adolescent sorrow and rage is the recognition that life is harder, more absurd and less fulfilling than one could ever have suspected, or had been led to suppose by kindly representatives of the adult world. The sentimental protection of childhood falls away, and, to one’s great anger, a range of horrible but profoundly important realisations come into view.
”
”
The School of Life (The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children)
“
In his 1920 book Schooling of the Immigrant, Thompson argued that native-born Americans must “assume fundamental racial equality” and rid themselves of the “delusion” that they constituted a “superior race.” He claimed that recognition of the “virtues of other nationalities” was what “we offer to the immigrant when asking him to join the fellowship of our democracy.
”
”
Cristina Viviana Groeger (The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston)
“
After you’ve decided on a place to study MBBS abroad, the following step is to choose the best medical university. MBBS abroad offers its students a plethora of alternatives and chances. Here are some pointers to help you choose the top medical university in the world to study MBBS.
Learn about the university’s rating.
The university’s experience in teaching MBBS
The university’s recognition
Fees for tuition and living expenses
Whether or if the university provides FMGE coaching
Indian cuisine is available at the hostel canteen.
Examine the number of Indian students enrolled at the university.
Admission Procedures for MBBS Programs Abroad
MBBS overseas is increasingly a popular option for thousands of students. It does not necessitate any difficult procedures or fees. Admission to medical schools in other countries is a pretty straightforward procedure. MBBS abroad offers a plethora of chances to its students. The student must send the necessary paperwork to us, and we will begin the admissions process right away.
The admission letter is issued once the following papers are submitted:
Results of the 12th grade with eligibility matching according to the university.
Passport photocopy
Following the submission of the required papers, the student will get an invitation from the Ministry of Education of the particular nation. A representative is on hand at the airport to meet the students, and another is on hand at the destination airport to greet them, The University provides lodging for its students.
The Cost of a Medical Degree in Abroad
MBBS overseas offers a viable option for medical education studies. The cost of MBBS in Russia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, China, Bangladesh, Guyana, and other such nations is substantially lower than that of private medical institutions in India. Furthermore, the cost of living in these nations is quite low for international students. These colleges also provide scholarships to deserving students.
Criteria for Eligibility to Study medical Abroad:
The following admission requirements are reserved for Indian candidates seeking admission to MBBS programs at any of the Best Medical Universities in the World:
Firtly, A non-reserved Indian medical candidate must have obtained a minimum of 50% in their 12th grade in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology.
Secondly, Medical aspirants from the restricted categories (SC/ST/OBC) can apply with a minimum of 40% marks in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, according to NMC/MCI criteria (Medical Council of India).
Medical students must take the NEET (National Eligibility and Entrance Test) starting in 2019.
”
”
twinkle instituteab
“
Our setbacks would take on a different meaning. Instead of looking like confidence-destroying evidence of our incapacities, they would much more readily strike us as proof that we were on the standard path to what we admire. We’d interpret our worries, reversals and troubles as unavoidable landmarks, not aberrations or fateful warnings.
Confidence isn’t the belief that we won’t meet obstacles: it is the recognition that difficulties are an inescapable part of all worthwhile contributions.
”
”
The School of Life (On Confidence)
“
In schools, where inclusion matters, competition is not equal. A focus on competition inevitably results in an overemphasis on rewards. I have sat in on too many awards ceremonies, year after year, where 1% of the students get 100% of the recognition. Olympic values are great, but introducing intense competition in a school means that the children who are going to lose know they are going to lose before they even hear the starting gun.
”
”
Paul Dix (After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana)
“
A host of scholars – many of whom, like Deloria, have aided petitioning tribes – support the ‘small pie’ theory. They believe that government definitions of Indians and tribes are simply part of the old colonial order, set to ‘divide and conquer’ Native peoples. These scholars see these government definitions as overreliant on nonindigenous models of tribalism, blood quantum, government rolls and censuses. Many of them call upon tribes and Native peoples to undertake decolonization projects, imploring Indian leaders to pursue a new acknowledgment agenda, on that is more inclusive and less based on national imperatives and Western epistemologies of race, history, empiricism, and science. The most accepted scholarly position, which has been called the ‘liberal-inclusive’ model for identifying tribes and Indian individuals, implies that the vast majority of unrecognized Indian groups and individuals are worthy of acknowledgment. This acknowledgment is not forthcoming, they say, due to a host of factors, including federal neglect, inadequate Euro-American recordkeeping, racism, and opposition from established tribes. Scholars who take this position find it shameful that marginal, unacknowledged aboriginal peoples are languishing today. Certain individuals within this loosely defined ideological school argue that officials should rely not on the current restrictive policy, but upon self-identification, community acceptance, and state recognition.
