kismetism

My son is gay →

IT IS NOT OK TO BULLY. Even if you wrap it up in a bow and call it ‘concern.’

Absolutely, freaking fantastic.

“The Secret Powers of Time”, Philip Zimbardo.

Quad linked the full talk to me some time ago, but I wasn’t able to watch it just then and kind of forgot about it. Then I ended up seeing a link to the animated one, which reminded me (“didn’t Quad link me something about time, too?”) … and then I found it was the same guy / talk. ;x

I do like the animated one better, just because it has all the essentials packed in. The full talk has some interesting studies, just a little too long for my tastes.

How MetaFilter Saved Two Russian Women From Potential Human Trafficking →

The amazing things we could do…..

tumblographr:

Even knowing the eventual outcome, the actual thread is absolutely nerve-wracking to read.

Gainful Employment →

Thanks, Quad.

In the business world, however, we too often stop at that second drive. We organise our enterprises around the belief that the way to improve performance is through an elaborate architecture of carrots and sticks. If we reward the behaviour we seek, and punish the behaviour we dislike, individuals will perform at a high level and their organisations will flourish. Or so the theory goes. In the 19th and 20th century, that approach – enacted in businesses large and small on both sides of the Atlantic – had a sturdy logic. Indeed, it works quite well when people are doing relatively simple, routine, rule-based work, whether this involves turning a screw on an assembly line or processing paper in an office.

Trouble is, that kind of work has largely disappeared in western Europe and North America. In the 21st century, most white-collar workers do jobs that require at least some non-routine, heuristic, creative, conceptual capabilities. And a half-century of research in behavioural science, carried out in laboratories and field experiments around the world, shows that for this sort of work, the approach we use with donkeys – carrots and sticks – is rarely effective and sometimes harmful.

If you take a small child into the garden and point at the moon, the child will look at the moon. Take your dog into the garden and point at the moon, and the dog will look at your finger. Quizzically.

Other animals sing, but they don’t compose operas. They communicate, but they don’t write plays. They look puzzled, but they don’t write tomes of philosophy. They get depressed, but they don’t listen to Miles Davis and drink Jack Daniels.

—

Sir Ken Robinson promoting his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, which is about finding your true passion(s) and how the current educational system is extremely poor at permitting students to discover what it is exactly that they are “meant” to do.

Without a doubt, this is thus far the most eloquent manner of describing, I think, what it is to be quintessentially human.

His talk reminds me of what the things I find to be most appealing about ATDP: that is, for the teachers who stick around for progressive years, you know they are there because they love what they do and they are trying to impart their passion onto students who are interested in learning their craft.

Also, this is why it drives me so bonkers sometimes to find parents who shove their students into this class or that class (english! math! science!) because the parents think it’s important that their kids get more practice in said subject. While that may be true, I think it’s a damn shame that the summer time (the supposed vacation time) isn’t used to explore topics that you don’t get any exposure to in the regular school year.

Kids should be exploring their options at EVERY available opportunity and in today’s society, summer vacation is the perfect time to be discovering something new.

As for me, I find that I’m interested in a number of different things and have been fascinated by several reoccurring topics. But it’s hard to say if I’ve really discovered my so-called passion. What a frustrating predicament.