Student Activism Quotes

Review your notes within 24 hours of class, and highlight any areas where you have questions or need more clarification.

The student is to read history actively not passively.

I entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer...education as the practice of freedom.... education that connects the will to know with the will to become. Learning is a place where paradise can be created.

In our studies we keep seeing how difficult it is for traumatized people to feel completely relaxed and physically safe in their bodies. We measure our subjects’ HRV by placing tiny monitors on their arms during shavasana, the pose at the end of most classes during which practitioners lie face up, palms up, arms and legs relaxed. Instead of relaxation we picked up too much muscle activity to get a clear signal. Rather than going into a state of quiet repose, our students’ muscles often continue to prepare them to fight unseen enemies. A major challenge in recovering from trauma remains being able to achieve a state of total relaxation and safe surrender.

I remembered what Morrie said during our visit: “The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.” "Morrie true to these words, had developed his own culture – long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted not time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the Week.” He had created a cocoon of human activities– conversations, interaction, affection–and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.

critical pedagogy becomes a project that stresses the need for teachers and students to actively transform knowledge rather than simply consume it.

Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.

In Japan, a number of time-honored everyday activities (such as making tea, arranging flowers, and writing) have traditionally been deeply examined by their proponents. Students study how to make tea, perform martial arts, or write with a brush in the most skillful way possible to express themselves with maximum efficiency and minimum strain. Through this efficient, adroit, and creative performance, they arrive at art. But if they continue to delve even more deeply into their art, they discover principles that are truly universal, principles relating to life itself. Then, the art of brush writing becomes shodo—the “Way of the brush”—while the art of arranging flowers is elevated to the status of kado—the “Way of flowers.” Through these Ways or Do forms, the Japanese have sought to realize the Way of living itself. They have approached the universal through the particular.

Student engagement is the product of motivation and active learning. It is a product rather than a sum because it will not occur if either element is missing.

Students who excel in active listening also contribute much to the formation of community. This is also true of students who may not speak often but when they speak (sometimes only when reading required writing) the significance of what they have to say far exceeds those of other students who may always openly discuss ideas. And of course there are times when an active silence, one that includes pausing to think before one speaks, adds much to classroom dynamics.

As I see it, the aims of education are to enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens.

All the people I ever admired and respected led balanced lives—studying hard, partying hard, as well as being involved in activities and getting a decent amount of sleep each night. I really think this is the only logically defensible way of doing things.” Chris, a straight-A college student

Even the most motivated and intelligent student will advance more quickly under the tutelage of someone who knows the best order in which to learn things, who understands and can demonstrate the proper way to perform various skills, who can provide useful feedback, and who can devise practice activities designed to overcome particular weaknesses.

Rules and consequences are not the best tools for classroom management. Giving students goals and rewards is more effective. It’s about putting systems in place that actively incentivize good behavior and passively decentivize bad behavior. In this way, as a teacher you can spend less time on managing behaviors and more time on educating and leading.

The third leg of critical pedagogy's three-legged stool involves something called "affective learning." How students feel in class shapes so much of how they receive content as well as their ability to develop critical thinking. Emotions matter for students and teachers alike. Social inequalities become important here via all the classroom practices that create privilege and penalty in the classroom, with all the feelings of empowerment and hurt that go with them. When we set up our classes such that some people dominate classroom discussions and others never say anything, we are actually teaching inequality and the emotions that it engenders. Social hierarchy is quite crucial to how students feel about learning, regardless of content and critical thinking.

You can’t just do whatever you feel like.” “You can’t just do anything you want.” “You have to learn self-restraint.” “You’re only interested in gratifying your desires.” “You don’t care about anything but your own pleasure.” Can you hear the judgmentality in these admonitions? Can you see how they reproduce the mentality of domination that runs our civilization? Goodness comes through conquest. Health comes through conquering bacteria. Agriculture is improved by eliminating pests. Society is made safe by winning the war on crime. On my walk today, students accosted me, asking if I wanted to join the “fight” against pediatric cancer. There are so many fights, crusades, campaigns, so many calls to overcome the enemy by force. No wonder we apply the same strategy to ourselves. Thus it is that the inner devastation of the Western psyche matches exactly the outer devastation it has wreaked upon the planet. Wouldn’t you like to be part of a different kind of revolution?

Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity-- to pose their own problems, to make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs-- you deny them mathematics itself.

Kids “knew” the TCM was involved because witnesses and news anchors had said so on TV. They confirmed it with friends watching similar reports. Word spread fast—conversation was the only teen activity in south Jeffco Tuesday afternoon. Pretty soon, most of the students had multiple independent confirmations. They believed they knew the TCM was behind the attack as a fact. From 1:00 to 8:00 P.M., the number of students in Clement Park citing the group went from almost none to nearly all. They weren’t making it up, they were repeating it back.

If you are disabled, it is probably not your fault, but it is no good blaming the world or expecting it to take pity on you. One has to have a positive attitude and must make the best of the situation that one finds oneself in; if one is physically disabled, one cannot afford to be psychologically disabled as well. In my opinion, one should concentrate on activities in which one's physical disability will not present a serious handicap. I am afraid that Olympic Games for the disabled do not appeal to me, but it is easy for me to say that because I never liked athletics anyway. On the other hand, science is a very good area for disabled people because it goes on mainly in the mind. Of course, most kinds of experimental work are probably ruled out for most such people, but theoretical work is almost ideal. My disabilities have not been a significant handicap in my field, which is theoretical physics. Indeed, they have helped me in a way by shielding me from lecturing and administrative work that I would otherwise have been involved in. I have managed, however, only because of the large amount of help I have received from my wife, children, colleagues and students. I find that people in general are very ready to help, but you should encourage them to feel that their efforts to aid you are worthwhile by doing as well as you possibly can.

only a few handfuls of students now enter Yale with an authentic passion for reading. You cannot teach someone to love great poetry if they come to you without such love. How can you teach solitude? Real reading is a lonely activity and does not teach anyone to become a better citizen.

How to study wisely: (1) don't skip classes; (2) study early in the day; (3) study in isolation; (4) keep your energy levels high; (5) actively recall the material and quiz yourself until you're completely satisfied.

In manifestation, we are not passive observers but active participants, weaving the threads of our consciousness into the fabric of our reality.

It is quite probable that the most original problem solving activity students engage in school is related to the invention of systems for beating the system.

The main student body had been told to report at a quarter to eight, so the early birds consisted of the active mentors and a few Avoxes tidying the hall.

cognitive engagement persists beyond moments of student activity and into subsequent lecture periods?

According to a 1995 study, a sample of Japanese eighth graders spent 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. The study's sample of American students, on the other hand, spent less than 1 percent of their time in that state. “The Japanese want their kids to struggle,” said Jim Stigler, the UCLA professor who oversaw the study and who cowrote The Teaching Gap with James Hiebert. “Sometimes the [Japanese] teacher will purposely give the wrong answer so the kids can grapple with the theory. American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don't learn by gliding.

In testing, being required to supply an answer rather than select from multiple choice options often provides stronger learning benefits. Having to write a short essay makes them stronger still. Overcoming these mild difficulties is a form of active learning, where students engage in higher-order thinking tasks rather than passively receiving knowledge conferred by others.

Franz shook his head. "When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands;they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.

My basic philosophy of teaching was straightforward and deeply personal. I wanted to teach the way I wished that I myself had been taught. Which is to say, I hoped to convey the sheer joy of learning, the thrill of understanding things about the universe. I wanted to pass along to students not only the logic but the beauty of math and science. Furthermore, I wanted to do this in a way that would be equally helpful to kids studying a subject for the first time and for adults who wanted to refresh their knowledge; for students grappling with homework and for older people hoping to keep their minds active and supple.

Solitude takes time, and caregivers to children have no time. Our children demand attention and need care. They ask questions and parents must answer. The number of decisions that go into a week of parenting astonishes me. Women have known for centuries what I have just discovered: going to work every day is far easier than staying home raising children...thoughtful parenting requires time to think, and parents of young children do not have time to think...One middle-aged female writing student spoke to me of feeling she lacked the freedom to "play hooky in nature"; it is an act of leisure men indulge in while women stay at home, keeping domestic life in order. Men often can justify poking around in the woods as a part of their profession, or as part of an acceptably manly activity like hunting or fishing. Women, for generations circumscribed by conventional values, must purposefully create opportunities for solitude, for exploration of nature or ideas, for writing.

What would happen if some invisible gas leak in the school cafeteria caused diminished brain activity in students? Can we safely assume district officials would evacuate the school until further notice? That parents would be up in arms? That media and lawyers would descend in droves to collect statements from the innocent victims? Can we assume that the community would not gather together en masse on Friday nights to eat hot dogs and watch the gas leak?

The key to classroom behavior management is to have a structured system in place whereby good behaviors are actively and abundantly rewarded, and bad behaviors are promptly and efficiently punished. Rewards should be like the air, ever present and always lingering. Punishment should be like a thunderstorm that is obvious and inconvenient yet quick, temporary and not abusive. The predominant theme of classroom management should be good behaviors and continuous rewards.

Of course, every time you have sex, it will not be identical: moods, spaces, times, touches, intentions all drift and mingle, forming new pathways, reflecting and drawing from past journeys, and ending somewhere that may look similar. But isn’t.

Politics of Friendship is, in other words, only a book between covers. For the real text, you must enter the classroom, put yourself to school, as a preview of the formation of collectivities. A single “teacher's” “students,” flung out into the world and time, is, incidentally, a real-world example of the precarious continuity of a Marxism “to come,” aligned with grassroots counterglobalizing activism in the global South today, with little resemblance to those varieties of “Little Britain” leftism that can take on board the binary opposition of identity politics and humanism, shifting gears as the occasion requires.

This was in [Orwell's] 1946 'Politics and the English Language,' an essay that despite its date (and its title's basic redundancy) remains the definitive SNOOT statement on Academese. Orwell's famous AE translation of the gorgeous 'I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift' in Ecclesiastes as 'Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account' should be tattooed on the left wrist of every grad student in the anglophone world.

Mental rehearsal and visualization can significantly improve physical abilities and performance by activating the brain in a way that cannot distinguish between real and imagined experiences, allowing us to rewire our brains effectively through consistent mental practice.

From thought-instant to thought-instant, no FORM; from thought-instant to thought-instant, no ACTIVITY—that is to be a Buddha! If you students of the Way wish to become Buddhas, you need study no doctrines whatever, but learn only how to avoid seeking for and attaching yourselves to anything.

The very definition of what it means to be alone has changed. To be physically alone is still relatively easy, but many of us struggle daily to turn off e-mail, computers, or cell phones... Our students...find requests not to text during these activities strange, annoying, and downright silly.

The single problem plaguing all students in all schools everywhere is the crisis of disconnection. Meaningful Student Involvement happens when the roles of students are actively re-aligned from being the passive recipients of schools to becoming active partners throughout the educational process.

Now, preschools are having Active Shooter Drills. Now, more high schools are installing metal detectors. Now, we’re talking about giving guns to the teachers so they can protect the students, but that’s like burning all the trees in the spring so the forest fire won’t take them in the summer. America, this is climate change.

You became conscious of precisely what you unconsciously intended to say only when you said it. You modify your speech depending on wether you are talking to child, a colleague, a student, or a dean. Not consiously, most probably. Paradoxically, speech is usually considered the case of conscious behavior - behavior for which we hold people responsoble. Certainly, it require consciousness: you cannot have a conversation while in deep sleep or in coma. Nevertheless, the activities that organize your speech output are not conscious activities. Speaking is a highly skilled business, relyling on uncounscious knowledge of precisely what to say and how.

The complex tactile movement of writing by hand stimulates our mind more effectively than typing. It activates multiple regions of the brain simultaneously, thereby imprinting what we learn on a deeper level. As a result, we retain information longer than we would by tapping it into an app.18 In one study, college students who were asked to take lecture notes by hand tested better on average than those who had typed out their notes. They were also able to better retain this information long after the exam.

The information and knowledge enters in your mind and grows on your head like a horn. You can use that horn to fight, argue, impress and compete with others. The spiritual knowledge is supposed to activate your Inner roots but your mind starts growing this too as a horn. That is why a student can never progress on spiritual path, only a disciple can.

Lectures aren’t designed to accommodate dialogue or disagreement; they turn students into passive receivers of information rather than active thinkers.

I discover that my skin can carry her, that I can know what she feels like without opening my legs, without closing my eyes, when I am walking down the street without touching her.

A quiet room, or a room led by a teacher, doesn’t promote student leadership, but an active, collaborative classroom does!

The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.

the key is to make sure students are actively engaged with the content and have something to do as they watch.

When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.

I was no longer capable of either enthusiasm or fear. Once an ecstatic idealist […], I had now passed - like the rest of my contemporaries who had survived thus far - into a permanent state of numb disillusion. Whatever part of my brief adulthood I chose to look back upon — the restless pre-War months at home, the naïve activities of a college student, the tutelage to horror and death as a V.A.D. nurse, the ever-deepening night of fear and suspense and agony in a provincial town, in a university city, in London, in the Mediterranean, in France — it all seemed to have meant one thing, and one thing only, ‘a striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing.’ Now there were no more disasters to dread and no friends left to wait for; with the ending of apprehension had come a deep, nullifying blankness, a sense of walking in a thick mist which hid all sights and muffled all sounds. I had no further experience to gain from the War; nothing remained except to endure it.

In a special file cabinet drawer or dedicated file box, keep six file folders for each high-school student. Label them: Course Descriptions Books Read Papers Written Recommendations Extracurricular Activities Other

I withdrew from active work among deficients, and began a more thorough study of the works of Itard and Séguin. I felt the need of meditation. I did a thing which I had not done before, and which perhaps few students have been willing to do,—I translated into Italian and copied out with my own hand, the writings of these men, from beginning to end, making for myself books as the old Benedictines used to do before the diffusion of printing.

And it turns out that the brain is malleable. What we practice, we strengthen. I practiced being an excellent student—it was an active practice, the way an aspiring athlete might shoot baskets. Like an athlete, I got better.

Universities today loudly proclaim their commitment to diversity. But in the meantime, democratization through public investment has been replaced by democratization through consumer credit, effectively transferring the costs of diversity back to the individual student and her family. The beauty of securitized credit is that it excludes no one a priori. By abstracting from class stratification in the present, it can accommodate all differences preemptively simply by pricing them at variable rates and deferring repayment to some barely imaginable point in the future. In principle, we all have access to a college education, no matter how much we or our parents earn. Yet, private credit does not merely obscure the effects of class; it also actively exacerbates inequality by forcing those without income or collateral to pay higher rates for the same service. When the long-term costs of credit begin to materialize and accumulate, students are once again confronted with the intractable resistances of class, race, and gender stratification. The divisions of family wealth reassert themselves with all their historical force.

I will be responsible for educating at least five students for three years. I will activate at least one water pond in my neighbourhood or nearest village. I will remove all enmity within my family and withdraw any court cases. I will plant five fruit bearing trees. I will not gamble and succumb to any addiction. I will treat male and female children in my family equally in education. I will lead from now onwards a righteous life free from corruption.

Ignore this advice and some people will discard your work as amateurish. You’ll never know because they won’t tell you; they’re too busy editing books, or teaching their creative writing students or reading better quality books.

And we're not just talking high school students; this practice of hovering often begins before they've learned how to write. Kids used to grow up in a neighborhood-- on the block or in the parks, playing games with other kids. These games had rules, but the kids themselves determined them, flexing their imaginations. Social scientists called these activities -- capture the flag, bike races, pickup baseball games -- "free play, " and it's been steadily decreasing since the 1950s. Scientists have also noted a correlation between the decreasing amount of childhood free play—any play not directed by adults—and the increasing rates of anxiety and depression among kids. As free play decreases, anxiety increases.

As the American Library Association presciently concluded in their 1989 report Presidential Committee on Information Literacy, students must be taught to play an active role in knowing, identifying, finding, evaluating, organizing, and using information.

Using your wealth to purchase other people’s loyalty is a game as old as humanity itself. Rich men use their wealth to attract women, unscrupulous employers use material incentives and disincentives to manipulate their workers, and wealthy countries like the USA use their national wealth to keep their citizens loyal to the cause of aggressive and genocidal Imperialism. But historical longevity and common practice don’t make the manipulation or exploitation morally or ethically right. Organized religions are inherently POLITICAL organizations. There is a fundamental difference between the financial enterprise and political machinations of an organized religion versus a mass of independent unaffiliated believers, philosophers, and mystics who do not support any organized religion. Christianity and Islam are known as proselytizing religions because they make an organized and systemic effort to gain converts, and they often provide services, products, or employment to attract converts. Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism show far less zeal about gaining converts, which is why you almost never hear about Jewish, Hindu, or Buddhist missionaries. Modern medical and nursing schools usually teach their students the moral principle that the provision of medical services should never be used as a means to proselytize or promote a religion, but that does not deter many Christian health care providers from doing exactly that. Most of the medical and charitable organizations based in Christian countries are fronts for Christian proselytizing activities.