”
”
Mark Edwin Miller (Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment)
“
There is no foreseeable scenario under which Beijing will back away, either rhetorically or in practice, from its territorial claims in Taiwan and in the South and East China Seas. As Xi Jinping told the then US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis in June 2018, China will not give up 'even an inch' of its territory, which includes its expansive maritime claims and a large land area disputed with India. Within the Chinese system, any leader who stepped back from these claims would be committing political suicide. The internal sensitivity of the territorial issue helps explain the bellicose way Beijing handles these disputes outside of its borders. China constantly schools its Asian neighbours on its red lines in territorial disputes, all the while rapidly building up its military capability and regional diplomatic sway to entrench them. With the possible exception of Vietnam, smaller countries have taken to either submitting or swerving in the face of Beijing's pressure.
Yet it is far from game over, if history is any guide. Total capitulation in international relations is rare. Behind the scenes in Beijing, there has always been recognition that it was dangerous for China to bully its way to regional domination. 'The history of contemporary relations does not provide any precedent of a large country successfully bringing to its knees another country,' wrote Wang Jisi, formerly of Peking University, and for many years an informal government adviser. Wang pointed to America's experience in Vietnam and more recently Afghanistan, where its vastly superior military firepower couldn't drag it out of a military and then political quagmire. Wang was writing in 2014. Such strategic humility is rare in Beijing these days, either because the Chinese themselves have become cockier or because the country's diplomats fear being caught out of step with the temper of Xi's times. Nonetheless, the point stands. Beijing cannot bully its way to superpower status without engendering a strong pushback from other countries, which is exactly what is happening.
”
”
Richard McGregor (Xi Jinping: The Backlash (Penguin Specials))
“
Teasdale doesn't have money for an attorney," he said. "Especially one from Boston. Who are you, really?"
Sidney lifted her chin. "An attorney from Boston."
"You don't sound like it."
She lifted an eyebrow. "Like an attorney?"
He scoffed. "No, you have that droning drivel down. You don't sound Boston."
She shrugged. "I didn't start out there."
"You sound like Sawyer," he said with a nod toward wherever Sawyer had headed. She refused to turn around to find out.
"Well, I'm sure there are more than just two of us from---"
"You know him," Crane said, narrowing his eyes.
Sidney's tongue faltered, and she cleared her throat.
"You're from the same place, aren't you?" he asked. "The same little hick town."
"Because we both have an accent?" she asked, laughing, hoping it would cover up her lie.
"Because of how I just saw him look at you," Crane said, studying Sidney with a grin. "Like a lovesick schoolboy. Holy shit, you're her>."
Sidney's breath felt trapped in her chest, unable to move in or out, just held captive there. Sawyer had a her? And she was it? "I---I'm who?"
"The girl he came to town all messed up over," Crane said, crossing his own arms. "A hundred years ago. Well, well, well."
All messed up over.
After punching out his own father.
Defending her.
Damn it if all her carefully constructed and ancient defenses weren't crumbling around her regarding him. The boy who shattered her already shaky confidence. The reason she bitterly swore off love and dove into work, into making herself a hard and formidable beast. A beast without people skills but still. And now...
"We were friends in high school, yes," Sidney managed to push out, her voice sounding decidedly wobbly. "That has no bearing on Mr. Teasdale's case."
"Which came to you how, again?" Crane asked.
Sidney smiled. "I'll ask the questions."
Crane winked, and she so much wanted to slug him. "Nice deflection. What firm are you with?"
"Finley and Blossom."
"Blossom?" he asked. And it wasn't about the name. It was recognition. Shit.
"Yes, sir."
"His damn niece," Crane said, slapping a big hand against the ladder. "I forgot she was a lawyer. Damn it. She sent you."
Oh, seven kinds of hell, now this wall was disintegrating, too. She needed a suit of armor.
"Everything okay?" said a voice from directly behind her. A voice that sent shock waves to all her nether regions, especially coupled with thee hand that rested on the back of her neck. Crap, she needed more than armor. Sidney needed a force field.
"I work for her," Sidney said, ignoring Sawyer's question and fighting the urge to settle back against him.
"And you need to bring back the win," Crane said, chuckling.
God help her if she was ever up against this asshole in court.
”
”
Sharla Lovelace (The Cottage on Pumpkin and Vine)
“
London the next week. The night of November 21, a Thursday, was the eve of my twenty-fifth birthday. After getting home to my mom’s after practice, I collapsed on my bed, wiped beyond recognition, when a high school friend, E, called. “Hey, let me take you out for your birthday,” he said.
”
”
Michael K. Williams (Scenes from My Life: A Memoir)
“
Values: what makes our existence most worthwhile: safety, excitement, social recognition, happiness, self-respect, status. • Life goals: the achievements we crave during a lifetime: career success, financial security, travel, adventure, marriage, children. • Personality: a combination of character and temperament: honesty, mental acuity, kindness, generosity, bravery, commitment to hard work.
