Archive for the 'Newsletter' Category

Sam Laird | Mashable.com | Original Article

Is tech saturation good or bad for the modern teenager?

Arguments can be made either way, but there’s no debating that today’s teens are more wired than ever. And digital permeates the lives of young people in general, too.

People aged 18-34 have an average of 319 online connections, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. That’s compared to an average of 198 connections for the 35-46 group, and the numbers continue to decrease from there.

Pew also recently reported that 63% of teenagers text message with friends on a daily basis, compared to 39% who speak on the phone daily and just 35% who interact face-to-face outside of school. Other research has found that text-happy teens send more than 100 messages per day.

But the digital revolution comes with drawbacks. A 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation study found a correlation between media consumption and poor academic performance. The study found that 21% of young people between the ages of eight and 18 consume at least 16 hours of media per day, while 17% consume less than three hours per day. 47% of the heavy users reported typically earning grades of C or below in school, compared to just 23% of the light users. Twice as many heavy users as light users reported getting in trouble frequently. More…

Image via Mashable.com

Anemona Hartocollis | The New York Times | Original Article

A reading passage included this week in one of New York’s standardized English tests has become the talk of the eighth grade, with students walking around saying, “Pineapples don’t have sleeves,” as if it were the code for admission to a secret society.

The passage is a parody of the tortoise and the hare story, the Aesop’s fable that almost every child learns in elementary school. Only instead of a tortoise, the hare races a talking pineapple, and the moral of the story — more on that later — is the part about the sleeves.

While taking the test, baffled children raised their hands to say things like, “This story doesn’t make sense.”

Antitesting activists have taken up the cudgel, saying that the passage and the multiple-choice questions associated with it perfectly illustrate the absurdity of standardized testing. And by Friday afternoon, the state education commissioner had decided that the questions would not count in students’ official scores. More…

Image: Suzanne DeChillo for The New York Times

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee | New York Times Op-Eds | Original Article

Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. More…

Image: Harriet Russell for the New York Times

Hanif Kureishi, The New York Times

The other day it occurred to me that I needed more exercise and should take up skipping. I obtained a smart leather rope with weights in the handles and, waiting until it was almost dark, went out into the street. Making sure that no one was coming, I started bouncing on the pavement. I must have skipped a bit as a child, I guess, because I could remember how to do it. Being a determined if not bloody-minded fellow, I improved after a few days; I could go on longer. But that was that: I didn’t do more skips; my knees couldn’t take it, and I soon ran out of breath. Nor could I do the leaps, twirls, step-overs and girly hops I’d seen on the Internet. I repeated the same little leaden jumps over and over. Soon I had to conclude that I’d reached my level. The only way was down.

My 13-year-old son wandered into the street and said he’d like to have a go with the rope. I handed it over, and he began to fling himself in all directions at once, crisscrossing his arms, hopping and tripping from foot to foot while doing a Cossack impression; then he did the whole thing backward, singing a Beatles song. It was moving and educational to be so instructed by one’s son. I hoped an opportunity for retribution would soon present itself.

My son, who can skip and sing, found it difficult, for a long time, to read and write at the level of others his age. At primary school he was castigated, even insulted and punished, for his inability. After experts were called in, he was investigated and berated some more, and finally labeled dyslexic and dyspraxic. More…

Image: Rutu Modan via The New York Times