On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a successful coup that overthrew the elected socialist government of President Salvador Allende in Chile. Ruling in the name of economic liberty, the Pinochet junta became one of the most notorious authoritarian regimes in recent history. With mass killings, widespread torture, and systematic intimidation, Pinochet’s forces crushed the trade union movement, vanquished the rural farmers seeking land reform, stifled student activism, and imposed radical and unpopular changes in schooling, health care, social security, and more. As Orlando Letelier, the soon-to-be-assassinated Chilean ambassador to the United States, explained in The Nation, the economic program and the repression were inseparable: social and political “regression for the majorities and ‘economic freedom’ for small privileged groups” went together.1 The military coup obliterated the citizen-led organizing that had made Chile a beacon to the rest of Latin America of what might be achieved by democratic, electoral means.2

activity is not the same as engagement. In too many classrooms, teachers worry about having the students active rather than having the students thinking, and even where students are thinking, there is often too little concern for what students are thinking about.

As students cross the threshold from outside to insider, they also cross the threshold from superficial learning motivated by grades to deep learning motivated by engagement with questions. Their transformation entails an awakening--even, perhaps, a falling in love.

The capacities that develop in the earliest years may be harder to measure on tests of kindergarten readiness than abilities like number and letter recognition, but they are precisely the skills, closely related to executive functions, that researchers have recently determined to be so valuable in kindergarten and beyond: the ability to focus on a single activity for an extended period, the ability to understand and follow directions, the ability to cope with disappointment and frustration, the ability to interact capably with other students.

I always start my class with a coloring assignment using crayons to color three pages from a variety of coloring pages pinned to the wall. Pick 3. Color them densely, trying to get as much of the crayon on the paper as possible. Students find it frustrating because crayons are surprisingly hard to work with, but they usually have some fun doing it. Until...when the finished pages were pinned to the wall, all of the pages were colored just the way I assigned— but all the joy was gone. Something went wrong. What was it? This: I told them to color hard in order to do it right. And go straight to using force— thinking I was showing them a short-cut—— this took away the way of coloring they would have found on their own. By telling them just how to do it, I took the playing-around away, the gradual figuring out that brings something alive to this activity, makes it worth-while, and is transferable to other activities. I realize now the best results came when I gave no instructions except, “spend time on this assignment.” That was 3 years ago. Why did it take me so long to figure this out?

Service members will only stay on active duty if they can provide for their families—and DOD schools provide a world-class education that has proven time and again to be an incentive for sailors, soldiers, airmen and marines to reenlist. Military dependents that attend DoDDS schools are highly regarded by prestigious universities the world over for a number of reasons, but there’s one that you’d have a hard time replicating in a stateside school system: they’ve lived overseas, traveled the world, seen and experienced other cultures, learned foreign languages through immersion, and they’ve gained an understanding of the world that you can’t get in a traditional classroom. Add a rigorous curriculum and a long track record of high test scores throughout DoDDS, and it’s pretty easy to see why military kids are in such high demand.

research suggests that all students are motivated to learn, as long as there are clear expectations, the tasks and activities have value, and the learning environment promotes intrinsic motivation (Wlodkowski & Ginsberg, 1995; Eccles & Wigfield, 1985; Feather, 1982; Kovalik & Olsen, 2005).

Like mismatched minority students, mismatched minority faculty have sought refuge in non-intellectual pursuits, such as community activities and campus political activism, in denunciations of standards they do not meet, and in complaints about the moral shortcomings of colleagues, or of American society in general. Given the stark alternatives of (1) losing one’s self-respect by accepting the prevailing academic standards and values, and (2) protecting one’s self-respect by repudiating those standards and values, it can hardly be surprising that many have chosen the latter. Clearly,

College was an extension of the Nazi propaganda system that had engulfed Franka and her friends in high school. Intellectuals were on the same level as Jews and merited the same treatment. Hundreds of professors across Germany were dismissed for being too liberal, or Jewish. Among them were some of the greatest scholars in the country, and several Nobel Prize winners. “Culture” became a dirty word. The universities were transformed into vessels for the Propaganda Ministry. There were no student activities save for the Nazi-sponsored rallies and pep talks declaring the greatness of the regime.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But

Reading is like skiing. When done well, when done by an expert, both reading and skiing are graceful, harmonious, activities. When done by a beginner, both are awkward, frustrating, and slow. Learning to ski is one of the most humiliating experiences an adult can undergo (that is one reason to start young). After all, an adult has been walking for a long time; he knows where his feet are; he knows how to put one foot in front of the other in order to get somewhere. But as soon as he puts skis on his feet, it is as though he had to learn to walk all over again. He slips and slides, falls down, has trouble getting up, gets his skis crossed, tumbles again, and generally looks- and feels- like a fool. Even the best instructor seems at first to be of no help. The ease with which the instructor performs actions that he says are simple but that the student secretly believes are impossible is almost insulting. How can you remember everything the instructors says you have to remember? Bend your knees. Look down the hill Keep your weight on the downhill ski. Keep your back straight, but nevertheless lean forward. The admonitions seem endless-how can you think about all that and still ski? The point about skiing, of course, is that you should not be thinking about the separate acts that, together, make a smooth turn or series of linked turns- instead, you should merely be looking ahead of you down the hill, anticipating bumps and other skiers, enjoying the feel of the cold wind on your cheeks, smiling with pleasure at the fluid grace of your body as you speed down the mountain. In other words, you must learn to forget the separate acts in order to perform all of them, and indeed any of them, well. But in order to forget them as separate acts, you have to learn them first as separate acts. only then can you put them together to become a good skier.

At her easiest, she was hard, because her brain was always working, working, working - I had to exert myself just to keep pace with her. I'd spend an hour crafting a casual e-mail to her, I became a student of arcana so I could keep her interested: the Lake poets, the code duello, the French Revolution. Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result. Amy made me believe I was exceptional, that I was up to her level of play. That was both our making and undoing. Because I couldn't handle the demands of greatness. I began craving ease and averageness, and I hated myself for it, and ultimately, I realized, I punished her for it. I turned her into the brittle, prickly thing she became.

Since no one can know everything, and most people know almost nothing, rationality consists of outsourcing knowledge to institutions that specialize in creating and sharing it, primarily academia, public and private research units, and the press. That trust is a precious resource which should not be squandered. Though confidence in science has remained steady for decades, confidence in universities is sinking. A major reason for the mistrust is the universities’ suffocating left-wing monoculture, with its punishment of students and professors who question dogmas on gender, race, culture, genetics, colonialism, and sexual identity and orientation. Universities have turned themselves into laughingstocks for their assaults on common sense (as when a professor was recently suspended for mentioning the Chinese pause word ne ga because it reminded some students of the racial slur). On several occasions correspondents have asked me why they should trust the scientific consensus on climate change, since it comes out of institutions that brook no dissent. That is why universities have a responsibility to secure the credibility of science and scholarship by committing themselves to viewpoint diversity, free inquiry, critical thinking, and active open-mindedness.

Darkness seems to have prevailed and has taken the forefront. This country as in the 'cooperation' of The United States of America has never been about the true higher-good of the people. Know and remember this. Cling to your faith. Roll your spiritual sleeves up and get to work. Use your energy wisely. Transmute all anger, panic and fear into light and empowerment. Don't use what fuels them; all lower-energy. Mourn as you need to. Console who you need to—and then go get into the spiritual and energetic arena. There's plenty work for us to do; within and without. Let's each focus on becoming 'The President of Our Own Life. Cultivate your mind. Pursue your purpose. Shine your light. Elevate past—and reject—any culture of low vibrational energy and ratchetness. Don't take fear, defeat or anger—on or in. The system is doing what they've been created to do. Are you? Am I? Are we—collectively? Let's get to work. No more drifting through life without your higher-self in complete control of your mind. Awaken—fully. Activate—now. Put your frustrations or concerns into your work. Don't lose sight. There is still—a higher plan. Let's ride this 4 year energetic-wave like the spiritual gangsters that we are. This will all be the past soon. Let's get to work and stay dedicated, consistent and diligent. Again, this will all be the past soon. We have preparing and work to do. Toxic energy is so not a game. Toxic energy and low vibrations are being collectively acted out on the world stage. Covertly operating through the unconscious weak spots and blind spots in the human psyche; making people oblivious to their own madness, causing and influencing them to act against–their–own–best–interests and higher-good, as if under a spell and unconsciously possessed. This means that they are actually nourishing the lower vibrational energy with their lifestyle, choices, energy and habits, which is unconsciously giving the lower-energy the very power and fuel it needs—for repeating and recreating endless drama, suffering and destruction, in more and more amplified forms on a national and world stage. So what do we do? We take away its autonomy and power over us while at the same time empowering ourselves. By recognizing how this energetic/spiritual virus or parasite of the mind—operates through our unawareness is the beginning of the cure. Knowledge is power. Applied knowledge is—freedom. Our shared future will be decided primarily by the changes that take place in the psyche of humanity, starting with each of us— vibrationally. In closing and most importantly, the greatest protection against becoming affected or possessed by this lower-energy is to be in touch with our higher vibrational-self. We have to call our energy and power back. Being in touch with our higher-self and true nature acts as a sacred amulet, shielding and protecting us from the attempted effects. We defeat evil not by fighting against it (in which case, by playing its game, we’ve already lost) but by getting in touch with the part of us that is invulnerable to its effects— our higher vibrational-self. Will this defeat and destroy us? Or will it awaken us more and more? Everything depends upon our recognizing what is being revealed to us and our stepping out of the unconscious influence of low vibrational/negative/toxic/evil/distraction energy (or whatever name you relate to it as) that is and has been seeking power over each of our lives energetically and/or spiritually, and step into our wholeness, our personal power, our higher self and vibrate higher and higher daily. Stay woke my friends—let's get to work.

The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, founded in 1947 and devoted to promoting and affirming individual initiative and “the American dream,” releases annual back-to-school surveys.48 Its survey for 1998 contrasted two groups of students: the “highly successful” (approximately 18 percent of American students) and the “disillusioned” (approximately 15 percent). The successful students work hard, choose challenging classes, make schoolwork a top priority, get good grades, participate in extracurricular activities, and feel that teachers and administrators care about them and listen to them. According to the association, the successful group in the 1998 survey is 63 percent female and 37 percent male. The disillusioned students are pessimistic about their future, get low grades, and have little contact with teachers. The disillusioned group could accurately be characterized as demoralized. According to the Alger Association, “Nearly seven out of ten are male.”49

He offered a less diabolic likeness of a complex and many-sided personality, and one that is both more plausible and more attractive. He said: Catilina had many excellent qualities, not indeed maturely developed, but at least sketched out roughly in outline.… There was a good deal about him that exercised a corrupting effect on other people; and yet he also undeniably possessed a gift for stimulating his associates into vigorous activity. Catilina was at one and the same time a furnace of inordinate sensual passions and a serious student of military affairs. I do not believe that the world has ever seen such a portent of divergent, contrary, contradictory tastes and appetites.

No, this wasn’t a 1960s student riot. Out there were the streets. There were no nice dorms for sleeping. No school cafeteria for certain food. No affluent parents to send us checks. There was a ghetto riot on home turf. We already had our war wounds. So this was just another battle. Nobody thought of it as history, herstory, my-story, your-story, or our-story. We were being denied a place to dance together. That’s all. The total charisma of a revolution in our CONSCIOUSNESS rising from the gutter to the gut to the heart and the mind was here. Non-existence (or part existence) was coming into being, and being into becoming. Our Mother Stonewall was giving birth to a new era and we were the midwives.

Finally I asked my friend Judy, who spent many years as a student of Sufism and who embodies fana—the self-annihilating love of God—as well as anyone I know. When I asked her to define spirituality for me, she thought for a moment and said, ‘Spirituality is the active pursuit of the God you didn’t make up.’ I loved that. I also did not know what it meant.

time, cost, or safety concerns. • MasteringBiology: Virtual Biology Labs offer unique learning experiences in microscopy, molecular biology, genetics, ecology, and systematics. • Choose from 20–30 automatically graded, “pre-set” lab activities that are ready to assign to students, or create your own from scratch. • Each “pre-set” lab provides an assignable

Finally, (and controversially) there might be a case – in monolingual classes – for allowing the learners to conduct some speaking activities, initially at least, in their mother tongue. Allowing learners to use their L1 in the interests of promoting talk and a sense of community may well be a necessary stage in the transition from a monolingual (L1) through a bilingual (L1 and L2) to finally a monolingual (L2) culture again. Certainly, if students are not used to having conversations in the classroom (in whatever language), they may become more disposed to the idea if there is an initial transition period of ‘L1 permissiveness’, or if tasks are first performed in the L1 (as a kind of rehearsal) before moving into the L2.

Today's offended students often show a marked degree of over-reaction to words that make them feel uncomfortable. They equate speech itself, and often the most innocuous comments, with physical violence. In this, they are simply extending how they were taught as children to respond disproportionately to damaging words. That's because the child protection narrative they have been raised on makes a particular feature of blurring the line between physical and psychological harm. For example, children's charities and NGOs constantly broaden definitions of abuse this way and, in doing so, actively encourage children to be suspicious of entirely harmless, informal, emotional interactions and tensions, even within their own families.

Sylvester says they sold their lefty student principles, if they ever had them, as soon as they left university and accepted an overpaid starter-salary in a morally objectionable corporate job offering lucrative career prospects and inflated annual bonuses which soon turned them into filthy-rich Tories with a hatred of the social welfare infrastructures they’re actively not contributing to through tax avoidance and evasion while hypocritically scorning the underclasses as the scourge of society who sponge off the state when they’re the ones who are the biggest scroungers on society with no sense of community responsibility other than a very self-aggrandizing, tax-deductible form of fashionable charity they like to call philanthropism!

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.

Every day the same things came up; the work was never done, and the tedium of it began to weigh on me. Part of what made English a difficult subject for Korean students was the lack of a more active principle in their learning. They were accustomed to receiving, recording, and memorizing. That's the Confucian mode. As a student, you're not supposed to question a teacher; you should avoid asking for explanations because that might reveal a lack of knowledge, which can be seen as an insult to the teacher's efforts. You don't have an open, free exchange with teachers as we often have here in the West. And further, under this design, a student doesn't do much in the way of improvisation or interpretation. This approach might work well for some pursuits, may even be preferred--indeed, I was often amazed by the way Koreans learned crafts and skills, everything from basketball to calligraphy, for example, by methodically studying and reproducing a defined set of steps (a BBC report explained how the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had his minions rigorously study the pizza-making techniques used by Italian chefs so that he could get a good pie at home, even as thousands of his subjects starved)--but foreign-language learning, the actual speaking component most of all, has to be more spontaneous and less rigid. We all saw this played out before our eyes and quickly discerned the problem. A student cannot hope to sit in a class and have a language handed over to him on sheets of paper.

I had a strong bias in favor of Russian scientists; many can be put to active use as chess coaches (I also got a piano teacher out of the process). In addition, they are extremely helpful in the interview process. When MBAs apply for trading positions, they frequently boast “advanced” chess skills on their résumés. I recall the MBA career counselor at Wharton recommending our advertising chess skills “because it sounds intelligent and strategic.” MBAs, typically, can interpret their superficial knowledge of the rules of the game into “expertise.” We used to verify the accuracy of claims of chess expertise (and the character of the applicant) by pulling a chess set out of a drawer and telling the student, now turning pale: “Yuri will have a word with you.

The new Anti-Drug Abuse Act authorized public housing authorities to evict any tenant who allows any form of drug-related criminal activity to occur on or near public housing premises and eliminated many federal benefits, including student loans, for anyone convicted of a drug offense. The act also expanded use of the death penalty for serious drug-related offenses and imposed new mandatory minimums for drug offenses, including a five-year mandatory minimum for simple possession of cocaine base—with no evidence of intent to sell. Remarkably, the penalty would apply to first-time offenders. The severity of this punishment was unprecedented in the federal system. Until 1988, one year of imprisonment had been the maximum for possession of any amount of any drug.

Whether blatant or subtle, brainwashing has become a major, time-consuming activity in American education at all levels. Some zealots have not hesitated to use the traditional brain-washing technique of emotional trauma in the classroom to soften up children for their message. Gruesome and graphic movies on nuclear war, for example, have reduced some school children to tears—after which the teacher makes a pitch for whatever movement claims to reduce such dangers. Another technique is the ambush shock: A seventh-grade teacher in Manhattan, for example, innocently asked her students to discuss their future plans—after which she said: “Haven’t any of you realized that in this world with nuclear weapons no one in this class will be alive in the year 2000?”75 These

Morrie.. had developed his own culture - long before he got sick. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature.. He had created a cocoon of human activities - conversation, interaction, affection - and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.

Deliberate practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement. Once an overall goal has been set, a teacher or coach will develop a plan for making a series of small changes that will add up to the desired larger change. Improving some aspect of the target performance allows a performer to see that his or her performances have been improved by the training. Deliberate practice is deliberate, that is, it requires a person’s full attention and conscious actions. It isn’t enough to simply follow a teacher’s or coach’s directions. The student must concentrate on the specific goal for his or her practice activity so that adjustments can be made to control practice.

When you have done some programming then you'll know how satisfying it can be to use a program that you made yourself, one that does exactly what you want it to do. Creating a Sugar Activity takes that enjoyment to the next level. A useful Sugar Activity can be translated by volunteers into every language, be downloaded hundreds of times a week and used every day by students all over the world.