”
”
Susan Quilliam (How to Choose a Partner (The School of Life Book 13))
“
Use paper wristbands with positive recognition (like the ones that you might get at a festival or for slides at the swimming pool). They are very low cost and most can be written or printed on.
”
”
Paul Dix (When the Adults Change, Everything Changes: Seismic shifts in school behaviour)
“
I recognize the classic story elements from my own life. A family legacy of alcoholism. A parent who was a chronic drunk, another parent who was a chronic enabler. Hitting that awkward, anxious phase of high school, not knowing who I was or where I belonged—and consequently tossing back a beer at that party, or stealing a shot of my parents’ liquor before boarding the school bus. That magical melting feeling that immediately followed. That sense of almost primal recognition.
”
”
Lisa Gardner (Before She Disappeared (Frankie Elkin, #1))
“
Readers of this book will not encounter discussions of the Middle Kingdom Syndrome, China’s concept of tianxia (“all under heaven”), imperial China’s tributary system, or strategizing as reflected by the board game wei ch’i. These ideas are not entirely irrelevant to China’s contemporary international relations, but these references serve more the purpose of conjuring up some cultural disposition without explicating the interpretive logic necessary to show the usefulness or validity of the suggested extrapolation. It is about as useful as invoking Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, the idea of Fortress America, the analogy of American football, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s treatise on sea power, and even Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War to illuminate current U.S. foreign policy.
Any country with a long history and a rich culture, including China, offers contested ideas and competing, even divergent, doctrines and schools of thought. Indeed, strategic thoughts often embody bimodal injunctions, such as to be cautious and audacious, confident and vigilant, uncompromising and flexible, optimistic about eventual victory and realistic about short-term set back (Bobrow 1965, 1969; Bobrow, Chan, and Kringen 1979). Chinese diplomatic discourse and military treatises feature both lofty Confucian rhetoric on the efficacy of moral suasion and hard-nosed, realpolitik recognition of military coercion (Feng 2007; Johnston 1995)— just as contemporary analyses of and pronouncements about U.S. policies often incorporate both liberal and realist themes and arguments. Such elements can coexist.
”
”
Steve Chan (Looking for Balance: China, the United States, and Power Balancing in East Asia (Studies in Asian Security))
“
The universal plight – pretty much – is a sad one. We will almost certainly die with much of our potential undeveloped. Much of what you could have done will remain unexplored. And you may well go to the grave with parts of yourself pleading for recognition, or carrying a sense of failure that there was so much you didn’t manage to do. But this isn’t really a cause for shame. It ought to be one of the most basic things we recognise about each other: a common fate we face. It’s very sad. But it is not sad uniquely to any one person. It’s a strangely consoling tragic idea that imagination always, inevitably, outstrips the potential. Everyone is unfulfilled, and that’s just a consequence of the odd way our minds have evolved.
”
”
The School of Life (Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury)
“
Ever since the Prajnā-Pāramitā-Sūtras, or the scriptures on the perfection of wisdom, practitioners of Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna have sought to cultivate the recognition that all phenomena are empty (shūnya): Everything that we could possibly point to, talk about, or even merely think of is a conceptual construct. Hence, according to the masters of Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna, nothing that is composite has any essence (sva-bhāva); everything is “without self” (nairātmya). In its most developed form—that of the Madhyamaka school founded by Nāgārjuna—this teaching came to mean that nothing is independently real. In his Madhyamaka-Kārikā (24.18), Nāgārjuna notes that it is the Buddha’s teaching of “dependent origination (pratītya-samutpāda) that we call ‘emptiness’ (shūnyatā).” Everything arises in dependence on causes and conditions or what in modern ecology is known as the “web of life” or “interconnectedness.” When we think of a star, for instance, we must admit that it is not so much a stable thing but a very complex process of limited duration. The same is true of our body, the mind, and every other conceivable thing. But in order to navigate in the world of appearances, we artificially construct a cosmos populated by stable things, as if these had inherent existence. The problem with this is that we begin to take them very seriously—including our body-mind—and start reacting either by attracting or rejecting them. In the case of our body, we even go so far as to identify with it, and as a result we suffer all kinds of negative consequences, notably the fear of death. The cure, according to Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna, is to cultivate the vision of emptiness, realizing of course that “emptiness” itself is a mental construct and therefore empty of inherent existence. Practitioners who forget this truth are apt to take shūnyatā itself as a definitive view (drishti) rather than as an antidote to all abstractions, which is the intended purpose. This kind of thinking has led to accusations of nihilism: that nothing whatsoever is real at any level and that nirvāna therefore is a completely meaningless and undesirable goal. In fact, both nihilism and realism are erroneous. Already the Buddha declined to speculate about the nature of nirvāna; he simply wanted to point a way to its realization. The Madhyamaka school simply developed this fundamental teaching along rigorous logical lines, focusing on the art of refutation of all possible metaphysical standpoints. But the language of emptiness is not meant to be merely a game of logic. Its real function is to shatter the conceptual mind and guide it to the truth about phenomena. For this emptiness must not only be understood intellectually but experienced through the cultivation of wisdom and compassion by means of the ten stages of the bodhisattva path.
