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How green are Millennials? Not very

March 18, 2012 By

Green? Schmean.  Young Americans are less interested in environmental issues than baby boomers and Gen Xers were at the same age, concludes a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Over the last four decades, in young people have lost trust in others and interest in government; they spend less time thinking about social problems. And they’re not all that keen on green, notes AP.

Researchers found that, when surveyed decades ago, about a third of young baby boomers said it was important to become personally involved in programs to clean up the environment. In comparison, only about a quarter of young Gen Xers—and 21 percent of Millennials—said the same.

Meanwhile, 15 percent of Millennials said they had made no effort to help the environment, compared with 8 percent of young Gen Xers and 5 percent of young baby boomers.

Young baby boomers and Gen Xers were much more likely than Millennials to say they’ve tried to conserve electricity and fuel used to heat their homes.

One professor says the younger generation has less contact with “unpaved” nature.

At Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, Biology Professor  Richard Niesenbaum estimates 5 to 10 percent of students are environmentalists, 5 percent are hostile to environmentalism and 85 to 90 percent are OK with protecting the environment and conserving resources, but not interested in being “seriously inconvenienced or paying a cost to do so.”

Perhaps Millennials are burned out on green.

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Power to the introverts

March 16, 2012 By

Our culture is designed for gregarious team players, says Susan Cain, author of Quiet, in this TED talk on The Power of Introverts.  Schools require children to work in groups, “even in  the most solitary of assignments, such as creative writing,” she complains. Students need the chance to think and learn on their own too. “Solitude is the school of the soul.”

Diana Senechal’s Republic of Noise also criticizes the mania for group work, collaboration and “groupthink,” rather than solitary contemplation.

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Twitter, text, talk, but no time to think

February 6, 2012 By

Everybody’s connected all the time, “sharing” every 140-character observation, updating each other on their latest cup of coffee, tweeting and texting. But there’s less time to think, writes Diana Senechal in her new book, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture.

An English teacher quotes Senechal’s critique of the stress on group work and collaboration.

“Our public schools, which should encourage students to see beyond the claims of the movement, have instead caved in to the immediate demands of the larger culture and economy. Convinced that the outside world calls for collaboration, school leaders and policymakers expect teachers to incorporate group work in their lessons, the more of it the better. They do not pay enough attention to the ingredients of good collaboration: independent thought, careful pondering of a topic, knowledge of the subject, and attentive listening.

“One oft-touted practice in elementary school is the ‘turn and talk’ activity, where a teacher pauses in a story she is reading aloud, asks a question, and has the students talk to their partners about it. When they are done, they join hands and raise them in the air. Instead of losing themselves in the story, they must immediately contend with the reactions of their peers. Many districts require small-group activities, throughout the grades, because such activities presumably allow all student to talk in a given lesson. Those who set and enforce such policies do not consider the drawbacks of so much talk. Talk needs a counterbalance of thought; without thought, it turns into chatter.”

I memorized a sonnet by Wordsworth in the 10th grade. Forty-odd years later, it stills comes to mind: “The world is too much with us; late and soon. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers . . . “

Compulsive tweeting and checking of e-mail is harder to resist than alcohol or cigarettes, according to a new study.

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‘You can do anything’

January 17, 2012 By

Saturday Night Live celebrates the self-esteem of the YouTube generation in this skit.

Self-esteem is making your kids weak and dumb, warns Gawker.

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Franco gets a D, NYU prof loses job

December 20, 2011 By

Actor James Franco got a D in a NYU directing class. His professor, José Angel Santana, claims he was fired for not coddling the star, who’s pursuing a master’s in fine arts. Franco missed 12 of 14 classes, says Santana, who’s filed suit.

Franco, 33, did well in his other NYU courses. That’s because he hired one of his professors, Jay Anania, to write and direct a film starring Franco, Santana charges.

“The school has bent over backwards to create a Franco-friendly environment, that’s for sure,” Santana, 58, told The Post. “The university has done everything in its power to curry favor with James Franco.”

Franco was photographed sleeping in a Columbia lecture, recalls Next Media Animation.

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Immigrant blacks outperform natives

December 20, 2011 By

Africans outperform African-Americans in Seattle schools: Even the children of destitute Somali refugees do better.

The district compared blacks who speak English at home with those who speak other languages at home but aren’t considered English Language Learners.

Amharic-speaking students from Ethiopia scored the highest, nearly reaching the district average in reading. Somalis did worse than other African immigrants, but much better than English-only blacks.

• Only 36 percent of black students who speak English at home passed their grade’s math test, while 47 percent of Somali-speaking students passed. Other black ethnic groups did even better, although still lower than the district average of 70 percent.