Drug prevention and sex education might seem to be very different activities, and a program for gifted and talented students still more different from both of these. But that is true only where these programs are legitimately confined to what they claim to be. Far too often, however, these words are mere flags of convenience under which schools set sail on an uncharted sea of social experimentation

Most lecture-based courses contribute nothing to real learning. Consequential and retained learning comes from applying knowledge to new situations or problems, research on questions and issues that students consider important, peer interaction, activities, and projects. Experiences, rather than short-term memorization, help students develop the skills and motivation that transforms lives." [p. 7-8]

The difference between human dynamics and data mining boils down to this: Data mining predicts our behaviors based on records of our patterns of activity; we don't even have to understand the origins of the patterns exploited by the algorithm. Students of human dynamics, on the other hand, seek to develop models and theories to explain why, when, and where we do the things we do with some regularity.

It matters little whether you are the mother of active children who drain away your energy, an important executive in a major multinational corporation, a graduate student cramming for impending comprehensives, a plumber working overtime to put your children through college, or a pastor of a large church putting in ninety-hour weeks: at the end of the day, if you are too busy to pray, you are too busy. Cut something out.

They’d never take the standardized tests that they were prepping for. In a way, Amelia had said, this had led to a kind of renaissance in pedagogy. Free from the constraints of racking up high test scores or getting into colleges, students could learn for learning’s sake—which was how it ought to be. The tick-tock curriculum had dissolved and been replaced by activities improvised from day to day by teachers and parents:

I have found that educators yearn to be told something like this: There will be no more initiatives—at least for a time. Instead, we will focus only on what will have an immediate and dramatic impact on learning in your classrooms: ensuring the implementation of a common, content-rich curriculum; good lessons; and plenty of meaningful literacy activities (such as close reading, writing, and discussion) across the curriculum.

I don't believe some teachers consider whether their classroom instruction fosters the development of reading habits in their students. Reflecting on the landslide of crossword puzzles, dioramas, annotations, and reading logs assigned to their students for every book they read, teachers might realize that instead of encouraging students to read, these mindless assignments make kids hate reading. Primarily assigned to generate grades and give teachers a false sense that they are holding students accountable for reading, these counterfeit activities—that no wild reader completes on his or her own—guarantee that their students will avoid reading. If we care about our students' reading lives, we must foster their lifelong reading habits and eliminate or reduce the negative influences of classroom practices that don't align with what wild readers do.

Decir estudiante hoy en día no significa na, pero en una América Latina con los ánimos exaltados por la Caída de Arbenz, por el Apedreo de Nixon, por las Guerrillas de la Sierra Maestra, por las cínicas maniobras sin fin de los Yankee Pig Dogs —en una América Latina ya entrada año y medio en la Década de la Guerrilla— ser estudiante era algo, un agente de cambio, una secuencia de quantum vibrante en el universo serio newtoniano.

I’d fallen in love with Amy because I was the ultimate Nick with her. Loving her made me superhuman, it made me feel alive. At her easiest, she was hard, because her brain was always working, working, working—I had to exert myself just to keep pace with her. I’d spend an hour crafting a casual e-mail to her, I became a student of arcana so I could keep her interested: the Lake poets, the code duello, the French Revolution. Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result. Amy made me believe I was exceptional, that I was up to her level of play. That was both our making and undoing. Because I couldn’t handle the demands of greatness. I began craving ease and average-ness, and I hated myself for it, and ultimately, I realized, I punished her for it. I turned her into the brittle, prickly thing she became. I had pretended to be one kind of man and revealed myself to be quite another. Worse, I convinced myself our tragedy was entirely her making. I spent years working myself into the very thing I swore she was: a righteous ball of hate.

Paul was saying that in all of his teaching, in all of his preaching, in all of his missionary activity, the central point of importance was the cross. In effect, this teacher was saying to his students, "You might forget other things that I teach you, but don't ever forget the cross, because it was on the cross, through the cross, and by the cross that our Savior performed His work of redemption and gathered His people for eternity.

As with everything she did, Aimi excelled. Academically, she was in the top one percent of students in the state and was in the track team that had just won the nationals. She said she only went in for cheerleading because she liked the physical activity. It made sense though, Sam thought. Because of her bright, cheerful attitude, she was also incredibly popular. At times Sam felt slightly jealous of her, but mostly he was just immensely proud.

He begins talking to Himself inside of Himself, playing two parts as the student and the teacher or as Shiva and Shakti. ‘Hmm, why are things like this?’ ‘Well here’s why’. Becoming both, He has a dialogue within Himself. When we turn within we can still hear that rumbling, vibratory monologue. It is the fundamental vibration of the mind within. Whatever is in Shiva is in you, whatever divine powers are in God are in you. To truly get there you have to become unlimited. You have to let go of limitation, you have to let go of ego, you have to let go of ignorance. It is not a trivial process. The Mahartamanjari says: This is the way that the error of ordinary persons who think, ‘I am not the Lord’, is dissipated. This is an error with respect to the Self who shines always as the ‘I’. One repeats to them, ‘You are Shiva, gifted with the free power of Consciousness and activity: this world depends on you as a kingdom on its king. It is in you that the world shines, in you that it resides. It is you as Consciousness that the world has as its basis: from which it arises and into which it is reabsorbed. There is no world here without you. Only your awareness makes the world so for you. Contemplate this until conviction dawns. The Shiva Sutras say that such conviction is realisation of the Self. Shivo’ham. I am Shiva. All this arises and has its being in my awareness!

I was starting to remember the whole problem now: I hate these fucking people [people at Tea Party rallies, ed]. It's never been just political, it's personal. I'm not convinced anyone in this country except the kinds of weenies who thought student council was important really cares about large versus small government or strict constructionalism versus judicial activism. The ostensible issues are just code words in an ugly snarl of class resentment, anti-intellectualism, old-school snobbery, racism, and who knows what else - grudges left over from the Civil War, the sixties, gym class. The Tea Party likes to cite a poll showing that their members are wealthier and better educated than te general populace, but to me they mostly looked like the same people I'd had to listen to in countless dive bars railing against "edjumicated idiots" and explaining exactly how Nostradamus predicted 9/11, the very people I and everyone I know fled our hometowns to get away from. So far all my interactions at the rally were only reinforcing my private theory - I suppose you might call it a prejudice - that liberals are the ones who went to college, moved to the nearest city where no one would call them a fag, and now only go back for holidays; conservatives are the ones who married their high school girlfriends, bought houses in their hometowns, and kept going to church and giving a shit who won the homecoming game. It's the divide between the Got Out and the Stayed Put. This theory also account for the different reactions of these two camps when the opposition party takes power, raising the specter of either fascist or socialist tyranny: the Got Outs always fantasize about fleeing the country for someplace more civilized - Canada, France, New Zealand; the Stayed Put just di further in, hunkering down in compounds, buying up canned goods and ammo.

Type I homework test by asking yourself three questions: • Am I offering students any autonomy over how and when to do this work? • Does this assignment promote mastery by offering a novel, engaging task (as opposed to rote reformulation of something already covered in class)? • Do my students understand the purpose of this assignment? That is, can they see how doing this additional activity at home contributes to the larger enterprise in which the class is engaged?

Remember that, as the receiver is as bad as the thief, so the hearer of scandal is a sharer in the guilt of it. If there were no listening ears there would be no talebearing tongues. While you are a buyer of ill wares the demand will create the supply, and the factories of falsehood will be working full time. No one wishes to become a creator of lies, and yet he who hears slanders with pleasure and believes them with readiness will hatch many a brood into active life.

Some parents resist the idea of ADD for fear of seeing their children labeled and categorized. They do not like the idea of pinning a medical diagnosis on a child who, except in certain areas of functioning, seems quite well. Such fears are not baseless. Too often ADD seems no more than a judgment that characterizes a child as a problem student, incapable of normal activity. How people use language is quite revealing. People commonly say that this adult or that child “is ADD.” That, indeed, is labeling, identifying the whole person with an area of weakness or impairment. No one is ADD, and no one should be defined or categorized in terms of it or any other particular problem. Recognizing a child’s ADD should be simply a way of understanding that helping him calls for some knowledgeable and creative approaches, not a judgment that there is anything fundamentally or irretrievably wrong with him. This recognition should enable us to support the child in fullfilling his potential, not to further limit him. That even open-minded people may have difficulty coming to terms with this diagnosis is only to be expected. Our usual mode of thinking about illness (or anything else, for that matter) is not comfortable with ambiguity. A patient either has pneumonia or does not; she either has some illness affecting the mind or does not. There is a popular discomfort with any condition of the mind perceived as “abnormal.” But what if illness is not a separate category, if there is no line of distinction between the “healthy” and the “nonheaithy,” if the “abnormality” is just a greater concentration in an individual of disturbed brain processes found in everyone? Then perhaps there are no fixed, immutable brain disorders, and we could all be vulnerable to mental breakdowns or malfunctions under the pressure of stressful circumstances. We could all go crazy. Maybe we already have.

Congress would later find that though bureau officials undertook COINTELPRO in the name of national security, its purpose was “preventing or disrupting the exercise of First Amendment rights.” The program took tactics developed for use against foreign adversaries during war and applied them to citizens: leaking phony allegations, sending anonymous poison-pen letters, interfering with jobs, having people arrested on drug charges, distributing misinformation, and encouraging violence. “In essence, the Bureau took the law into its own hands, conducting a sophisticated vigilante operation against domestic enemies,” the committee said. “Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that. The unexpressed major premise of the programs was a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.

It’s not that I hate high school—I enjoy learning, and for the most part my classes are interesting enough, with engaging teachers—I just don’t quite fit in as a typical high-school student. They’re just…not interesting. Or engaging. They say stupid shit, while doing or having just done stupid shit. So I make a concerted effort to stick to myself. It gets lonely sometimes, but it’s better to be alone than to be part of behavior and activities that will only leave me ashamed, disgusted, and/or in trouble. But

Ironically, the student who is dyslexic is often working two or three times harder just to keep up with her peers. The double whammy is that the child arrives home exhausted from the day at school and has zero reserves left to do homework or participate in family activities. As a result, the child can be seen as lazy because she comes home and doesn’t want to do anything. If you can provide your child with the accommodations and supports she needs in school, she’ll have the energy to participate like any other kid.

I know a lot of people like me. People who work overtime, never turning down additional work for fear of disappointing their boss. They're available to friends and loved ones twenty-four seven, providing an unending stream of support and advice. They care about dozens and dozens of social issues yet always feel guilty about not doing "enough" to address them, because there simply aren't enough hours in the day. These types of people often try to cram every waking moment with activity. After a long day at work, they try to teach themselves Spanish on the Duolingo app on their phone, for example, or they try to learn how to code in Python on sites like Code Academy. People like this -- people like me -- are doing everything society has taught us we have to do if we want to be virtuous and deserving of respect. We're committed employees, passionate activists, considerate friends, and perpetual students. We worry about the future. We plan ahead. We try to reduce our anxiety by controlling the things we can control -- and we push ourselves to work very, very hard. Most of us spend the majority of our days feeling tired, overwhelmed, and disappointed in ourselves, certain we've come up short. No matter how much we've accomplished or how hard we've worked, we never believe we've done enough to feel satisfied or at peace. We never think we deserve a break. Through all the burnouts, stress-related illnesses, and sleep-deprived weeks we endure, we remain convinced that having limitations makes us "lazy" -- and that laziness is always a bad thing.

In the case of Tunisia, it was indeed this single act that sparked what had been long-standing active protest movements and moved them forward. But that's not so unusual. Let's look at our own history. Take the civil rights movement. There had been plenty of concern and activism about violent repression of blacks in the South, and it took a couple of students sitting in at a lunch counter to really set it off. Small acts can make a big difference when there is a background of concern, understanding, and preliminary activism.

In the Vassar study, there was a group of students who, in Senior year, neither suffered conflict to the point of breakdown, nor stopped their own growth to flee into marriage. These were students who were preparing for a profession. They gained in college interests deep enough to commit themselves to a career. The study revealed that virtually all such students with professional ambitions plan to marry, but marriage is for them an activity in which they will voluntarily choose to participate, rather than something that is necessary for any sense of personal identity. Such students have a clear sense of direction, a greater degree of independence and self-confidence than most. They maybe be engaged or deeply in-love, but they do not feel they must sacrifice their own individualities or their career ambitions if they wish to marry. With these girls, the psychologists did not get the impression --as they did with so many-- that interest in men and in marriage is a kind of defense against intellectual development. Their interest in a particular man was real.

Lemons had us write on index cards the different activities (or modules) that we usually did in class, one per card. That was the first time I had written out a list of my teaching modules—an activity that was eye-opening enough on its own. Then she asked us to consider an upcoming class, and to think about what we wanted students to accomplish during it. Finally, she had us take the cards and use them to build that class period. It was a fascinating visual activity to put the cards in different orders, seeing how each of them would lead to

In many cases, this is due to simple execution failures. But in other cases, the institutions behave as though they were designed to achieve other, unacknowledged goals. Take school, for instance. We say that the function of school is to teach valuable skills and knowledge. Yet students don’t remember most of what they’re taught, and most of what they do remember isn’t very useful. Furthermore, our best research says that schools are structured in ways that actively interfere with the learning process, such as early wake-up times and frequent testing.

Merrill Meewee knew his stones. As a boy in Kenya, skipping stones was his favorite free-time activity. There had been an abundance of saucer-shaped missiles on the banks of his father’s own fishpond. Fat, river-smoothed disks, they skipped ten, twelve, sixteen times before slipping beneath the surface with a watery plop. His father, a man of little wealth but great forbearance, was not pleased with his boy’s solitary pastime, but he never ordered him to stop. Instead, he asked the boy how many stones he thought the pond could hold. I don’t know, Meewee remembered answering. A hundred thousand? Oh, such a big number! And how many stones do you suppose you’ve thrown already? Merrill, who was an excellent student, calculated the number of stones he might have tossed in an hour and how many free hours were left each day after school and chores, how many afternoons in how many years since he first discovered the sport. I would estimate 14,850, he informed his father with a certain amount of swagger. His father was impressed. So many? And all of them have gone to the bottom? Of course they’ve gone to the bottom, he had said, embarrassed by his father’s apparent ignorance. They’re stones. They’re heavier than water. And heavier than fishes? Of course heavier than fishes. Good, good, his father concluded, patting him on the head. Keep at it, son, and soon I won’t have to work so hard. Father? It’s true. When you fill up my pond with your stones, I won’t need nets and plungers to harvest the fish. I’ll simply wade up to my ankles and pick them like squash. It was a lesson in diplomacy, as much as aquaculture, and it stayed with him all these years.

More often than not, these attempts at sociability ended in painful silence. His old friends, who remembered him as a brilliant student and wickedly funny conversationalist, were appalled by what had happened to him. Tom had slipped from the ranks of the anointed, and his downfall seemed to shake their confidence in themselves, to open the door onto a new pessimism about their own prospects in life. It didn't help matters that Tom had gained weight, that his former plumpness now verged on an embarrassing rotundity, but even more disturbing was the fact that he didn't seem to have any plans, that he never spoke about how he was going to undo the damage he'd done to himself and get back on his feet. Whenever he mentioned his new job, he described it in odd, almost religious terms, speculating on such questions as spiritual strength and the importance of finding one's path through patience and humility, and this confused them and made them fidget in their chairs. Tom's intelligence had not been dulled by the job, but no one wanted to hear what he had to say anymore, least of all the women he talked to, who expected young men to be full of brave ideas and clever schemes about how they were going to conquer the world. Tom put them off with his doubts and soul-searchings, his obscure disquisitions on the nature of reality, his hesitant manner. It was bad enough that he drove a taxi for a living, but a philosophical taxi driver who dressed in army-navy clothes and carried a paunch around his middle was a bit too much to ask. He was a pleasant guy, of course, and no one actively disliked him, but he wasn't a legitimate candidate?not for marriage, not even for a crazy fling.

It baffled me that so many students disliked math and struggled with it. I figured they had either a parent who didn’t like math and told them it was hard or a teacher who didn’t have the passion or the patience to make math relevant to their lives. At home I never let my girls tell me math or any other subject was difficult. From the time they were very young, I always tried to incorporate learning, whether it was math, spelling, or creative activities, such as sewing and working puzzles, into their lives. I tried to show them how what they were learning in school connected to our lives outside school. Of course, I had them counting everything—the stars in the sky, the steps from the bottom to the top of the Carson mansion, or the people in church on any given Sunday. On road trips I’d have them add the numbers on the license plates of cars traveling in front of us. Or I’d have them cover their eyes and spell the state. If they were helping in the kitchen, I might write out a recipe, give it to them, and ask them to figure out how much of each ingredient we would need if I wanted to make half of that batch of cookies or biscuits.

The Court has been busy in recent years approving mandatory drug testing of employees and students, upholding random searches and sweeps of public schools and students, permitting police to obtain search warrants based on an anonymous informant’s tip, expanding the government’s wiretapping authority, legitimating the use of paid, unidentified informants by police and prosecutors, approving the use of helicopter surveillance of homes without a warrant, and allowing the forfeiture of cash, homes, and other property based on unproven allegations of illegal drug activity.