”
”
Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
“
Ever since the Prajnā-Pāramitā-Sūtras, or the scriptures on the perfection of wisdom, practitioners of Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna have sought to cultivate the recognition that all phenomena are empty (shūnya): Everything that we could possibly point to, talk about, or even merely think of is a conceptual construct. Hence, according to the masters of Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna, nothing that is composite has any essence (sva-bhāva); everything is “without self” (nairātmya). In its most developed form—that of the Madhyamaka school founded by Nāgārjuna—this teaching came to mean that nothing is independently real. In his Madhyamaka-Kārikā (24.18), Nāgārjuna notes that it is the Buddha’s teaching of “dependent origination (pratītya-samutpāda) that we call ‘emptiness’ (shūnyatā).” Everything arises in dependence on causes and conditions or what in modern ecology is known as the “web of life” or “interconnectedness.” When we think of a star, for instance, we must admit that it is not so much a stable thing but a very complex process of limited duration. The same is true of our body, the mind, and every other conceivable thing. But in order to navigate in the world of appearances, we artificially construct a cosmos populated by stable things, as if these had inherent existence. The problem with this is that we begin to take them very seriously—including our body-mind—and start reacting either by attracting or rejecting them. In the case of our body, we even go so far as to identify with it, and as a result we suffer all kinds of negative consequences, notably the fear of death. The cure, according to Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna, is to cultivate the vision of emptiness, realizing of course that “emptiness” itself is a mental construct and therefore empty of inherent existence. Practitioners who forget this truth are apt to take shūnyatā itself as a definitive view (drishti) rather than as an antidote to all abstractions, which is the intended purpose. This kind of thinking has led to accusations of nihilism: that nothing whatsoever is real at any level and that nirvāna therefore is a completely meaningless and undesirable goal. In fact, both nihilism and realism are erroneous. Already the Buddha declined to speculate about the nature of nirvāna; he simply wanted to point a way to its realization. The Madhyamaka school simply developed this fundamental teaching along rigorous logical lines, focusing on the art of refutation of all possible metaphysical standpoints. But the language of emptiness is not meant to be merely a game of logic. Its real function is to shatter the conceptual mind and guide it to the truth about phenomena. For this emptiness must not only be understood intellectually but experienced through the cultivation of wisdom and compassion by means of the ten stages of the bodhisattva path. The inherent selflessness or emptiness of beings notwithstanding, a bodhisattva is altruistically dedicated to their liberation.
”
”
Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
“
NIOS OPEN SCHOOLING ADMISSION BENEFITS FOR 10TH & 12TH CLASS IN GURGAON, BASAI, PATAUDI, BHIWADI
NIOS (National Institute of Open Schooling) Open School Education offers numerous benefits that contribute to a flexible and inclusive learning environment. Here are 20 key advantages of NIOS Open School Education:
Flexibility: NIOS provides a flexible education system that allows learners to study at their own pace and convenience, accommodating individual needs and circumstances.
Alternative Learning: It offers an alternative path to education for those who couldn’t complete formal schooling or wish to pursue education alongside other commitments.
Accreditation: NIOS is a recognized board of education in India, ensuring that its certificates and diplomas hold equal value as those obtained from other traditional boards.
Recognition of Prior Learning: NIOS acknowledges the knowledge and skills gained through life experiences, allowing learners to obtain credits for their existing expertise.
Inclusive Education: NIOS embraces inclusivity by providing educational opportunities to differently-abled individuals, dropouts, and those in remote areas, enabling them to access quality education.
ADMISSION OPEN FROM 1st ARPIL 2023-24
For more information for admission & and guidance please contact us on +91 9716451127, 9560957631
”
”
jpinstitute
“
There is one final step we must take. Our walls, they have to go. We have revised our textbooks and renamed our holidays to acknowledge the harms of colonization. We have begun the work of removing marble statues and changing street signs in recognition of the horrors of slavery. But do we not act as modern-day segregationists when we mobilize to block an affordable housing complex in our neighborhood? Do we not colonize the future when we reserve spaces there for our children while denying other children a fair shot? By deconcentrating poverty in schools and communities, integration blunts its sting. Simply moving poor families to high-opportunity neighborhoods, without doing anything to increase their incomes, improves their lives tremendously. Even if they remain below the poverty line, they become less “poor” in the sense that their exposure to crime drops, and their mental health improves, and their children flourish in school. Studies have found that each year that poor children spend in a high-opportunity neighborhood increases their income in adulthood—so much so that younger siblings experience bigger gains than their older brothers and sisters because of the additional years spent in a safer and more prosperous place.[1]
”
”
Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
“
Many Palestinians are unaware of how the occupation has been privatized because it makes no difference if a state officer or private individual harasses or humiliates them. Neither entity is accountable to those over whom they rule. I saw this constantly when working and traveling across the West Bank beginning in 2005. Many checkpoints through which Palestinians are forced to travel to access their schools, workplaces, or Israel if they are fortunate enough to get one of the few work permits handed out by the Jewish state, use facial recognition technology and biometric details to document their every move.