• In reading, 56 percent of black students who speak English passed, while 67 percent of Somali-speaking students passed. Again, other black ethnic groups did better, though still lower than the district average of 78 percent.

Black immigrants attend college at a much higher rate than U.S.-born blacks or whites, concluded a John Hopkins study in 2009. The immigrants were educated, successful people in their home countries, researchers said.

However, that’s not true of the very poor Somalis who found refuge in Seattle.

Seattle School Board member Betty Patu, who has worked for decades with community groups serving students of color, said she has noticed that all immigrant families, regardless of socioeconomic status, place high value on education.

“Their motivation is different,” she said. “When you leave your country, you come here to do something. You don’t come here just to sit around and do nothing.”

In short, it’s the culture, stupid.

However, Marty McLaren, a board member and former teacher, blames “a culture of low expectations . . .  dating back to the days of slavery” for American blacks’ poor performance. Faced with institutionalized racism, students give up, she said.

 

 

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Poverty isn’t just about money

December 16, 2011 By
If I was a poor black kid, I’d work hard in school and use technology to succeed, writes Gene Marks, a middle-class white man, in a Forbes column that’s angered and annoyed  many people.
Being poor is a lot harder than middle-class people think, responds Megan McArdle in The Atlantic. She lists the many reasons why poor black kids don’t just work, study, log in to Google Scholar and get ahead.
Number 14 is that not everyone likes school. She quotes Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier:

The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly.

People for whom school us fun have made “education a virtual pre-requisite for a stable and well paying job,”  McArdle writes. People who don’t like school and aren’t good at it can choose between a career as a fry cook or dealing drugs.

In another post, McArdle takes on the idea that more and better jobs would create “education parents” in low-income communities.

Poverty isn’t just about not having “the same stuff” as the middle class (education, a marriage license, a home), McArdle writes. It’s about the choices people make. And those choices are affected by generational poverty and by bad decisions made at a young age, such as unprotected sex with an unreliable male or dropping out of school. But they’re choices.

 A middle class parent after a long and crappy day at work struggles to deal with the kid’s school because other parents expect it, because they were raised to treasure education, and because people will work harder to avoid loss (a kid who drops out of the middle class) than to achieve gains (a kid who makes it into the middle class).  Also, that middle class job probably isn’t as miserable as changing diapers on Alzheimer’s patients, or cleaning houses, so you have more psychic energy to spare.

Or you can blame a “sick culture” or personal laziness, as some conservatives do–at some level, it doesn’t matter.  Poor people are actually choosing not to hassle with their kid’s school.  It’s a real choice that they have made.  There is no reason to assume that you will be able to override it if you just get the policy levers in the right position.

Higher-wage jobs enable people to earn more money, which solves some problems, she writes. But it’s not so easy to change people. And it would be “pretty creepy” if we could tweak a policy here and there to “remake people into something more to the liking of bourgeois taxpayers.”

 

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The wrong word

November 4, 2011 By

Poet Robert Pinsky praises memorizing poetry badly.

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Prehistoric fingerpainting

October 16, 2011 By

Prehistoric children as young as two drew on cave walls, writes Cosmic Log.

The tale of the “prehistoric preschool”  at France’s Rouffignac cave complex was laid out by Cambridge archaeologist Jessica Cooney at a conference on the archaeology of childhood.

Archaeologists measure the “finger flutings” to determine the artists’ age.

The researchers suspect that eight to 10 people, including four kids aged 7 or younger, were behind the ancient finger flutings. Children left marks in every chamber. One of them was apparently just 2 or 3 years old and may have been helped by a grown-up. “The most prolific of the children who made flutings was aged around 5 — and we are almost certain the child in question was a girl,” Cooney said.

Cooney said that child’s markings appear on cave ceilings more than 6 feet (2 meters) high, which would suggest that she was held up or put on someone’s shoulders to make the marks. One chamber was so marked up by children that it may have served as a “playpen of sorts,” she said.

Scientists have discovered a prehistoric paint workshop in South Africa.

Filed Under: Children, Culture Tagged With: , , ,

The canon lives — in adult courses

September 5, 2011 By

“The canon of great literature, philosophy, and art is thriving — in the marketplace, if not on college campuses, writes Heather Mac Donald in City Journal.

The Great Courses (previously The Teaching Company) is turning a profit “selling recorded lectures in the humanities and sciences to an adult audience eager to brush up its Shakespeare and its quantum mechanics.”

Back when I was commuting to work, I listened to the history of western thought series on tape. One of their economics lecturers, Tim Taylor, is an old friend and former San Jose Mercury News colleague. Yes, back when newspapers made money, we had an editorial writer who understood economics — and math.

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