It seems obvious that throughout history, as one of the few professions open to women, midwifery must have attracted women of unusual intelligence, competence, and self-respect§. While acknowledging that many remedies used by the witches were “purely magical” and worked, if at all, by suggestion, Ehrenreich and English point out an important distinction between the witch-healer and the medical man of the late Middle Ages: . . . the witch was an empiricist; She relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but actively inquiring. She trusted her ability to find ways to deal with disease, pregnancy and childbirth—whether through medication or charms. In short, her magic was the science of her time. By contrast: There was nothing in late mediaeval medical training that conflicted with church doctrine, and little that we would recognize as “science”. Medical students . . . spent years studying Plato, Aristotle and Christian theology. . . . While a student, a doctor rarely saw any patients at all, and no experimentation of any kind was taught. . . . Confronted with a sick person, the university-trained physician had little to go on but superstition. . . . Such was the state of medical “science” at the time when witch-healers were persecuted for being practitioners of “magic”.15 Since asepsis and the transmission of disease through bacteria and unwashed hands was utterly unknown until the latter part of the nineteenth century, dirt was a presence in any medical situation—real dirt, not the misogynistic dirt associated by males with the female body. The midwife, who attended only women in labor, carried fewer disease bacteria with her than the physician.

Assembly-line instruction is what hap-pens in many schools. Learning is separated from productive activity. Kids are separated from families and most other adults and have little agency to decide how and when they’ll plug into the learning process. The content is decided by experts far removed from the community. Kids may have no idea why they’re learning this content, nor any idea how to apply it, but the broader society has deemed it important. Students are expected to ingest the content and later they are sorted ac-cording to how accurately they can parrot back this content on exams.

If a stranger saying we are "dependable" activates the reward system, imagine what praise from a boss, a parent, or even an unaccomplished slightly older graduate student will do. Of course, we all know that praise is a good thing, as long as it isn't too unconditional, but until very recently, we had no idea that praise taps into the same reinforcement system in the brain that enables cheese to help rats learn to solve mazes. And positive social regard is a renewable resource. Rather than having less of something after using it, when we let others know we value them, both parties have more.

But there's only one other person besides me in the Monterey Bay area who could pick up on spectral sound waves-especially now that Jesse is going to school so far away-and that person happened to be away at a seminarian retreat in New Mexico. I knew because Father Dominic likes to keep his present (and former) students up to date on his daily activities on Facebook. The day my old high school principal started his own Facebook account was the day I swore off social media forever. So far this has worked out fine since I prefer face-to-face interactions. It's easier to tell when people are lying.

After Luther’s revolution, Protestant states began to show signs of greater economic dynamism. Why was this? One answer is that, despite Luther’s desire to purify the Church, the Reformation led to a large-scale reallocation of resources from religious to secular activities. Two thirds of monasteries were closed in the Protestant territories of Germany, the lands and other assets mostly appropriated by secular rulers and sold to wealthy subjects, as also happened in England. A rising share of university students gave up thoughts of the monastic life, turning their attention to more worldly vocations.

Our schools cannot be improved by the blind worship of data. Data are only as good as the measures used to create the numbers and good as the underlying activities. If the measures are shoddy, then the data will be shoddy. If the data reflect mainly the amount of time invested in test preparation activities, then the data are worthless. If the data are based on dumbed-down state tests, then the data are meaningless. A good accountability system, whether for schools, teachers, or students, must include a variety of measures, not only test scores...our schools should be “data-informed”, “not data driven".

Drama and activities of that sort have nothing to do with your academic work, you find your own time to do them. As a result, such pursuits flower, fruit and flourish as nowhere else. If I had had to submit to some drama teacher casting me in plays, directing me or telling me how it was done I should have withered on the vine. The beauty of our way was that everyone was learning as they went along. The actors and directors were all students, as were the lighting, sound, set construction, costume, stage management, production crew, front of house and administration. All were undergraduates saying, ‘Oh, this looks like fun.

Many doctors and educators have not yet reached this understanding. They assume that a high level of intelligence confers protection against attention problems, and they do not recognize that a student can be very bright and focus very well for a few specific activities, including standardized tests, and still have significant difficulty in deploying his impressive intelligence for most activities of daily life, including some that the student himself considers quite important. Often these difficulties are taken as problems resulting from boredom or lack of willpower, when they are actually problems with chemical dynamics of the brain.

Where does South Africa find herself now in the post-apartheid dilemma? Is this country still a believer in the country of blood, milk and honey, does she seek perfection in the reports of minorities, the land of thirst, of afro and political activists who were active in ‘the struggle’ what happened to their children, their wives and their husbands? There are no longer straitjackets and cold showers in the lunatic asylum. Banging their heads against the walls. Banging, banging and banging away like an empty drum. Every generation wants to change the world. There must be unification of some kind. Students brought together by protest marches.

Quick. Don’t think about it. Imagine an English professor in your head. No, a male English professor. What do you see? Tweeds? Elbow patches? A high pale forehead with thinning hair combed over? Eyeglasses with designer frames? Oh God, do you see a cravat? His fingernails are clean and white. His palms are silky and uncalloused. If you grip him by his upper arm, your fingers plunge to the bone. He prefers wine to beer. But when he drinks beer, he favors pretentious microbrews that he sniffs and swirls, while waxing on about oaky hints and lemony essences. You are imagining a man, yes, but one whose masculinity is so refined, so sanded down and smoothed away, that it’s hard to see how it differs from femininity. It has been said that the humanities have been feminized. In English departments, where the demographics of professors and students now skew strongly female, this is literally so. But English departments have also been feminized in spirit. There’s a sense in which if you are a guy who wants to be a literature professor, it’s wise to actively suppress all of the offensive cues that you are actually a guy. Or at least that’s how it has always seemed to me. And I think that’s how it seems to most people. In the public mind, teaching English is about as manly as styling hair.

Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.

Nurture parent-teacher relationships. When students feel that parents are talking negatively about their teacher, it undermines that critical relationship, akin to the acrimonious divorce of parents, notes Suniya Luthar. Students learn best from teachers they feel close to, and teachers play an essential role in buffering against achievement stress. Show respect and appreciation when you speak about or interact with their teachers. Actively build a partnership with educators so that a child can be best supported. “Replace” yourself. Consider creating your own council of parents. Value and appreciate the adults in your children’s lives. Guard that time so that they can enjoy a wider safety net of support. You might even make it formal, as some parents I interviewed did, by creating a master sheet of phone numbers and meeting together as a group. Encourage gratitude. Help children to get into the habit of telling others explicitly why they matter. You might adopt a regular gratitude practice at home, like “the one thing I love about the birthday person.” Teach kids how to think gratefully. Point out when someone goes out of their way to find a present for them, or when they do something kind that makes your child’s life better. Researchers find gratitude is the glue that binds relationships together.

Making, tinkering, and engineering are ways of knowing that should be visible in every classroom, regardless of the subject or age of the students. In a makerspace these processes may be defined loosely: Making is about the active role construction plays in learning. The maker has a product in mind when working with tools and materials. Tinkering is a mindset – a playful way to approach and solve problems through direct experience, experimentation, and discovery. Engineering extracts principles from direct experience. It builds a bridge between intuition and the formal aspects of science by being able to better explain, measure, and predict the world around us.

Microassaults involve misusing power and privilege in subtle ways to marginalize students and create different outcomes based on race or class. In the classroom, a microassault might look like giving a more severe punishment to a student of color than his White classmate who was engaged in the same behavior. Or it might look like overemphasizing military-like behavior management strategies for students of color. With younger children, it looks like excluding them from fun activities as punishment for minor infractions. Microinsults involve being insensitive to culturally and linguistically diverse students and trivializing their racial and cultural identity such as not learning to pronounce a student’s name or giving the student an anglicized name to make it easier on the teacher. Continually confusing two students of the same race and casually brushing it off as “they all look alike.” Microinvalidations involve actions that negate or nullify a person of color’s experiences or realities such as ignoring each student’s rich funds of knowledge. They are also expressed when we don’t want to acknowledge the realities of structural racialization or implicit bias. It takes the form of trivializing and dismissing students’ experiences, telling them they are being too sensitive or accusing them of “playing the race card.”

So what exactly is phenomenology? It is essentially a method rather than a set of theories, and — at the risk of wildly oversimplifying — its basic approach can be conveyed through a two-word command: DESCRIBE PHENOMENA. The first part of this is straightforward: a phenomenologist’s job is to describe. This is the activity that Husserl kept reminding his students to do. It meant stripping away distractions, habits, clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to return our attention to what he called the ‘things themselves’. We must fix our beady gaze on them and capture them exactly as they appear, rather than as we think they are supposed to be.

It was difficult to sustain the illusion that education was of value for kids who would not live long enough to use it. They’d never take the standardized tests that they were prepping for. In a way, Amelia had said, this had led to a kind of renaissance in pedagogy. Free from the constraints of racking up high test scores or getting into colleges, students could learn for learning’s sake—which was how it ought to be. The tick-tock curriculum had dissolved and been replaced by activities improvised from day to day by teachers and parents: hiking in the mountains, doing art projects about the Cloud Ark, talking with psychologists about death, reading favorite books.

When I say my wound became political in the years that followed, I don't mean that my involvement in the anti-war movement was somehow insincere or that I have any regrets about my activism. As a champion of the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the poor, and the oppressed, I found a new outlet for the somewhat irrational but nevertheless strong sense I had of being an outsider in a group - uncomfortable, awkward, and quick to feel a slight. Political feeling can't exist without identification, and mine inevitably went to people without power, In contrast, right-wing ideologies often appeal to those who want to link themselves to authority, people for whom the sight of military parades or soldiers marching off to war is aggrandizing, not painful. Inevitably, there is sublimation in politics, too. It becomes an avenue for suppressed aggression and anger, and I was no exception. And so it was that armed with passion and gorged on political history, I became a firebrand at fourteen. For three years, I read and argued and demonstrated. I marched against the Vietnam War, helped print strike T-shirts at Carleton College after the deaths of four students at Kent State, attended rallies, raised money for war-torn Mozambique, signed petitions, licked envelopes for the American Indian Movement, and turned into a feminist. But even then, I didn't believe all the rhetoric.

Student: How does Self-realization of an individual help society? Ramdas: By Self-realization you become happy inwardly and therefore seek nothing from outside. So, your activities flow out only for the uplift and good of others. A man who is discontented within seeks for external things in order to get happiness, and so doing, harms society. He thinks he will get happiness from external objects. When you have found true happiness by realizing the Self, that is, by realizing that your true nature is absolute peace and bliss, you are not in conflict with anybody, your vision is equal and your activities turn to the service of everyone. Then it is that you become the true instrument of God.

Kate is my roommate, and she has chosen today of all days to succumb to the flu. Therefore, she cannot attend the interview she’d arranged to do, with some mega-industrialist tycoon I’ve never heard of, for the student newspaper. So I have been volunteered. I have final exams to cram for and one essay to finish, and I’m supposed to be working this afternoon, but no—today I have to drive 165 miles to downtown Seattle in order to meet the enigmatic CEO of Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. As an exceptional entrepreneur and major benefactor of our university, his time is extraordinarily precious—much more precious than mine—but he has granted Kate an interview. A real coup, she tells me. Damn her extracurricular activities.

Critics established the right to say whatever they pleased about the dead. It is an absolute power, and the corruption that comes with it, very often, is an atrophy of the moral imagination. They move onto the living because they can no longer feel the difference between the living and the dead. They extend over the living that license to say whatever they please, to ransack their psyche and reinvent them however they please. They stand in front of classes and present this performance as exemplary civilized activity—this utter insensitivity towards other living human beings. Students see the easy power and are enthralled, and begin to outdo their teachers. For a person to be corrupted in that way is to be genuinely corrupted.

Active scholars are uniquely attracted by a high-quality graduate school of arts and sciences. Faculty members consider the teaching and training of new generations of graduate students as their highest calling. They believe that working with graduate students maintains and develops their professional skills more effectively than any other activity. It may be the main reason for the great attraction of academic jobs. Laboratory scientists have told me that the opportunity to work with graduate students keeps them in the university. For them, other options would center on research in commercial laboratories, but there the principal investigator would be assisted by technicians, and that is considered a far less creative interaction.

I don’t believe a word of the whole thing,” said Heisenberg upon hearing the news. “I don’t believe it has anything to do with uranium.” Hahn jeered, “If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you’re all second raters. Poor old Heisenberg.” After they heard the BBC report the news in great detail later that night, Heisenberg and the others accepted the truth: they had been beaten. Over the next few days, Heisenberg attempted to work out how his project had fallen so far behind; his fumbling calculations show that he had never really understood how to even build a bomb in the first place, though he had certainly thought he’d understood it. And the bickering of the other scientists at Farm Hall confirmed what documents captured by Alsos had already suggested: the Nazi bomb program, unlike the Manhattan Project, was a disorganized mess, with vital information compartmentalized and no clear vision of how to proceed. Yet, in those same few days, the Farm Hall transcripts make it clear that Heisenberg and his student, Carl von Weizsäcker, purposefully constructed a revisionist narrative of their wartime activities. According to them, while the Americans had built a weapon of death and destruction on unprecedented scales, they, the Germans, had deliberately pursued only a nuclear reactor, being unwilling to build a massive new weapon for Hitler’s Reich—thereby placing the responsibility for their failure on their supposed moral clarity, rather than their sheer incompetence.

This was what he taught at the Collège de France. And in the entire neighborhood, in all the nearby Faculties, in the literature, law, history and philosophy courses, at the Institute and at the Palais de Justice, in the buses, the métros, in all the government offices, sensible men, normal men, active men, worthy, wholesome, strong men, triumphed. Avoiding the shops filled with pretty things, the women trotting briskly along, the café waiters, the medical students, the traffic policemen, the clerks from notary offices, Rimbaud or Proust, having been torn from life, cast out from life and deprived of support, were probably wandering aimlessly through the streets, or dozing away, their heads resting on their chests, in some dusty public square.

The first break in the case came on day six. A college student named Beatrice Arnold called the FBI hotline to report she’d sold Suzanne Lombard snacks at the gas station where she worked in Breezewood, Pennsylvania. “The Breezewood tape caused a seismic shift in the investigation and completely scrambled the assumptions of law enforcement. Suzanne Lombard hadn’t been snatched; she had run away. She had somehow traveled three hundred fifty miles from the Virginia shore to the Pennsylvania line without drawing attention to herself. From the surveillance tape, three unassailable facts emerged: First, Suzanne was actively trying to conceal her identity. Second, she was waiting for someone. And third, in Suzanne’s mind at least, that someone was a friend.

North Korean students and intellectuals didn’t dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root. Any antiregime activity would have terrible consequences for the protester, his immediate family, and all other known relatives. Under a system that sought to stamp out tainted blood for three generations, the punishment would extend to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins. “A lot of people felt if you had one life to give, you would give it to get rid of this terrible regime, but then you’re not the only one getting punished. Your family would go through hell,” one defector told me.

The Obama administration warned federal employees that materials released by WikiLeaks remained classified—even though they were being published by some of the world’s leading news organizations including the New York Times and the Guardian. Employees were told that accessing the material, whether on WikiLeaks.org or in the New York Times, would amount to a security violation.21 Government agencies such as the Library of Congress, the Commerce Department and the US military blocked access to WikiLeaks materials over their networks. The ban was not limited to the public sector. Employees from the US government warned academic institutions that students hoping to pursue a career in public service should stay clear of material released by WikiLeaks in their research and in their online activity.

Is, then, the man-made reality outside ourselves not the most significant factor for the development of the very best in us, and must we not expect that, when deprived of contact with the outside world, we regress temporarily to a primitive, animal-like, unreasonable state of mind? Much can be said in favor of such an assumption, and the view that such a regression is the essential feature of the state of sleep, and thus of dream activity, has been held by many students of dreaming from Plato to Freud. From this viewpoint dreams are expected to be expressions of the irrational, primitive strivings in us, and the fact that we forget our dreams so easily is amply explained by our being ashamed of those irrational and criminal impulses which we express when we were not under the control of society.

While those of us with ADHD may struggle to focus on school, work, and other structured activities, that doesn’t mean we’re not smart. Far from it. In fact, those of us with ADHD are usually intensely curious, persistent, and lifelong learners… When we find a learning strategy that works for us, we can be excellent students, especially if we’re interested in a certain subject, since we’ll usually we want to know everything about it. If we’re not interested in the subject but have to learn it to satisfy a school or work environment, we can struggle. When ADHD students pursue university or graduate degrees where they can tailor their classes to their interests, they do much better. I often hear stories from women with ADHD who struggled through grade school but went on to receive a PhD and graduated with highest honors.

But Mills also pointed to the common phenomenon known as the “winner’s curse,” in which two companies bid competitively to acquire a third, until the price climbs so high that it becomes less an economic activity than a war of egos. The winning bidders will be damned if they’ll let their opponents get the prize, so they buy the target company at an inflated price. “It tends to be the assertive people who carry the day in these kinds of things,” says Mills. “You see this all the time. People ask, ‘How did this happen, how did we pay so much?’ Usually it’s said that they were carried away by the situation, but that’s not right. Usually they’re carried away by people who are assertive and domineering. The risk with our students is that they’re very good at getting their way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going the right way.