”
”
Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)
“
the Mahāyāna Buddhist master Nāgārjuna pointed out so vigorously, nirvāna is samsāra and samsāra is nirvāna. This grand spiritual realization entails the recognition that even while we are afraid of change and death and are troubled by the vicissitudes of samsāra, we are immersed in the freedom of the Spirit, or transcendental Reality. For the Spirit, which is devoid of any trace of suffering, is our inalienable nature. We are simply ignorant of this deep truth and consequently deem ourselves to be finite beings who are destined to suffer and die. In other words, it is our ignorance (avidyā) of our true nature that is responsible for our misidentification with a particular body-mind. In actuality, according to Yoga, our true identity is the Spirit, which is the same superconscious Reality in every being and thing. As soon as we take our first breath in a human body, this illusion is created and becomes more overpowering as the brain/mind is educated to function ever more in human ways. In the end, we might even come to the conclusion that there is no reality beyond the body-mind, and that consciousness is a function of the brain. The testimony of all great spiritual masters, however, is otherwise: What we conventionally call consciousness (citta) is merely the borrowed light of a sublime radiance that exceeds the physical and mental levels of existence. It is indeed largely dependent on brain functions, which, in turn, are dependent on the body’s biochemistry. But Awareness—or Supraconsciousness (cit)—requires for its existence no neurons, chemicals, or atomic and subatomic particles. It is, in fact, that in which all matter and thought arises and vanishes in every moment. That verity is glimpsed in higher states of ecstasy (samādhi) and fully realized upon enlightenment (bodhi), which is a permanent identity shift: Instead of experiencing ourselves as a specific individuated being, we realize our true nature as the superconscious substratum of all individuated beings and their perceived environments. Upon enlightenment, we cease to run around in circles. On the contrary, we stand at the still point, the axle hole (kha) of the great samsaric wheel, which continues to whirl round and round at dizzying speed for all those who are as yet unenlightened. Our own bodies, which are crystallized karmic residue, continue to live out their destiny (which is inevitable death), but “we”—as Spirit—are completely unaffected by the bodily processes and experiences. According to some schools of Yoga, the enlightened being’s supraconscious radiance gradually transforms and transubstantiates the physical body itself and creates a “body of light” or superconductive body (ativāhika-deha). This nonphysical vehicle defies the laws of Nature and is endowed with all kinds of extraordinary capacities. It is really an extension of the enlightened being’s unfettered mind, which has pierced the veil of illusion (māyā) and is perfectly attuned to the ultimate Reality. This superconductive body allows the liberated one to remain in the conditional realms and serve the awakening of others, without becoming subject to decay and death, which is the inexorable fate of ordinary bodies.
”
”
Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
“
Self-esteem” doesn’t exist in the Chinese lexicon, at least not in the way Americans use it. In China, a child’s regard for herself is rarely as important as a stark evaluation of performance. Almost as if childhood were an Olympic sport, the Chinese rank children on everything from work ethic to Chinese character recognition and musical skill.
”
”
Lenora Chu (Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve)
“
If a person systematically keeps his esteem enunciated and smoothies, then his life is within the acceptable range of accreditation by his opinions and its startups. It is propounded or predicated on the homologation, recognition, and respectability of situated works. This is neither a synthetic nor inconvenient position of life; this happens only from schooling, not pampering.
”
”
Viraaj Sisodiya
“
Wu wei means ‘not making an effort’, or going with the flow, but does not in any way imply laziness or sloth. It suggests an intentional surrender of the will based on a wise recognition of the need, at points, to accede to, rather than protest against, the demands of reality.
”
”
The School of Life (Philosophy in 40 Ideas: Lessons for life)
“
While a school’s branding plants the seeds of recognition and reputation, its marketing efforts waters and nurtures them, cultivating engagement and loyalty among students, parents, and the community.
”
”
Asuni LadyZeal
“
Formalism has received nothing but benefactions from intuitionism and may expect further benefactions. The formalistic school should therefore accord some recognition to intuitionism instead of polemicizing against it in sneering tones while not even observing proper mention of authorship.