The first obstacle [to liberal education] is the learning situation itself. What is the ideal learning situation? It is the more or less continuous contact between a student and his teacher, who is another student, more advanced in many ways, but still learning himself. This situation usually does not prevail; in fact, it is extremely rare. Since the immemorial, institutions of learning, especially higher learning, have been established, called „schools“ — and the ambiguity of the term becomes immediately apparent. Institutionalization means ordering activities into certain patters; in the case of learning activities, into classes, schedules, courses, curriculums, examinations, degress, and all the venerable and sometimes ridiculous paraphernalia of academic life. The point is that such institutionalization cannot be avoided: both the gregarious and the rational character of man compel him to impose upon himself laws and regulations. Moreover, the discipline of learning itself seems to require an orderly and planned procedure. And yet we all know how this schedule routine can interfere with the spontaneity of questioning and of leaning and the occurrence of genuine wonderment. A student may even never become aware that there is the possibility of spontaneous learning which depends merely on himself and on nobody and nothing else. Once the institutional character of learning tends to prevail, the goal of liberal education may be completely lost sight of, whatever other goals may be successfully reached. And I repeat, this obstacle is not extraneous to learning. It is prefigured in the methodical and systematic character of exploratory questioning. It has to be faced over and over again.

Despite those risks, hypersexualization is ubiquitous, so visible as to be nearly invisible: it is the water in which girls swim, the air they breathe. Whatever else they might be—athletes, artists, scientists, musicians, newscasters, politicians—they learn that they must, as a female, first and foremost project sex appeal. Consider a report released by Princeton University in 2011 exploring the drop over the previous decade in public leadership positions held by female students. Among the reasons these über-elite young women gave for avoiding such roles was that being qualified was not enough. They needed to be “smart, driven, involved in many different activities (as are men), and, in addition, they are supposed to be pretty, sexy, thin, nice, and friendly.” Or, as one alumna put it, women had to “do everything, do it well, and look ‘hot’ while doing it.

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get an idea fir a while:, They have every opportunity to do something and they're bit getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside if you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.b Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge l: You're not in contact with the experimental guys, you don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

Stress physiologists have found a biological explanation for this phenomenon as well. The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments, and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school. When you’re overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses and distracted by negative feelings, it’s hard to learn the alphabet. And in fact, when kindergarten teachers are surveyed about their students, they say that the biggest problem they face is not children who don’t know their letters and numbers; it is kids who don’t know how to manage their tempers or calm themselves down after a provocation.

The uninitiated often assumed that undergraduate students were at the bottom rung, but undergrads were the paying customers, or at least their parents were. And paying customers needed to be kept happy. Grad students worked for the school as teaching and research assistants--TAs and RAs--but weren't really proper employees, and as such they weren't entitled to the benefits that, say, a cataloger in the Coffey Library received. Then there was the fact that they had to learn to leave behind passive studying and test taking, which was what most of them had been taught in their school careers up to that point, and learn how to actively attack research problems and come up with new ideas, all while being poorly paid. Like Helen had said, a not insignificant number of grad students left after a year instead of sticking around to work on obtaining their PhDs. Who could blame them? Industry paid more and had better benefits.

something that cannot be memorized and graded: a great doctor must have a huge heart and a distended aorta through which pumps a vast lake of compassion and human kindness. At least, that’s what you’d think. In reality, medical schools don’t give the shiniest shit about any of that. They don’t even check you’re OK with the sight of blood. Instead, they fixate on extracurricular activities. Their ideal student is captain of two sports teams, the county swimming champion, leader of the youth orchestra and editor of the school newspaper. It’s basically a Miss Congeniality contest without the sash. Look at the Wikipedia entry for any famous doctor, and you’ll see: ‘He proved himself an accomplished rugby player in youth leagues. He excelled as a distance runner and in his final year at school was vice-captain of the athletics team.’ This particular description is of a certain Dr H. Shipman, so perhaps it’s not a rock-solid system.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling conventions. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerant. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.

Lynum had plenty of information to share. The FBI's files on Mario Savio, the brilliant philosophy student who was the spokesman for the Free Speech Movement, were especially detailed. Savio had a debilitating stutter when speaking to people in small groups, but when standing before a crowd and condemning his administration's latest injustice he spoke with divine fire. His words had inspired students to stage what was the largest campus protest in American history. Newspapers and magazines depicted him as the archetypal "angry young man," and it was true that he embodied a student movement fueled by anger at injustice, impatience for change, and a burning desire for personal freedom. Hoover ordered his agents to gather intelligence they could use to ruin his reputation or otherwise "neutralize" him, impatiently ordering them to expedite their efforts. Hoover's agents had also compiled a bulging dossier on the man Savio saw as his enemy: Clark Kerr. As campus dissent mounted, Hoover came to blame the university president more than anyone else for not putting an end to it. Kerr had led UC to new academic heights, and he had played a key role in establishing the system that guaranteed all Californians access to higher education, a model adopted nationally and internationally. But in Hoover's eyes, Kerr confused academic freedom with academic license, coddled Communist faculty members, and failed to crack down on "young punks" like Savio. Hoover directed his agents to undermine the esteemed educator in myriad ways. He wanted Kerr removed from his post as university president. As he bluntly put it in a memo to his top aides, Kerr was "no good." Reagan listened intently to Lynum's presentation, but he wanted more--much more. He asked for additional information on Kerr, for reports on liberal members of the Board of Regents who might oppose his policies, and for intelligence reports about any upcoming student protests. Just the week before, he had proposed charging tuition for the first time in the university's history, setting off a new wave of protests up and down the state. He told Lynum he feared subversives and liberals would attempt to misrepresent his efforts to establish fiscal responsibility, and that he hoped the FBI would share information about any upcoming demonstrations against him, whether on campus or at his press conferences. It was Reagan's fear, according to Lynum's subsequent report, "that some of his press conferences could be stacked with 'left wingers' who might make an attempt to embarrass him and the state government." Lynum said he understood his concerns, but following Hoover's instructions he made no promises. Then he and Harter wished the ailing governor a speedy recovery, departed the mansion, slipped into their dark four-door Ford, and drove back to the San Francisco field office, where Lynum sent an urgent report to the director. The bedside meeting was extraordinary, but so was the relationship between Reagan and Hoover. It had begun decades earlier, when the actor became an informer in the FBI's investigation of Hollywood Communists. When Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, he secretly continued to help the FBI purge fellow actors from the union's rolls. Reagan's informing proved helpful to the House Un-American Activities Committee as well, since the bureau covertly passed along information that could help HUAC hold the hearings that wracked Hollywood and led to the blacklisting and ruin of many people in the film industry. Reagan took great satisfaction from his work with the FBI, which gave him a sense of security and mission during a period when his marriage to Jane Wyman was failing, his acting career faltering, and his faith in the Democratic Party of his father crumbling. In the following years, Reagan and FBI officials courted each other through a series of confidential contacts. (7-8)

[D]uring all my university years in the U.S. (doing a master’s and a doctorate degrees), I often noticed that young people were totally quiet when issues like wars and crimes against humanity in the Middle East came up, but they were very active and vocal when issues like recycling, environment, or global warming came up. While all these issues are important, the silences and complicity displayed on some issues rather than others; the selectivity of expressing resistance and rage are hypocritical, to say the least. I found that many choose to be active in what one could consider safe and convenient causes. How can I take seriously enraged rich and privileged students who want us to protect the environment by recycling a plastic bottle, yet it never occurs to them that all the bombs and weapons used in the Middle East are doing a serious damage to their beloved planet? Last time I checked we all live on one planet, unless these privileged students truly live on a different planet.

Another aspect of behavior directly impacted by the removal of religious principles was morality. Recall that both George Washington and Fisher Ames had warned that neither national morality in general nor student morality in particular could be maintained apart from religious principles. Statistics now verify the accuracy of their warnings. For example, following the 1962-1963 court-ordered removal of religious principles from students, teenage pregnancies immediately soared over 700 percent,52 with the United States recording the highest teen pregnancy rates in the industrialized world.53 Similarly, sexual activity among fifteen year-olds skyrocketed,54 and sexually transmitted diseases among students ascended to previously unrecorded levels.55 In fact, virtually every moral measurement kept by federal cabinet-level agencies reflects the same statistical pattern: the removal of religious principles from the public sphere was accompanied by a corresponding decline in public morality.56

She also felt like there was something slightly more insidious going on, about how you were now supposed to feel like your work was your everything: where you got your paycheck, yes, but also where you got fed and where you found your social circle. Everything had started bleeding into everything else. These kids—she felt no compunction about calling them kids—expected that their workplaces would provide all this for them, as if work were an extension of college, with its own clubs and student organizations. Even more disconcerting was that many TakeOff employees lived together or had roommates who were in some way connected to other TakeOff employees, and now there were even apartment buildings that were actual dorms for grown-ups, where you lived in a suite with a few other people and had common areas and nightly activities. It was almost like a return to the days of Henry Ford, when a company provided you with housing and meals and social events. What had happened to having to figure out life on your own?

When Sloboda and a colleague conducted a study with students at a British boarding school that recruited from around the country—admission rested entirely on an audition—they were surprised to find that the students classified as exceptional by the school came from less musically active families compared to less accomplished students, did not start playing at a younger age, were less likely to have had an instrument in the home at a very young age, had taken fewer lessons prior to entering the school, and had simply practiced less overall before arriving—a lot less. “It seems very clear,” the psychologists wrote, “that sheer amount of lesson or practice time is not a good indicator of exceptionality.” As to structured lessons, every single one of the students who had received a large amount of structured lesson time early in development fell into the “average” skill category, and not one was in the exceptional group. “The strong implication,” the researchers wrote, is “that that too many lessons at a young age may not be helpful.

I can hardly believe that our nation’s policy is to seek peace by going to war. It seems that President Donald J. Trump has done everything in his power to divert our attention away from the fact that the FBI is investigating his association with Russia during his campaign for office. For several weeks now he has been sabre rattling and taking an extremely controversial stance, first with Syria and Afghanistan and now with North Korea. The rhetoric has been the same, accusing others for our failed policy and threatening to take autonomous military action to attain peace in our time. This gunboat diplomacy is wrong. There is no doubt that Secretaries Kelly, Mattis, and other retired military personnel in the Trump Administration are personally tough. However, most people who have served in the military are not eager to send our young men and women to fight, if it is not necessary. Despite what may have been said to the contrary, our military leaders, active or retired, are most often the ones most respectful of international law. Although the military is the tip of the spear for our country, and the forces of civilization, it should not be the first tool to be used. Bloodshed should only be considered as a last resort and definitely never used as the first option. As the leader of the free world, we should stand our ground but be prepared to seek peace through restraint. This is not the time to exercise false pride! Unfortunately the Trump administration informed four top State Department management officials that their services were no longer needed as part of an effort to "clean house." Patrick Kennedy, served for nine years as the “Undersecretary for Management,” “Assistant Secretaries for Administration and Consular Affairs” Joyce Anne Barr and Michele Bond, as well as “Ambassador” Gentry Smith, director of the Office for Foreign Missions. Most of the United States Ambassadors to foreign countries have also been dismissed, including the ones to South Korea and Japan. This leaves the United States without the means of exercising diplomacy rapidly, when needed. These positions are political appointments, and require the President’s nomination and the Senate’s confirmation. This has not happened! Moreover, diplomatically our country is severely handicapped at a time when tensions are as hot as any time since the Cold War. Without following expert advice or consent and the necessary input from the Unites States Congress, the decisions are all being made by a man who claims to know more than the generals do, yet he has only the military experience of a cadet at “New York Military Academy.” A private school he attended as a high school student, from 1959 to 1964. At that time, he received educational and medical deferments from the Vietnam War draft. Trump said that the school provided him with “more training than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” His counterpart the unhinged Kim Jong-un has played with what he considers his country’s military toys, since April 11th of 2012. To think that these are the two world leaders, protecting the planet from a nuclear holocaust….

Whatever a student hears in class or reads in a book travels these pathways as he masters yet another iota of understanding. Indeed, everything that happens to us in life, all the details that we will remember, depend on the hippocampus to stay with us. The continual retention of memories demands a frenzy of neuronal activity. In fact, the vast majority of neurogenesis—the brain’s production of new neurons and laying down of connections to others—takes place in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is especially vulnerable to ongoing emotional distress, because of the damaging effects of cortisol. Under prolonged stress, cortisol attacks the neurons of the hippocampus, slowing the rate at which neurons are added or even reducing the total number, with a disastrous impact on learning. The actual killing off of hippocampal neurons occurs during sustained cortisol floods induced, for example, by severe depression or intense trauma. (However, with recovery, the hippocampus regains neurons and enlarges again.)20 Even when the stress is less extreme, extended periods of high cortisol seem to hamper these same neurons.

most students reported a state of total involvement in what was being taught, he would rate the moment “inspired.” The inspired moments of learning shared the same active ingredients: a potent combination of full attention, enthusiastic interest, and positive emotional intensity. The joy in learning comes during these moments. Such joyous moments, says University of Southern California neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, signify “optimal physiological coordination and smooth running of the operations of life.” Damasio, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, has long been a pioneer in linking findings in brain science to human experience. Damasio argues that more than merely letting us survive the daily grind, joyous states allow us to flourish, to live well, and to feel well-being. Such upbeat states, he notes, allow a “greater ease in the capacity to act,” a greater harmony in our functioning that enhances our power and freedom in whatever we do. The field of cognitive science, Damasio notes, in studying the neural networks that run mental operations, finds similar conditions and dubs them “maximal harmonious states.

To a modern student, pre-industrial politics appear to be virtually soaked in religion, both in the sense that rulers devoted much attention to religious questions [...] and in the sense that everyone talked endlessly about it, justifying and vilifying a vast range of action in religious terms. [...] ... the pre-modern world was poor in organization. Modern people are members of an immense variety of associations, both local and nationwide, or indeed international, being organized as voters, artists, scholars, scientists, antivivisectionists, devotees of this sport or that, consumers and so forth in addition to (if they so wish) as believers. But pre-industrial society was less differentiated, less wealthy and far less well equipped with means of communication. Hence there might be little or no organization above the level of household or village apart from that provided by religion. This automatically endowed religion with political importance, [...] but it also meant that religion united under its umbrella numerous activities that would nowadays be pursued under umbrellas of their own. [...] Pre-modern religion could be about anything and everything.

What this reveals about our universities is the operation of a pathological element. One need not ban the American flag from most of our campuses. It is more useful to deceive the world by allowing that flag to fly in a place where, all things being equal, its meaning and spirit has been abolished. In the Humanities and Social Science departments, where freedom of thought is of central importance, the American flag is more hated than loved by the faculty and the graduate students. I know this from firsthand because I was a graduate student at UC Irvine from 1986-1989. Professors there promoted Marxism, engaged in active recruitment of students amenable to Marxist ideas, and damaged the careers of those who were anti-Marxist. In those days it was done very quietly, administratively. If you dared speak up for America or economic freedom, you were persecuted. Your reputation was ruined. It is preferable to avert one’s eyes from such a situation, and very unpleasant to experience it directly; that is why those singled out for persecution were never defended. They were hung out to dry, and nobody dared interfere. Who, after all, wants trouble? This is the beauty of a quiet and selective intimidation.

One of the major difficulties, and one of the monumental dangers, of sex education courses in public schools is that they disregard this significant principle of teaching. They tell all before the youngster is ready, and in so doing, they often wreak havoc with the spiritual, emotional, and moral stability of the students. They open them to great jeopardy. Things should be done in the season thereof, and there is a time for all things. A wise teacher and a wise parent will be alert to that fact. Likewise, in programming Church activities we should use great wisdom in considering the maturity and readiness of our members to be taught the basic principles of morality. If we teach the basic principles too soon, they may be meaningless to the youngsters. The matter of teaching morality may be necessary, but the framework in which it is set should recognize the degree of maturity and readiness. For instance, when the youngster is too young to have been subjected to the urging of physical desires, he must be taught about the subject in an entirely different way than will be appropriate when he is older. There will come a time for some more mature discussion later, but this must always be with reverence.

Fifteen of his clubs, dedicated to politics, music, and the performing arts, had all been developing strategic plans for the past two years. And the local branches of various societies--whose goals were to advance aviation, knowledge of chemistry, automotive transportation, equestrian sports, highway construction, as well as the prompt eradication of ethnic chauvinism--existed only in the sick imagination of the local union committee. As for the school of continuing education, of which Sardinevich was especially proud, it was constantly reorganizing itself, which, as anybody knows, means it wasn't undertaking any useful activity whatsoever. If Sardinevich were an honest man, he would probably have admitted that all these activities were essentially a mirage. But the local union committee used this mirage to concoct its reports, so at the next level up nobody doubted the existence of all those musico-political clubs. At that level, the school of continuing education was imagined as a large stone building filled with desks, where perky teachers draw graphs that show the rise of unemployment in the United States on their chalkboards, while mustachioed students develop political consciousness right in front of your eyes.

The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.” Morrie, true to these words, had developed his own culture—long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted no time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the Week.” He had created a cocoon of human activities—conversation, interaction, affection—and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.I had also developed my own culture. Work. I did four or five media jobs in England, juggling them like a clown. I spent eight hours a day on a computer, feeding my stories back to the States. Then I did TV pieces, traveling with a crew throughout parts of London. I also phoned in radio reports every morning and afternoon. This was not an abnormal load. Over the years, I had taken labor as my companion and had moved everything else to the side.