”
”
L.E.J. Brouwer
“
The biography of John Wesley is surely unique. Here is a man born in the first decade of his century, who sees it through into the last; a man so far in reaction from the tendencies of his age that he seems a living commentary on them, yet so much the child of his age that you cannot think of him as fitting in with any other. A High Churchman in his youth, he makes for himself in the unsympathetic surroundings of Oxford an enclave of primitive observance and of ascetic living; such is his personal influence that he seems destined, if that were possible, to shake Oxford out of its long dream. Dis aliter visum; he undergoes an experience of conversion before his lifetime has reached its mid-point. A sensational conversion; the finished product of the schools becomes the disciple of a foreign visitor to our shores, by no means his match in intellect. Thenceforward, he must fight by other methods, and for the most part with other companions, that battle against irreligion to which he has dedicated his youth. He has made his own soul, but the battle is not yet over; he finds himself in conflict with the men who had been his closest comrades in arms, and who still share his own beliefs but exaggerate their emphasis in a degree which he thinks dangerous. A man who once seemed likely to do great things for the Church of England, yet whose influence, on the whole, was to damage her position in the eyes of his contemporaries; a man, nevertheless, who lived to see something of the old bitterness against him die down, whose age was cheered by public recognition at once welcome, unsought, and unexpected.
So far, however, there is nothing unique about John Wesley. A careful reperusal of the foregoing paragraph will show that it all applies equally to the career of Cardinal Newman.
Wesley and Newman-you might think that some elfin fate had arranged this odd consent between the stars of the two men, just so as to throw into relief the vast difference there was between them. Newman, so sensitive, so warm in his attachments, so revealing in This content downloaded from his literary confidences, Wesley, so unruffled by opposition, so half-hearted in his familiarities, so circumspect in his admissions; Newman, the recluse, Wesley, a lifelong vagabond in the service of his gospel; Newman, painstaking in his judgements, fastidious in his style, Wesley, leaping to infallible conclusions and throwing them at you with the first words that came to hand; Newman, such a child of the Renaissance, Wesley, so fundamentally a Puritan. And, deeper down, Newman the apostle of religious authority, Wesley, a cheerful experimentalist who in all the hesitations of a lifetime never asked himself by what right he ruled, or on what basis of intellectual certainty he believed.
”
”
Ronald Knox (Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion)
“
Practice the virtue of “intellectual humility.” Intellectual humility is the recognition that our reasoning is so flawed, so prone to bias, that we can rarely be certain that we are right. For kids in middle or high school, find the TED Talk titled “On Being Wrong.”24
”
”
Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
“
I hate and have always hated the word therapist. I detest the idea that my work, if it is work at all, is therapeutic work, that I am a member of what some of my colleagues call— without irony— the helping professions. My pride has sought always to refresh itself in the bracing chill of Freud’s most merciless formulations, his statement that a cure only is a renewed acquaintance with "everyday misery,” his designation of psychoanalytic work as a “school of suffering.” I reject the claim that psychotherapeutic treatment promises peace of mind, or comfort with oneself, however much these may be the happy by- products of the treatment— the accessory consolations, if you will. Rather than seeking to enhance self- esteem or contentment, the work strives for the opposite, to strip away all illusions of self- sufficiency or autonomy. At its most successful, this school of suffering is a curriculum in awe. The true object of this awe is the sheer, impossible fact of being here at all— to have precipitated like a sudden dew from lightless and dimensionless nothing. That is the horizon of the treatment, the recognition that we appear from nowhere under inscrutable stars, at a place and time we did not choose, driven by desires we do not choose, toward a death we do not choose, a death that chose us for its own even in our mother’s womb. Maybe this is only madness to you. Why shouldn’t it be?
”
”
DeSales Harrison (The Waters & The Wild)
“
It is easy to see, however,―as has been indicated more than once by anarchist writers, and lately by the French professor, V. Basch, in an interesting work, Anarchist Individualism: Max Stirner (1904, in French)―that this sort of individualism, aiming as it does at the "full development," not of all members of society, but of those only who would be considered as the most gifted ones, without caring for the right of full development for all―is merely a disguised return towards the now-existing education-monopoly of the few. It simply means a "right to their full development" for the privileged minorities. But, as such monopolies cannot be maintained otherwise than under the protection of a monopolist legislation and an organized coercion by the State, the claims of these individualists necessarily end in a return to the state idea and to that same coercion which they so fiercely attack themselves. Their position is thus the same as that of Spencer, and of all so-called "Manchester school" of economists, who also begin by a severe criticism of the State and end in its full recognition in order to maintain the property monopolies, of which the State is the necessary stronghold.
”
”
Pyotr Kropotkin (Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings)
“
In recognition of his standing and commitment to conservation and research, the University of Queensland was about to appoint him as an adjust professor, an honor bestowed on only a few who have made a significant contribution to their field. Steve didn’t know this had happened. The letter from the university arrived at Australia Zoo while we were in the field studying crocs during August 2006. He never got back to the pile of mail that included that letter. I know he would have proudly accepted the recognition of his achievement, but I also suspect that he would have remained humble and given credit to those around him, especially Terri, his mum and dad, Wes, John Stainton, and the incredible team at Australia Zoo.
A year later, in 2007, we are back here in northern Australia, continuing the research in his name. There is a big gap in all our lives, but I feel he is here, all around us. One sure sign is that the sixteen-foot crocodile we named “Steve” keeps turning up in our traps.
My life has been enriched by my friendship with Steve. I now sit around the fire with Terri, his family, and mates from Australia Zoo chatting about crocodiles and continuing the legacy Steve has left behind. Terri and Bob Irwin are now leading the croc-catching team from Australia Zoo, and Bindi is helping to affix the tracking devices to crocs, and so the tradition continues.
I miss him. We all do. But I can sit at the campfire and look into the coals and hear his voice, always intense, always passionate, telling us stories and goading us on to achieve more. The enthusiasm and determination Steve shared with us is alive and well.
He has touched so many lives. His memory will never fade, and this book will be one of the ways we can remind ourselves of our brush with the indomitable spirit of a loving husband, father, and son; a committed wildlife ambassador and conservationist; and a great mate.
Professor Craig E. Franklin, School of Integrative Biology
University of Queensland
Lakefield National Park
August 2007
”
”
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
“
I am irritated by the fact that so many concerned policymakers who oppose choice because of its potential impact on equity are already exercising choice for their own children. They are generally among the millions of well-intentioned citizens who have chosen private schools, gotten their children into selective or specialized public schools, moved to more affluent communities where the schools are better, or taken whatever measures were needed to see that their children qualified for classes for the gifted. Despite their recognition that such choices are likely to have negative consequences, they cannot resist. Writ larger, however, such individual acts have already fatally damaged most of our neighborhood schools and made change of the sort advocated by policymakers in place of choice nearly impossible.
”
”
Deborah Meier (The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem)
“
All right there, mate?’ Clark jumped and turned round. He straightened up and looked at Billy, recognition taking a few seconds. Billy’s hair was shorter now, and his face was tanned. ‘Christ, you startled me,’ he said. ‘What have you got there?’ Clark held up the jar by a piece of tatty string. ‘Sticklebacks!’ For a moment his blue eyes shone with excitement, then they clouded over. He ran a wet hand through his red hair and swept it off his face. His freckles were more pronounced than usual, and for a moment Billy saw him as an eleven-year-old again. He felt his throat constrict, which made his next sentence a strangled croak. ‘We had fun, didn’t we, Clark?’ Clark snorted and set the jar of fish down on a large stone. He waded out of the water and sat down heavily on the bank. Billy edged closer and then tentatively sat down next to him. ‘Don’t get too comfortable,’ said Clark. ‘Look, Clark. Can’t we be friends again?’ ‘Can’t we be friends again?’ mimicked Clark. ‘We’re not in the school playground now, Billy.’ ‘Why did you come here?’ asked Billy. Clark thought for a moment. ‘To reflect.’ He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a brown envelope. ‘Here,’ he said, thrusting it into Billy’s hands. Billy opened the envelope and stared at the contents. ‘You’ve been called up?’ ‘Military training,’ explained Clark. Billy knew it was only a matter of time. Since Parliament had passed the Act in April, all men aged twenty and twenty-one were required to undertake six months’ military training. He didn’t know what to say. ‘Clark, look …’ He passed the envelope back. ‘How’s Chrissie?’ asked Clark, looking Billy directly in the eye. Billy was taken by surprise at the sudden mention of her name and picked at a blade of grass. ‘She’s fine, thanks. In fact she’s with me now, over there.’ Clark looked in the direction of Billy’s finger and Chrissie slid out sheepishly from behind a tree.
”
”
Kathryn Hughes (The Letter)
“
Education has nothing to do with it. Long before I was born, the secret had found its way into the possession of Thomas A. Edison, and he used it so intelligently that he became the world’s leading inventor, although he had but three months of schooling. The secret was passed on to a business associate of Mr. Edison. He used it so effectively that, although he was then making only $12,000 a year, he accumulated a great fortune, and retired from active business while still a young man. You will find his story at the beginning of the first chapter. It should convince you that riches are not beyond your reach, that you can still be what you wish to be, that money, fame, recognition and happiness can be had by all who are ready and determined to have these blessings.
”
”
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich)
“
This raises a recurring problem in the history of Marxism, i.e., the relation of Marxism to non-Marxist trends. This, it must be said, is a problem that Marxists have not always handled very well. Most have unfortunately gone to the one extreme or the other, either accommodating themselves too far in the direction of recurrences of modes of thought superseded by Marxism and compromising the very distinctiveness of Marxism beyond recognition without sufficient reason for doing so or considering Marxism a closed world, with nothing to learn from other schools of thought and heaping abuse and invective upon anyone who has suggested otherwise.
”
”
Helena Sheehan (Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (Radical Thinkers))
“
Abt Draws from a trove of personal experience to create a vivid account of the people and place. Along the way, Abt addresses big questions such as economic reform and practical ones such as how to use e–commerce to achieve brand recognition in North Korea.