Perhaps the most amazing practitioner of echolocation among humans is Daniel Kish, blind since he was one year old, who early in life discovered that making clicking noises helped him get around. Much of his brain must be reassigned to sound, because he uses his own clicks to navigate. He can ride a bicycle in traffic (hard to imagine), and he has founded World Access for the Blind to teach other blind people to use their own sonar—to summon, as it were, their inner dolphin. Sounds from his tongue clicks, he explains, “bounce off surfaces all around and return to my ears as faint echoes. My brain processes the echoes into dynamic images.… I construct a three-dimensional image of my surroundings for hundreds of feet in every direction. Up close, I can detect a pole an inch thick. At 15 feet, I recognize cars and bushes. Houses come into focus at 150 feet.” This is all so hard to imagine, people have wondered if he is telling the truth. But he’s not alone, and his claims appear to check out. He says, “Many students are surprised how quickly results come. I believe echolocation capacity is latent within us.… The neural hardware seems to be there; I’ve developed ways to activate it. Vision isn’t in the eyes; it’s in the mind.” So, is it possible that a dolphin such as a killer whale might actually see the echoes?

In any case, there are all of those chores that most of us can’t avoid: cleaning, straightening, raking leaves, shopping for groceries, driving the children to various activities, preparing food, washing dishes, washing the car, commuting, performing the routine, repetitive aspects of our jobs. This is the “in-between time,” the stuff we have to take care of before getting on to the things that count. But if you stop to think about it, most of life is “in between.” When goal orientation comes to dominate our thoughts, little that seems to really count is left. During the usual nonplayoff year, the actual playing time for a National Football League team is sixteen hours. For the players, does this mean that the other 8,744 hours of the year are “in between”? Does all time take its significance only in terms of the product, the bottom line? And if winning, as the saying goes, is the only thing, does that mean that even the climactic hours achieve their worth merely through victory? There’s another way of thinking about it. Zen practice is ostensibly organized around periods of sitting in meditation and chanting. Yet every Zen master will tell you that building a stone wall or washing dishes is essentially no different from formal meditation. The quality of a Zen student’s practice is defined just as much by how he or she sweeps

Many college courses in the humanities focus on discussion over lecture. Students read course material ahead of time and have a discussion in class. Harvard Business School took this to the extreme by pioneering case-based learning more than a hundred years ago, and many business schools have since followed suit. There are no lectures there, not even in subjects like accounting or finance. Students read a ten-to twenty-page description of a particular company’s or person’s circumstance—called a “case”—on their own time and then participate in a discussion/debate in class (where attendance is mandatory). Professors are there to facilitate the discussion, not to dominate it. I can tell you from personal experience that despite there being eighty students in the room, you cannot zone out. Your brain is actively processing what your peers are saying while you try to come to your own conclusions so that you can contribute during the entire eighty-minute session. The time goes by faster than you want it to; students are more engaged than in any traditional classroom I’ve ever been a part of. Most importantly, the ideas that you and your peers collectively generate stick. To this day, comments and ways of thinking about a problem that my peers shared with me (or that I shared during class) nearly ten years ago come back to me as I try to help manage the growth and opportunities surrounding the Khan Academy.

[My school] feels like a prison, to tell you the truth. ’Cuz you have to stay in the classroom, use the bathroom when they tell us, eat lunch when they tell us, it’s like a jail…. That’s why kids act bad. They feel like they trapped in here.[20] Dewayne’s observation echoes a point made by Foucault in his classic Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, which you’ll remember from chapter 4. Through practices like those Dewayne describes, the human being becomes less a spirit animated by agency and more a “body as object and target of power,” a thing to be “manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys [and] responds.”[21] In his everyday interactions in the building, Dewayne is reminded that his body is not his own. Necessary human functions like eating and using the bathroom can only be conducted with the approval and surveillance of those in a position of authority. Through these efforts, students are transformed into what Foucault calls “docile bodies”—bodies that can be “subjected, used, transformed, and improved” in ways that are endorsed by those in power. This process requires “uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than its result”—think of students completing meaningless busywork where the quality of the outcome is of no consequence, only the fact that they are sitting still and doing it—“and is exercised according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement.”[22]

More than anything, we have lost the cultural customs and traditions that bring extended families together, linking adults and children in caring relationships, that give the adult friends of parents a place in their children's lives. It is the role of culture to cultivate connections between the dependent and the dependable and to prevent attachment voids from occurring. Among the many reasons that culture is failing us, two bear mentioning. The first is the jarringly rapid rate of change in twentieth-century industrial societies. It requires time to develop customs and traditions that serve attachment needs, hundreds of years to create a working culture that serves a particular social and geographical environment. Our society has been changing much too rapidly for culture to evolve accordingly. There is now more change in a decade than previously in a century. When circumstances change more quickly than our culture can adapt to, customs and traditions disintegrate. It is not surprising that today's culture is failing its traditional function of supporting adult-child attachments. Part of the rapid change has been the electronic transmission of culture, allowing commercially blended and packaged culture to be broadcast into our homes and into the very minds of our children. Instant culture has replaced what used to be passed down through custom and tradition and from one generation to another. “Almost every day I find myself fighting the bubble-gum culture my children are exposed to,” said a frustrated father interviewed for this book. Not only is the content often alien to the culture of the parents but the process of transmission has taken grandparents out of the loop and made them seem sadly out of touch. Games, too, have become electronic. They have always been an instrument of culture to connect people to people, especially children to adults. Now games have become a solitary activity, watched in parallel on television sports-casts or engaged in in isolation on the computer. The most significant change in recent times has been the technology of communication — first the phone and then the Internet through e-mail and instant messaging. We are enamored of communication technology without being aware that one of its primary functions is to facilitate attachments. We have unwittingly put it into the hands of children who, of course, are using it to connect with their peers. Because of their strong attachment needs, the contact is highly addictive, often becoming a major preoccupation. Our culture has not been able to evolve the customs and traditions to contain this development, and so again we are all left to our own devices. This wonderful new technology would be a powerfully positive instrument if used to facilitate child-adult connections — as it does, for example, when it enables easy communication between students living away from home, and their parents. Left unchecked, it promotes peer orientation.

Obviously, the violence suppression of social movements is hardly new. One need only think of the Red Scare, the reaction to radical labor movements like the IWW, let alone the campaigns of outright assassination directed against the American Indian Movement or black radicals in the 1960s and early 1970s. But in almost every case, the victims were either working-class or nonwhite. On the few occasions where even much milder systematic repression is directed at any significant number of middle-class white people--as during the McCarthy era, or against student protesters during the Vietnam War--it quickly becomes a national scandal. And, while it would be wrong to call Occupy Wall Street a middle-class white people’s movement--it was much more divers than that--there is no doubt that very large numbers of middle-class white people were involved in it. Yet the government did not hesitate to attack it, often using highly militarized tactics, often deploying what can only be called terroristic violence--that is, if "terrorism" is defined as attacks on civilians consciously calculated to create terror for political ends. (I know this statement might seem controversial. But when Los Angeles police, for example, open fire with rubber bullets on a group of chalk-wielding protesters engaged in a perfectly legal, permitted "art walk," in an obvious attempt to teach citizens that participating in any Occupy-related activity could lead to physical injury, it’s hard to see how that word should not apply.) (p. 141-142)

One way Dan demonstrates to his students the concept of sunk cost is through a game in which participants bid to purchase a $100 bill. Rule #1: Bidding starts at $5. Rule #2: Bids can only increase by $5 at a time. Rule #3: The winner pays the amount of his or her final bid and gets the $100. The last rule is that the second-highest bidder also pays what he or she has bid, but gets nothing. As the game progresses, the bids rise to $50 and $55, at which point Dan will have made money. (The $55 bidder will pay $55 to get $100 and the second bidder will pay $50 and get nothing.) At some point, someone bids $85 and a competitor bids $90. At that point, Dan stops them and reminds them that the first person will win $10 ($100 minus $90) and the second person will lose $85. He asks the $85 bidder whether they want to continue to $95. Inevitably, they say yes. Then he asks the first person the same question, and he happily agrees to go to $100. But it doesn’t stop there at $100. Next, Dan asks the person who’s bid $95 if they want to go to $105. As before, if they say no, they’ll lose their previous bid: $95. But at this point, when the bidding is over $100, if they say yes, that means they are now actively bidding knowing that they will lose money. This time it’s $5 ($105 bid minus $100 winnings), but the loss will only increase from there. Inevitably, both participants keep bidding higher and higher until at some point one person realizes how crazy this is and they stop (and the person stopping ends up losing $95 more).

The aim is to get the students actively involved in seeking this evidence: their role is not simply to do tasks as decided by teachers, but to actively manage and understand their learning gains. This includes evaluating their own progress, being more responsible for their learning, and being involved with peers in learning together about gains in learning. If students are to become active evaluators of their own progress, teachers must provide the students with appropriate feedback so that they can engage in this task. Van den Bergh, Ros, and Beijaard (2010: 3) describe the task thus: Fostering active learning seems a very challenging and demanding task for teachers, requiring knowledge of students’ learning processes, skills in providing guidance and feedback and classroom management. The need is to engage students in this same challenging and demanding task. The suggestion in this chapter is to start lessons with helping students to understand the intention of the lesson and showing them what success might look like at the end. Many times, teachers look for the interesting beginning to a lesson – for the hook, and the motivating question. Dan Willingham (2009) has provided an excellent argument for not thinking in this way. He advocates starting with what the student is likely to think about. Interesting hooks, demonstrations, fascinating facts, and likewise may seem to be captivating (and often are), but he suggests that there are likely to be other parts of the lesson that are more suitable for the attention-grabber. The place for the attention-grabber is more likely to be at the end of the lesson, because this will help to consolidate what has been learnt. Most importantly,Willingham asks teachers to think long and hard about how to make the connection between the attention-grabber and the point that it is designed to make; preferably, that point will be the main idea from the lesson. Having too many open-ended activities (discovery learning, searching the Internet, preparing PowerPoint presentations) can make it difficult to direct students’ attention to that which matters – because they often love to explore the details, the irrelevancies, and the unimportant while doing these activities. One of Willingham's principles is that any teaching method is most useful when there is plenty of prompt feedback about whether the student is thinking about a problem in the right way. Similarly, he promotes the notion that assignments should be primarily about what the teacher wants the students to think about (not about demonstrating ‘what they know’). Students are very good at ignoring what you say (‘I value connections, deep ideas, your thoughts’) and seeing what you value (corrections to the grammar, comments on referencing, correctness or absence of facts). Thus teachers must develop a scoring rubric for any assignment before they complete the question or prompts, and show the rubric to the students so that they know what the teacher values. Such formative feedback can reinforce the ‘big ideas’ and the important understandings, and help to make the investment of

A Life like Mine: Round and round, round and round, this is how life is feeling at the very moment. Why on earth, would anyone want to live in a life that is never ending chaos? Not me, she thought to herself. Gloria Jacobson, 19 years old, was on her way to a life of success when she was finally looking into a life of school, love, and a family that could look up to her for being the next honor roll student. Well, ok, technically speaking, she wasn’t an “Honor roll” Student, and she wasn’t in love yet. But she did have one thing, and that was a family that loved her. Skeptical or not, as she was, she was headed to sleep after a long day’s journey through thoughts and school. She went to a College Prep school, so it wasn’t exactly the easiest. In fact, sometimes school to her could become one of the toughest things. She rolled up her jean legs and through on her purple hooded jacket then slipped out the door. “Mom will hopefully allow her to go to the school ball tomorrow night”; she thought as she crossed her fingers. It was going to be a school formal, and all the way through elementary and middle school, she wasn’t ever allowed to go. Why on earth wouldn’t her parents ever let her just be a normal teenage girl. After all she only turns 20, towards the end of graduation. Her entire life was devoted to school work, college apps, and volunteer work at different places after school, and church activities. She never seemed to have any time for boys or even friendships at this time. She practically had to beg for the ones that she already had. ~part of my story. :)

Here is a checklist for helping your students maintain and boost their motivation. Relate each item to the key motivators of agency (A), relatedness (R) and competence (C). Some items may be a mixture of more than one motivator. 1 Encourage students to get to know each other and talk to each other about their lives and what matters to them. Join in yourself. 2 Suggest they keep a learning journal in which they reflect on what they have learnt,  what activities they have liked or disliked, what is affecting their learning. 3 Allow class time for them to report on their learning to a partner or in small groups 4 Exploit the motivational tools that accompany course books, such as progress tests, ‘can do’ self-evaluative checklists and CEF-based portfolios. There is more on this in the section on coaching with a course book. 5 Wherever possible give your students a choice of what they do in class and for homework (whatever their age!), either as a group by voting for one activity which everyone will do or allowing them individually to choose different activities. 6 Help students set goals for themselves, as a group and individually. Encourage them to write these down and check their progress. 7 Offer your students the opportunity to prepare for an external exam which relates to their needs, such as the Trinity GESE exams for spoken English or the Cambridge ESOL exams. 8 Ask your students how they are feeling about their English on a regular basis. Ask them where their motivation levels are from one week to the next. Get them to ask each other. Be a role model by paying attention to your own motivation!

DURING those last weeks of the Bishop’s life he thought very little about death; it was the past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself. But he had an intellectual curiosity about dying; about the changes that took place in a man’s beliefs and scale of values. More and more life seemed to him an experience of the Ego, in no sense the Ego itself. This conviction, he believed, was something apart from his religious life; it was an enlightenment that came to him as a man, a human creature. And he noticed that he judged conduct differently now; his own and that of others. The mistakes of his life seemed unimportant; accidents that had occurred en route, like the shipwreck in Galveston harbour, or the runaway in which he was hurt when he was first on his way to New Mexico in search of his Bishopric. He observed also that there was no longer any perspective in his memories. He remembered his winters with his cousins on the Mediterranean when he was a little boy, his student days in the Holy City, as clearly as he remembered the arrival of M. Molny and the building of his Cathedral. He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible. Sometimes, when Magdalena or Bernard came in and asked him a question, it took him several seconds to bring himself back to the present. He could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life—some part of which they knew nothing.

It may seem paradoxical to claim that stress, a physiological mechanism vital to life, is a cause of illness. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them. Discharges of nervous system, hormonal output and immune changes constitute the flight-or-fight reactions that help us survive immediate danger. These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But the same stress responses, triggered chronically and without resolution, produce harm and even permanent damage. Chronically high cortisol levels destroy tissue. Chronically elevated adrenalin levels raise the blood pressure and damage the heart. There is extensive documentation of the inhibiting effect of chronic stress on the immune system. In one study, the activity of immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells were compared in two groups: spousal caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and age- and health-matched controls. NK cells are front-line troops in the fight against infections and against cancer, having the capacity to attack invading micro-organisms and to destroy cells with malignant mutations. The NK cell functioning of the caregivers was significantly suppressed, even in those whose spouses had died as long as three years previously. The caregivers who reported lower levels of social support also showed the greatest depression in immune activity — just as the loneliest medical students had the most impaired immune systems under the stress of examinations. Another study of caregivers assessed the efficacy of immunization against influenza. In this study 80 per cent among the non-stressed control group developed immunity against the virus, but only 20 per cent of the Alzheimer caregivers were able to do so. The stress of unremitting caregiving inhibited the immune system and left people susceptible to influenza. Research has also shown stress-related delays in tissue repair. The wounds of Alzheimer caregivers took an average of nine days longer to heal than those of controls. Higher levels of stress cause higher cortisol output via the HPA axis, and cortisol inhibits the activity of the inflammatory cells involved in wound healing. Dental students had a wound deliberately inflicted on their hard palates while they were facing immunology exams and again during vacation. In all of them the wound healed more quickly in the summer. Under stress, their white blood cells produced less of a substance essential to healing. The oft-observed relationship between stress, impaired immunity and illness has given rise to the concept of “diseases of adaptation,” a phrase of Hans Selye’s. The flight-or-fight response, it is argued, was indispensable in an era when early human beings had to confront a natural world of predators and other dangers. In civilized society, however, the flight-fight reaction is triggered in situations where it is neither necessary nor helpful, since we no longer face the same mortal threats to existence. The body’s physiological stress mechanisms are often triggered inappropriately, leading to disease. There is another way to look at it. The flight-or-fight alarm reaction exists today for the same purpose evolution originally assigned to it: to enable us to survive. What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awareness of distress or no awareness at all.

It’s unfair that we can’t just be regular students here like everyone else,” I argued. “We’re the ones having sleepless nights while trying to get the administration to support us. But that is exactly what the Confederate flag bearer wants—for us to be so distracted that we fail our classes and reinforce the stereotype that we can’t cut it in a place like Harvard.” I then referenced a quote from Toni Morrison, who three years earlier had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved, her devastatingly lyrical novel about a formerly enslaved woman choosing freedom on her own terms. More than a decade before that, in a 1975 lecture about the American Dream that Morrison gave at Portland State University, the author had cautioned that Black people needed to take care not to get turned aside by racism. “The function, the very serious function of racism…is distraction,” she had told her audience. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms, and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” Thankfully, my friends heard what Toni Morrison sought to convey. From that day forward, we became more purposeful in how we showed up for rallies and protests, advocating for the causes we supported in between attending classes and study sessions, and refusing to allow our necessary activism to undermine our academic success. As Antoinette put it, “Our backs got straight, we faced forward, our stride was sure, because once we recognized the true toll of that Confederate flag, not just on our psyche but also our work, we were determined to get the last laugh.

I must at this point reiterate my strong objection to being asked to fill in forms in which I have to tick a box labelling my 'race' or 'ethnicity', and voice my strong support for Lewontin's statement that racial classification can be actively destructive of social and human relations - especially when people use racial classification as a way of treating people differently, whether through negative or positive discrimination. To tie a racial label to somebody is informative in the sense that it tells you more than one thing about them. It might reduce your uncertainty about the colour of their hair, the colour of their skin, the straightness of their hair, the shape of their eye, the shape of their nose and how tall they are. But there is no reason to suppose that it tells you anything about how well-qualified they are for a job. And even in the unlikely event that it did reduce your statistical uncertainty about their likely suitability for some particular job, it would still be wicked to use racial labels as a basis for discrimination when hiring somebody. Choose on the basis of ability, and if, having done so, you end up with an all-black sprinting team, so be it. You have not practised racial discrimination in arriving at this conclusion... Discriminating against individuals purely on the basis of a group to which they belong is, I am inclined to think, always evil. There is near-universal agreement today that the apartheid laws of South Africa were evil. Positive discrimination in favour of 'minority' students on American campuses can fairly, in my opinion, be attacked on the same grounds as apartheid. Both treat people as representative of groups rather than as individuals in their own right. Positive discrimination is sometimes justified as redressing centuries of injustice. But how can it be just to pay back a single individual today for the wrongs done by long-dead members of a plural group to which he belongs?

he used the phrase “naive transitivity” to describe what we and other movement activists in the 1960s were calling “rebellion.” For Freire, it was the stage when the masses, conscious that their oppression is rooted in objective conditions, “become anxious for freedom, anxious to overcome the silence in which they have always existed.” Freire was very clear, as were we, that this breaking of silence was not just a riot. Indeed, the masses were seeking to make their historical presence felt. He was equally clear, as were we, that it was not yet revolution because revolutions are made by people (as distinguished from masses) who have assumed “the role of subject in the precarious adventure of transforming and re-creating the world. They are not just denouncing but also announcing a new positive.”8 Or as we put it in Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, “a rebellion disrupts the society,” but “a revolution . . . begins with projecting the notion of a more human, human being,” one “who is more advanced in the qualities which only human beings have—creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility.”9 Soon thereafter, I read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and was delighted to discover that his ideas of Education for Freedom, as education that not only makes the masses conscious of their oppression but engages them in struggles to transform themselves and their world, were very close to those that I had been putting forward.10 In this landmark work, Freire critiqued the bourgeois “banking method” of education, in which students are expected to memorize the “truths” of the dominant society—that is, “deposit” information in their head then “withdraw” it when required for tests, jobs, and other demands by overseers. Instead, Freire argued that critical thinking can develop only when questions are posed as problems. This problem-posing method provides no automatic “correct” answer. By contrast, students must discover their own understanding of the truth by developing a heightened awareness of their situation.

On my next weekend without the kids I went to Nashville to visit her. We had a great weekend. On Monday morning she kissed me goodbye and left for work. I would drive home while she was at work. Only I didn’t go straight home. I went and paid her recruiting officer a little visit. I walked in wearing shorts and a T-shirt so my injuries were fully visible. The two recruiters couldn’t hide the surprise on their faces. I clearly looked like an injured veteran. Not their typical visitor. “I’m here about Jamie Boyd,” I said. One of the recruiters stood up and said, “Yes, I’m working with Jamie Boyd. How can I help you?” I walked to the center of the room between him and the female recruiter who was still seated at her desk and said, “Jamie Boyd is not going to be active duty. She is not going to be a truck driver. She wants to change her MOS and you’re not going to treat her like some high school student. She has a degree. She is a young professional and you will treat her as such.” “Yes, sir, yes, sir. We hold ourselves to a higher standard. We’ll do better. I’m sorry,” he stammered. “You convinced her she can’t change anything. That’s a lie. It’s paperwork. Make it happen.” “Yes, sir, yes, sir.” That afternoon Jamie had an appointment at the recruitment center anyway for more paperwork. Afterward, she called me, and as soon as I answered, without even a hello, she said, “What have you done?” “How were they acting?” I asked, sounding really pleased with myself. “Like I can have whatever I want,” she answered. “You’re welcome. Find a better job.” She wasn’t mad about it. She just laughed and said, “You’re crazy.” “I will always protect you. You were getting screwed over. And I’m sorry you didn’t know about it, but you wouldn’t have let me go if I had told you ahead of time.” “You’re right, but I’m glad you did.” Jamie ended up choosing MP, military police, as her MOS because they offered her a huge signing bonus. We made our reunion official and she quit her job in Nashville to move back to Birmingham. She had a while before basic training, so she moved back in with me. We were both very happy, and as it turned out, some very big changes were about to happen beyond basic training.

He was a good, even a shining light as a Castalian to the extent that he had a many-sided mind, tirelessly active in scholarship as well as in the art of the Glass Bead Game, and enormously hard-working; but in character, in his attitude toward the hierarchy and the morality of the Order he was a very mediocre, not to say bad Castalian. The greatest of his vices was a persistent neglect of meditation, which he refused to take seriously. The purpose of meditation, after all, is adaptation of the individual to the hierarchy, and application in it might very well have cured him of his neurasthenia. For it infallibly helped him whenever, after a period of bad conduct, excessive excitement, or melancholia, his superiors disciplined him by prescribing strict meditation exercises under supervision. Even Knecht, kindly disposed and forgiving though he was, frequently had to resort to this measure. There was no question about it: Tegularius was a willful, moody person who refused to fit into his society. Every so often he would display the liveliness of his intellect. When highly stimulated he could be entrancing; his mordant wit sparkled and he overwhelmed everyone with the audacity and richness of his sometimes somber inspirations. But basically he was incurable, for he did not want to be cured; he cared nothing for co-ordination and a place in the scheme of things. He loved nothing but his freedom, his perpetual student status, and preferred spending his whole life as the unpredictable and obstinate loner, the gifted fool and nihilist, to following the path of subordination to the hierarchy and thus attaining peace. He cared nothing for peace, had no regard for the hierarchy, hardly minded reproof and isolation. Certainly he was a most inconvenient and indigestible component in a community whose idea was harmony and orderliness. But because of this very troublesomeness and indigestiblity he was, in the midst of such a limpid and prearranged little world, a constant source of vital unrest, a reproach, an admonition and warning, a spur to new, bold, forbidden, intrepid ideas, an unruly, stubborn sheep in the herd. And, to our mind, this was the very reason his friend cherished him.

We had used the radios on missions before; I could hear anything Erica said to me, while no one else could—and mine could pick up anything I said and transmit it back to her. At the moment, though, we were close enough not to need them. “You’re going to be my lookout,” Erica told me. “If you see any sign of trouble, let me know.” “Trouble?” I repeated, slipping on my second skate. “What are you planning to do?” “Find out what Shang’s up to.” “Now? How?” “I’m going to infiltrate his hotel room.” “What?” I gasped. “You can’t do that!” “Sure I can. I’m good at this stuff.” “I meant, you’re not supposed to do it. The mission is for me to befriend Jessica and use that connection to get close to her father.” “The mission is for us to find out what Operation Golden Fist is, period.” Erica was back to her normal, cool self; only somehow, she seemed even cooler than usual. Her attitude was icier than the skating rink. “The other plan is too complicated, the other students aren’t ready for activation yet, and like I said, you’re too emotionally involved where Jessica is concerned.” “Emotionally involved? I saw her for five seconds!” “It was enough. Your ability is compromised. I’m going with Plan B. Which should have been Plan A all along. If you just do your part, this will all be over within ten minutes.” Erica stood again and started toward the ice cream parlor. I followed her. Only, since I now had ice skates on, I couldn’t follow very quickly. “Wait!” I called. Erica stopped by the entrance to the ice rink. We were now close enough to the guy with the newspaper that she had to resume her teenage girl act again. “What is it, pumpkin?” I lowered my voice. “The hotel is crawling with guards. You’ll never be able to get into Shang’s room.” Erica smiled at me in a way I knew was pretend but that still melted my heart. “Oh, sweetie.” She sighed. “You’re so cute when you worry about me. But I’ll be fine. They won’t see me because of the diversion.” “What diversion?” I asked, suddenly feeling very worried. “This one,” Erica said, and shoved me onto the ice. I had ice-skated a few times before, so I might have been all right if Erica hadn’t caught me so off guard. Or shoved me so hard. Or sent me onto the rink backward.

Rebecca Wallace-Segall, who teaches creative-writing workshops for kids and teens as director of Writopia Lab in New York City, says that the students who sign up for her classes “are often not the kids who are willing to talk for hours about fashion and celebrity. Those kids are less likely to come, perhaps because they’re less inclined to analyze and dig deep—that’s not their comfort zone. The so-called shy kids are often hungry to brainstorm ideas, deconstruct them, and act on them, and, paradoxically, when they’re allowed to interact this way, they’re not shy at all. They’re connecting with each other, but in a deeper zone, in a place that’s considered boring or tiresome by some of their peers.” And these kids do “come out” when they’re ready; most of the Writopia kids read their works at local bookstores, and a staggering number win prestigious national writing competitions. If your child is prone to overstimulation, then it’s also a good idea for her to pick activities like art or long-distance running, that depend less on performing under pressure. If she’s drawn to activities that require performance, though, you can help her thrive. When I was a kid, I loved figure skating. I could spend hours on the rink, tracing figure eights, spinning happily, or flying through the air. But on the day of my competitions, I was a wreck. I hadn’t slept the night before and would often fall during moves that I had sailed through in practice. At first I believed what people told me—that I had the jitters, just like everybody else. But then I saw a TV interview with the Olympic gold medalist Katarina Witt. She said that pre-competition nerves gave her the adrenaline she needed to win the gold. I knew then that Katarina and I were utterly different creatures, but it took me decades to figure out why. Her nerves were so mild that they simply energized her, while mine were constricting enough to make me choke. At the time, my very supportive mother quizzed the other skating moms about how their own daughters handled pre-competition anxiety, and came back with insights that she hoped would make me feel better. Kristen’s nervous too, she reported. Renée’s mom says she’s scared the night before a competition. But I knew Kristen and Renée well, and I was certain that they weren’t as frightened as I was

Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers… Parents and other passengers read on Kindles… Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing… As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago… My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading… Increasing reports from educators and from researchers in psychology and the humanities bear this out. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19thand 20th centuries because they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. We should be less concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience,” however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts… Karin Littau and Andrew Piper have noted another dimension: physicality. Piper, Littau and Anne Mangen’s group emphasize that the sense of touch in print reading adds an important redundancy to information – a kind of “geometry” to words, and a spatial “thereness” for text. As Piper notes, human beings need a knowledge of where they are in time and space that allows them to return to things and learn from re-examination – what he calls the “technology of recurrence”. The importance of recurrence for both young and older readers involves the ability to go back, to check and evaluate one’s understanding of a text. The question, then, is what happens to comprehension when our youth skim on a screen whose lack of spatial thereness discourages “looking back.

Two exercises are especially prescribed by the adepts of the mystic path. The first consists in observing with great attention the workings of the mind without attempting to stop it. Seated in a quiet place, the disciple refrains as much as he can from consciously pointing his thoughts in a definite direction. He marks the spontaneous arising of ideas, memories, desires, etc., and considers how, superseded by new ones, they sink into the dark recesses of the mind. He watches also the subjective image which, apparently unconnected with any thoughts or sensations, appears while his eyes are closed: men, animals, landscapes, moving crowds, etc. During that exercise, he avoids making reflections about the spectacle which he beholds, looking passively at the continual, swift, flowing stream of thoughts and mental images that whirl, jostle, fight and pass away. It is said that the disciple is about to gather the fruit of this practice when he loosens the firm footing he had kept, till then, in his quality of spectator. He too — so he must understand — is an actor on the tumultuous stage. His present introspection, all his acts and thoughts, and the very sum of them all which he calls his self, are but ephemeral bubbles in a whirlpool made of an infinite quantity of bubbles which congregate for a moment, separate, burst, and form again, following a giddy rhythm. The second exercise is intended to stop the roaming of the mind in order that one may concentrate it on one single object. Training which tends to develop a perfect concentration of mind is generally deemed necessary for all students without distinction. As to observing the mind's activity it is only recommended to the most intellectual disciples. Training the mind to "one-pointedness" is practiced in all Buddhist sects. In Southern Buddhist countries — Ceylon, Siam, Burma — an apparatus called kasinas, which consists of clay discs variously coloured, or a round surface covered by water, or a fire at which one gazes through a screen in which a round hole is pierced — are used for this purpose. Any of these circles is stared at until it is seen as clearly when the eyes are shut, as when they are open and actually looking at it. The process does not aim at producing an hypnotic state, as some Western scholars have said, but it accustoms one to concentrating the mind. The fact that the subjective image has become as vivid as the objective, indicates — according

The school is teeming with activity. The rooms are small and large, many are special-purpose rooms, like shops and labs, but most are furnished like rather shabby living or dining rooms in homes: lots of sofas, easy chairs, and tables. Lots of people sitting around talking, reading, and playing games. On an average rainy day—quite different from a beautiful suddenly snowy day, or a warm spring or fall day—most people are inside. But there will also be more than a few who are outside in the rain, and later will come in dripping and trying the patience of the few people inside who think the school should perhaps be a “dry zone.” There may be people in the photo lab developing or printing pictures they have taken. There may be a karate class, or just some people playing on mats in the dance room. Someone may be building a bookshelf or fashioning chain mail armor and discussing medieval history. There are almost certainly a few people, either together or separate, making music of one kind or another, and others listening to music of one kind or another. You will find adults in groups that include kids, or maybe just talking with one student. It would be most unusual if there were not people playing a computer game somewhere, or chess; a few people doing some of the school’s administrative work in the office—while others hang around just enjoying the atmosphere of an office where interesting people are always making things happen; there will be people engaged in role-playing games; other people may be rehearsing a play—it might be original, it might be a classic. They may intend production or just momentary amusement. People will be trading stickers and trading lunches. There will probably be people selling things. If you are lucky, someone will be selling cookies they baked at home and brought in to earn money. Sometimes groups of kids have cooked something to sell to raise money for an activity—perhaps they need to buy a new kiln, or want to go on a trip. An intense conversation will probably be in progress in the smoking area, and others in other places. A group in the kitchen may be cooking—maybe pizza or apple pie. Always, either in the art room or in any one of many other places, people will be drawing. In the art room they might also be sewing, or painting, and some are quite likely to be working with clay, either on the wheel or by hand. Always there are groups talking, and always there are people quietly reading here and there. One

Scientists have found that there are two important genes, the CREB activator (which stimulates the formation of new connections between neurons) and the CREB repressor (which suppresses the formation of new memories). Dr. Jerry Yin and Timothy Tully of Cold Spring Harbor have been doing interesting experiments with fruit flies. Normally it takes ten trials for them to learn a certain task (e.g., detecting an odor, avoiding a shock). Fruit flies with an extra CREB repressor gene could not form lasting memories at all, but the real surprise came when they tested fruit flies with an extra CREB activator gene. They learned the task in just one session. “This implies these flies have a photographic memory,” says Dr. Tully. He said they are just like students “who could read a chapter of a book once, see it in their mind, and tell you that the answer is in paragraph three of page two seventy-four.” This effect is not just restricted to fruit flies. Dr. Alcino Silva, also at Cold Spring Harbor, has been experimenting with mice. He found that mice with a defect in their CREB activator gene were virtually incapable of forming long-term memories. They were amnesiac mice. But even these forgetful mice could learn a bit if they had short lessons with rest in between. Scientists theorize that we have a fixed amount of CREB activator in the brain that can limit the amount we can learn in any specific time. If we try to cram before a test, it means that we quickly exhaust the amount of CREB activators, and hence we cannot learn any more—at least until we take a break to replenish the CREB activators. “We can now give you a biological reason why cramming doesn’t work,” says Dr. Tully. The best way to prepare for a final exam is to mentally review the material periodically during the day, until the material becomes part of your long-term memory. This may also explain why emotionally charged memories are so vivid and can last for decades. The CREB repressor gene is like a filter, cleaning out useless information. But if a memory is associated with a strong emotion, it can either remove the CREB repressor gene or increase levels of the CREB activator gene. In the future, we can expect more breakthroughs in understanding the genetic basis of memory. Not just one but a sophisticated combination of genes is probably required to shape the enormous capabilities of the brain. These genes, in turn, have counterparts in the human genome, so it is a distinct possibility that we can also enhance our memory and mental skills genetically. However, don’t think that you will be able to get a brain boost anytime soon. Many hurdles still remain. First, it is not clear if these results apply to humans.