”
”
U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies SAIS .
“
Abt Draws from a trove of personal experience to create a vivid account of the people and place. Along the way, Abt addresses big questions such as economic reform and practical ones such as how to use e–commerce to achieve brand recognition in North Korea.
”
”
Jeff Baron
“
When she’s in a courtroom, Wendy Patrick, a deputy district attorney for San Diego, uses some of the roughest words in the English language. She has to, given that she prosecutes sex crimes. Yet just repeating the words is a challenge for a woman who not only holds a law degree but also degrees in theology and is an ordained Baptist minister. “I have to say (a particularly vulgar expletive) in court when I’m quoting other people, usually the defendants,” she admitted.
There’s an important reason Patrick has to repeat vile language in court. “My job is to prove a case, to prove that a crime occurred,” she explained. “There’s often an element of coercion, of threat, (and) of fear. Colorful language and context is very relevant to proving the kind of emotional persuasion, the menacing, a flavor of how scary these guys are. The jury has to be made aware of how bad the situation was. Those words are disgusting.”
It’s so bad, Patrick said, that on occasion a judge will ask her to tone things down, fearing a jury’s emotions will be improperly swayed.
And yet Patrick continues to be surprised when she heads over to San Diego State University for her part-time work of teaching business ethics. “My students have no qualms about dropping the ‘F-bomb’ in class,” she said. “The culture in college campuses is that unless they’re disruptive or violating the rules, that’s (just) the way kids talk.”
Experts say people swear for impact, but the widespread use of strong language may in fact lessen that impact, as well as lessen society’s ability to set apart certain ideas and words as sacred. . . .
[C]onsider the now-conversational use of the texting abbreviation “OMG,” for “Oh, My God,” and how the full phrase often shows up in settings as benign as home-design shows without any recognition of its meaning by the speakers. . . .
Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert in San Antonio, in a blog about workers cleaning up their language, cited a 2012 Career Builder survey in which 57 percent of employers say they wouldn’t hire a candidate who used profanity. . . .
She added, “It all comes down to respect: if you wouldn’t say it to your grandmother, you shouldn’t say it to your client, your boss, your girlfriend or your wife.”
And what about Hollywood, which is often blamed for coarsening the language?
According to Barbara Nicolosi, a Hollywood script consultant and film professor at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian school, lazy script writing is part of the explanation for the blue tide on television and in the movies. . . .
By contrast, she said, “Bad writers go for the emotional punch of crass language,” hence the fire-hose spray of obscenities [in] some modern films, almost regardless of whether or not the subject demands it. . . . Nicolosi, who noted that “nobody misses the bad language” when it’s omitted from a script, said any change in the industry has to come from among its ranks: “Writers need to have a conversation among themselves and in the industry where we popularize much more responsible methods in storytelling,” she said. . . .
That change can’t come quickly enough for Melissa Henson, director of grass-roots education and advocacy for the Parents Television Council, a pro-decency group. While conceding there is a market for “adult-themed” films and language, Henson said it may be smaller than some in the industry want to admit.
“The volume of R-rated stuff that we’re seeing probably far outpaces what the market would support,” she said. By contrast, she added, “the rate of G-rated stuff is hardly sufficient to meet market demands.” . . .
Henson believes arguments about an “artistic need” for profanity are disingenuous. “You often hear people try to make the argument that art reflects life,” Henson said. “I don’t hold to that. More often than not, ‘art’ shapes the way we live our lives, and it skews our perceptions of the kind of life we're supposed to live."
[DN, Apr. 13, 2014]
”
”
Mark A. Kellner
“
Trees constitute the environmental quality committee--running air and water purification service 24-7. They're on every task force, from the historical society picnic, to the highway department, school board and library. When it comes to civic beautification, they alone create the crimson fall with little recognition.
”
”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants)
“
Changing the racial order in schools calls for patience, tenacity, and a humble recognition of how much there is to learn. Longing to do something dramatic assumes that no significant work is yet under way but that, now that an enlightened white person is on board, things can really start happening.
”
”
Audrey Thompson
“
She nodded. “He’s still in love with you. I knew it back in October, when he ordered the security system and he made you his safe word.” I schooled the recognition from my face. “His safe word?
”
”
Elle Cosimano (Finlay Donovan Knocks 'Em Dead (Finlay Donovan, #2))
“
Recent breakthroughs in the field of neuro-science have shown that playing the piano is good for your brain. Dr. Gottfried Schlaug of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School spoke in 2009 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., on the brain’s “plasticity”—its capacity to change—and announced that even nine- to eleven-year-old musicians show more brain activity than nonmusicians when performing tasks that require high levels of perceptual discrimination. Playing the piano, it turns out, is especially effective in enhancing skills in such important areas as pattern recognition and memory. To your health!
”
”
Stuart Isacoff (A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians--from Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between)