To their surprise, they found that dopamine actively regulates both the formation and the forgetting of new memories. In the process of creating new memories, the dCA1 receptor was activated. By contrast, forgetting was initiated by the activation of the DAMB receptor. Previously, it was thought that forgetting might be simply the degradation of memories with time, which happens passively by itself. This new study shows that forgetting is an active process, requiring intervention by dopamine. To prove their point, they showed that by interfering with the action of the dCA1 and DAMB receptors, they could, at will, increase or decrease the ability of fruit flies to remember and forget. A mutation in the dCA1 receptor, for example, impaired the ability of the fruit flies to remember. A mutation in the DAMB receptor decreased their ability to forget. The researchers speculate that this effect, in turn, may be partially responsible for savants’ skills. Perhaps there is a deficiency in their ability to forget. One of the graduate students involved in the study, Jacob Berry, says, “Savants have a high capacity for memory. But maybe it isn’t memory that gives them this capacity; maybe they have a bad forgetting mechanism. This might also be the strategy for developing drugs to promote cognition and memory—what about drugs that inhibit forgetting as a cognitive enhancers?” Assuming that this result holds up in human experiments as well, it could encourage scientists to develop new drugs and neurotransmitters that are able to dampen the forgetting process. One might thus be able to selectively turn on photographic memories when needed by neutralizing the forgetting process. In this way, we wouldn’t have the continuous overflow of extraneous, useless information, which hinders the thinking of people with savant syndrome. What is also exciting is the possibility that the BRAIN project, which is being championed by the Obama administration, might be able to identify the specific pathways involved with acquired savant syndrome. Transcranial magnetic fields are still too crude to pin down the handful of neurons that may be involved. But using nanoprobes and the latest in scanning technologies, the BRAIN project might be able to isolate the precise neural pathways that make possible photographic memory and incredible computational, artistic, and musical skills. Billions of research dollars will be channeled into identifying the specific neural pathways involved with mental disease and other afflictions of the brain, and the secret of savant skills may be revealed in the process. Then it might be possible to take normal individuals and make savants out of them. This has happened many times in the past because of random accidents. In the future, this may become a precise medical process.

Weston, having been born in Chicago, was raised with typical, well-grounded, mid-western values. On his 16th birthday, his father gave him a Kodak camera with which he started what would become his lifetime vocation. During the summer of 1908, Weston met Flora May Chandler, a schoolteacher who was seven years older than he was. The following year the couple married and in time they had four sons. Weston and his family moved to Southern California and opened a portrait studio on Brand Boulevard, in the artsy section of Glendale, California, called Tropico. His artistic skills soon became apparent and he became well known for his portraits of famous people, such as Carl Sandburg and Max Eastman. In the autumn of 1913, hearing of his work, Margrethe Mather, a photographer from Los Angeles, came to his studio, where Weston asked her to be his studio assistant. It didn’t take long before the two developed a passionate, intimate relationship. Both Weston and Mather became active in the growing bohemian cultural scene in Los Angeles. She was extremely outgoing and artistic in a most flamboyant way. Her bohemian sexual values were new to Weston’s conventional thinking, but Mather excited him and presented him with a new outlook that he found enticing. Mather was beautiful, and being bisexual and having been a high-class prostitute, was delightfully worldly. Mather's uninhibited lifestyle became irresistible to Weston and her photography took him into a new and exciting art form. As Mather worked and overtly played with him, she presented a lifestyle that was in stark contrast to Weston’s conventional home life, and he soon came to see his wife Flora as a person with whom he had little in common. Weston expanded his horizons but tried to keep his affairs with other women a secret. As he immersed himself further into nude photography, it became more difficult to hide his new lifestyle from his wife. Flora became suspicious about this secret life, but apparently suffered in silence. One of the first of many women who agreed to model nude for Weston was Tina Modotti. Although Mather remained with Weston, Tina soon became his primary model and remained so for the next several years. There was an instant attraction between Tina Modotti, Mather and Edward Weston, and although he remained married, Tina became his student, model and lover. Richey soon became aware of the affair, but it didn’t seem to bother him, as they all continued to remain good friends. The relationship Tina had with Weston could definitely be considered “cheating,” since knowledge of the affair was withheld as much as possible from his wife Flora May. Perhaps his wife knew and condoned this new promiscuous relationship, since she had also endured the intense liaison with Margrethe Mather. Tina, Mather and Weston continued working together until Tina and Weston suddenly left for Mexico in 1923. As a group, they were all a part of the cozy, artsy, bohemian society of Los Angeles, which was where they were introduced to the then-fashionable, communistic philosophy.

Kashmir Shaivism also developed an integrated and effective method of spiritual practice that includes intense devotion, the study of correct knowledge, and a special type of yoga unknown to other systems of practical philosophy. These three approaches are meant to be carefully integrated to produce a strong and vibrant practice. Yoga is the main path that leads to Self-realization, theoretical knowledge saves yogins from getting caught at some blissful but intermediary level of spiritual progress, and devotion provides them the strength and focus with which to digest correctly the powerful results of yoga and so avoid their misuse. This is a practice for both the mind and the heart. The teachings offers offer a fresh and powerful understanding of life that develops the faculties of the mind, while the devotional aspects of Kashmir Shaivism expand the faculties of a student’s heart. Combined together, both faculties help students reach the highest goal to which Shaiva yoga can dead them. The yoga system of Kashmir Shaivism is known as the Trika system. It includes many methods of yoga, which have been classified into three groups known as sambhava, sakta, and anava. Sambhava yoga consists of practices in direct realization of the truth, without making any effort at meditation, contemplation, or the learning of texts. The emphasis is on correct being, free from all aspects of becoming. This yoga transcends the use of mental activity. Sakta yoga consists of many types of practices in contemplation on the true nature of one’s real Self. Anava yoga includes various forms of contemplative meditation on objects other than one’s real Self, such as the mind, the life-force along with its five functions (the five pranas), the physical form along with its nerve-centers, the sounds of breathing, and different aspects of time and space. Trika yoga teaches a form of spiritual practice that is specific to Kashmir Shaivism. This system, along with its rituals, has been discussed in detail in Abhinavagupta’s voluminous Tantraloka, which is one of the world’s great treatises on philosophy and theology. Unlike many other forms of yoga, the Trika system is free from all types of repression of the mind, suppression of the emotions and instincts, and starvation of the senses. It eliminates all self-torturing practices, austere vows or penance, and forcible renunciation. Shaiva practitioners need not leave their homes, or roam as begging monks. Indifference (vairagya) to worldly life is not a precondition to for practicing Trika yoga. Sensual pleasures automatically become dull in comparison with the indescribable experience of Self-bliss. This is a transforming experience that naturally gives rise to a powerful form of spontaneous indifference to worldly pleasures. Finally, regardless of caste, creed, and sex, Trika yoga is open to all people, who through the Lord’s grace, have developed a yearning to realize the truth, and who become devoted to the Divine. — B. N. Pandit, Specific Principles of Kashmir Shaivism (3rd ed., 2008), p. xxiii-xxiv

If you are a great warrior, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before the lowest opponent. If you are a great general, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before the lowest soldier. If you are a great politician, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before for the lowest constituent. If you are a great governor, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before for the lowest peasant. If you are a great president, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before the lowest citizen. If you are a great leader, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before for the lowest servant. If you are a great pastor, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before the lowest parishioner. If you are a great prophet, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before the lowest seer. If you are a great pope, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before the lowest priest. If you are a great teacher, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before for the lowest student. If you are a great guru, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before for the lowest disciple. If you are a great architect, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before the lowest mason. If you are a great engineer, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before the lowest mechanic. If you are a great inventor, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before for the lowest scientist. If you are a great doctor, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before for the lowest nurse. If you are a great judge, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before the lowest lawyer. If you are a great artist, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before the lowest apprentice. If you are a great coach, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before for the lowest athlete. If you are a great genius, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before for the lowest talent. If you are a great philanthropist, you are supposed to be prepared to humble yourself before for the lowest beggar. In the school of patience, it is the long suffering who graduate. In the school of generosity, it is the kind who graduate. In the school of activism, it is the devoted who graduate. In the school of honor, it is the noble who graduate. In the school of wisdom, it is the prudent who graduate. In the school of knowledge, it is the curious who graduate. In the school of insight, it is the observant who graduate. In the school of understanding, it is the intelligent who graduate. In the school of success, it is the excellent who graduate. In the school of eminence, it is the influential who graduate. In the school of conquest, it is the fearless who graduate. In the school of enlightenment, it is the humble who graduate. In the school of courage, it is the hopeful who graduate. In the school of fortitude, it is the determined who graduate. In the school of leadership, it is servants who graduate. In the school of talent, it is the skilled who graduate. In the school of genius, it is the brilliant who graduate. In the school of greatness, it is the persevering who graduate. In the school of transcendence, it is the fearless who graduate. In the school of innovation, it is the creative who graduate.

10 Practical Strategies to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills and Unleash Your Creativity In today's rapidly changing world, the ability to think critically and creatively has become more important than ever. Whether you're a student looking to excel academically, a professional striving for success in your career, or simply someone who wants to navigate life's challenges with confidence, developing strong critical thinking skills is crucial. In this blog post, we will explore ten practical strategies to help you improve your critical thinking abilities and unleash your creative potential. 1. Embrace open-mindedness: One of the cornerstones of critical thinking is being open to different viewpoints and perspectives. Cultivate a willingness to listen to others, consider alternative opinions, and challenge your own beliefs. This practice expands your thinking and encourages creative problem-solving. 2. Ask thought-provoking questions: Asking insightful questions is a powerful way to stimulate critical thinking. By questioning assumptions, seeking clarity, and exploring deeper meanings, you can uncover new insights and perspectives. Challenge yourself to ask thought-provoking questions regularly. 3. Practice active listening: Listening actively involves not just hearing, but also understanding, interpreting, and empathizing with the speaker. By honing your active listening skills, you can better grasp complex ideas, identify underlying assumptions, and engage in more meaningful discussions. 4. Seek diverse sources of information: Expand your knowledge base by seeking information from a wide range of sources. Engage with diverse perspectives, opinions, and ideas through books, articles, podcasts, and documentaries. This habit broadens your understanding and encourages critical thinking by exposing you to different viewpoints. 5. Develop analytical thinking skills: Analytical thinking involves breaking down complex problems into smaller components, examining relationships and patterns, and drawing logical conclusions. Enhance your analytical skills by practicing activities like puzzles, riddles, and brain teasers. This will sharpen your ability to analyze information and think critically. 6. Foster a growth mindset: A growth mindset is the belief that your abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. Embracing this mindset encourages you to view challenges as opportunities for growth, rather than obstacles. By persisting through difficulties, you build resilience and enhance your critical thinking abilities. 7. Engage in collaborative problem-solving: Collaborating with others on problem-solving tasks can spark creativity and strengthen critical thinking skills. Seek out group projects, brainstorming sessions, or online forums where you can exchange ideas, challenge each other's thinking, and find innovative solutions together. 8. Practice reflective thinking: Taking time to reflect on your thoughts, actions, and experiences allows you to gain deeper insights and learn from past mistakes. Regularly engage in activities like journaling, meditation, or self-reflection exercises to develop your reflective thinking skills. This practice enhances your critical thinking abilities by promoting self-awareness and self-improvement. 9. Encourage creativity through experimentation: Creativity and critical thinking often go hand in hand. Give yourself permission to experiment and explore new ideas without fear of failure. Embrace a "what if" mindset and push the boundaries of your thinking. This willingness to take risks and think outside the box can lead to breakthroughs in critical thinking. 10. Continuously learn and adapt: Critical thinking is a skill that can be honed throughout your life. Commit to lifelong learning and seek opportunities to expand your knowledge and skills. Stay curious, be open to new experiences, and embrace change.

The process of receiving teaching depends upon the student giving something in return; some kind of psychological surrender is necessary, a gift of some sort. This is why we must discuss surrendering, opening, giving up expectations, before we can speak of the relationship between teacher and student. It is essential to surrender, to open yourself, to present whatever you are to the guru, rather than trying to present yourself as a worthwhile student. It does not matter how much you are willing to pay, how correctly you behave, how clever you are at saying the right thing to your teacher. It is not like having an interview for a job or buying a new car. Whether or not you will get the job depends upon your credentials, how well you are dressed, how beautifully your shoes are polished, how well you speak, how good your manners are. If you are buying a car, it is a matter of how much money you have and how good your credit is. But when it comes to spirituality, something more is required. It is not a matter of applying for a job, of dressing up to impress our potential employer. Such deception does not apply to an interview with a guru, because he sees right through us. He is amused if we dress up especially for the interview. Making ingratiating gestures is not applicable in this situation; in fact it is futile. We must make a real commitment to being open with our teacher; we must be willing to give up all our preconceptions. Milarepa expected Marpa to be a great scholar and a saintly person, dressed in yogic costume with beads, reciting mantras, meditating. Instead he found Marpa working on his farm, directing the laborers and plowing his land. I am afraid the word guru is overused in the West. It would be better to speak of one’s “spiritual friend,” because the teachings emphasize a mutual meeting of two minds. It is a matter of mutual communication, rather than a master-servant relationship between a highly evolved being and a miserable, confused one. In the master-servant relationship the highly evolved being may appear not even to be sitting on his seat but may seem to be floating, levitating, looking down at us. His voice is penetrating, pervading space. Every word, every cough, every movement that he makes is a gesture of wisdom. But this is a dream. A guru should be a spiritual friend who communicates and presents his qualities to us, as Marpa did with Milarepa and Naropa with Marpa. Marpa presented his quality of being a farmer-yogi. He happened to have seven children and a wife, and he looked after his farm, cultivating the land and supporting himself and his family. But these activities were just an ordinary part of his life. He cared for his students as he cared for his crops and family. He was so thorough, paying attention to every detail of his life, that he was able to be a competent teacher as well as a competent father and farmer. There was no physical or spiritual materialism in Marpa’s lifestyle at all. He did not emphasize spirituality and ignore his family or his physical relationship to the earth. If you are not involved with materialism, either spiritually or physically, then there is no emphasis made on any extreme. Nor is it helpful to choose someone for your guru simply because he is famous, someone who is renowned for having published stacks of books and converted thousands or millions of people. Instead the guideline is whether or not you are able actually to communicate with the person, directly and thoroughly. How much self-deception are you involved in? If you really open yourself to your spiritual friend, then you are bound to work together. Are you able to talk to him thoroughly and properly? Does he know anything about you? Does he know anything about himself, for that matter? Is the guru really able to see through your masks, communicate with you properly, directly? In searching for a teacher, this seems to be the guideline rather than fame or wisdom.

A communicative methodology will therefore encourage students to practise language in pairs and groups, where they have equal opportunity to ask, answer, initiate and respond. The teacher assumes a counselling role, initiating activity, listening, helping and advising. Students are encouraged to communicate effectively rather than merely to produce grammatically correct forms of English.

An excellent illustration of this notion comes from another intriguing experiment conducted on psychology students. In this case students were given, in advance of class, either a complete set of notes on the lecture for the day or a partial set of notes—one that consisted of “headings and titles of definitions and concepts, which required students to add information to complete the notes” (Cornelius & Owen-DeSchryver 2008, p. 8). So the students who received the full notes had the knowledge network for the day handed to them prior to class (through the course learning management system); the students who received the partial notes received only the frame of that knowledge network, and had to fill in the rest on their own. The students in both conditions performed comparably on the first two examinations for the course. On the third and final examinations, however, as the amount of course material increased and required deeper understanding, the students in the partial-notes condition outperformed their full-note peers. Especially relevant for the argument that connections improve comprehension, the students in the partial-notes condition outperformed their peers on conceptual questions on the final exam. As the authors explained, “On a [final] test that required knowledge of a large number of concepts, rote memorization was not feasible, so students who encoded the information by actively taking notes throughout the semester may have performed better because they had experienced better conceptual understanding” (p. 10). This experiment has obvious implications for classroom teaching, or even the creation of reading guides or lecture notes for an online courses. However, the important point for now is that the partial notes gave students an organized framework that enabled and encouraged them to see and make new connections on their own.

In the northernmost block, located next to a public square and close to the main thoroughfare, various non-residential uses have flourished alongside a range of dwelling types, including a student residence. The active ground floors include small shops, offices, and services, a “bodega” pub, a cellar restaurant and music venue, and a nursery school with big front windows. There is a co-op supermarket that has progressively expanded into neighboring buildings, including a former cinema and a bank, creating an important local shopping hub. The courtyard includes a nursery for the smallest children and a shared laundry for the student housing.

You also may have heard teachers say that students have different learning styles—for example, some are “visual learners” and others are “auditory learners.” The way the brain processes information actually runs counter to these classifications. Research shows that if children are taught new information using several modalities, such as learning letters of the alphabet by looking at them, writing them, and naming them, the brain areas underlying each modality become activated even when children later process information using one modality, such as vision only (James, 2007). This suggests that rather than classify students as one type of learner or another, we should ask students to learn information in a variety of ways. This is consistent with research indicating that providing students

During instruction, teachers should provide problem-solving activities that enable students to use scientific concepts in practical ways. This allows scientific concepts to meet students’ personal, concrete experiences so their spontaneous concepts become structured and conscious (Karpov, 2006; Vygotsky, 1987).