LET IT SNOW!

This was originally going to be a silly post, but maybe it'll be serious. It's snowing here for the first time since... oh, I'd say the end of October. Yeah, Baltimore has a history of crazy weather patterns, but nothing like this.


It's interesting: people seem to think global warming is going to eventually eliminate snow entirely. Actually, snow needs warmth to fall. Here's what happens to make snow- The ice particles in the drastically colder upper levels of the atmosphere begin falling to earth. If the air is cold enough, they keep falling as hail, and if it's warm enough, they melt into rain. If the air is thick and warm enough, yet cold up above, the ice actually falls, then bounces back up, collecting more particles with it, leading to flakiness and snowfall.


So actually, my favorite weather is an indirect product of my favorite everyday method of transportation. So please, everyone keep driving everywhere, even if you could carpool, take the bus, or even walk. Get inefficient gas-guzzlers, and maybe even leave the engine running when you have to "just duck inside". Do your part to blanket the world in snow!


PS- I'm joking. Do the opposite of the things I just said. Don't choke us to death in carbon and snow.

The True Price of Gasoline

It's fairly common knowledge that the area of greatest concern to the entire world is the Middle East. There are tons of things going on there nowadays, and those combined events could very well determine the fate of our entire planet.


The first situation (the focus of this entry) seems very complicated, but is actually very easily averted: crude oil. Several Middle Eastern countries (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, etc.) are the top leading oil producers in the world. They just got lucky, I suppose. In fact, they are so lucky that they have enough oil to hold the world in a vice grip. If the OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) nations decided to withhold all their oil, not only would their economies collapse, due to their dependence on the export of oil, the economies of most world nations would also collapse, due to their dependence on the consumption of oil.


And guess which superpower consumes the lion's share of the oil? Nope, it's not China; they still bike a lot. The United States, the largest (single nation) economic power in the world [1], is also the hugest gas guzzler [2]. In fact, we consume more oil than the rest of the top five nations combined. SPOILER ALERT: if there was suddenly no petroleum available, Americans would start dropping dead from hunger, since the food industry is literally driven by petroleum. Pollan cites statistics like 10 calories of petroleum energy to produce 1 calorie of food energy [3].


Obviously, US government has figured this out as well; it would be sad if a 17-year-old could see it after 15 minutes on the internet, but highly trained officials with decades of training and experience couldn't. Is it any wonder that the majority of US foreign aid goes to Middle Eastern nations? [4] (Although the benefactors of this aid are the military and economic powers of the region, not the oil tankards... Just in case?)


Now then, what to do about this? There are so many options, I don't even know from which angle to deride the world governments. I think I'll go with alternative energy. I mean, come ON! We have figured out so many ways to produce power without burning petroleum that it's almost funny how bad cars smell.


We have electric and hybrid cars, and lots of people use them because they use less fuel. If you're one of those people, good for you! Nice effort! Except for one thing: you may be killing us faster. Although we generally don't use petroleum for power plants, they still produce harmful emissions, and electric cars usually charge using power from those plants. So if we all switch to electric, our cities would smell much better, since the local emission of pollution would go down, but the world as a whole would have more pollution. But even that would reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuels.


Here's one of my favorites: solar, hydro, and wind power. We have so much free energy literally floating around us, it's a little disappointing that we don't harvest more of it. Hydroelectricity is probably the hardest to get, unless you happen to have a large waterfall lying around in your backyard. Still, there are plenty of bodies of moving water that don't have generators attached to them, and although there are few that are powerful enough to be efficient uses of our efforts, some is more then none. We could stick TONS of solar panels and windmills all over the place, especially those sunny deserts and windswept plains, both of which are empty for miles. Solar and wind are generally inversely proportional--that is, the efficiency of solar goes down when the wind picks up, due to moving clouds, etc. But still, yet again, we are far from maximum efficiency as far as either goes.


With electric cars combined with optimized free energy, we can almost completely free ourselves from Middle Eastern (and South American) oil hoarders. But even that won't diffuse global interest in the center of the world.


What you can do- For starters, if you haven't already done so, switch to electric or hybrid cars. This is the first step. Yes, it may be a little more expensive, but it's well worth it in the long-run, and even in the medium-term. If the market experiences a vast upswing in the quantity of electric cars demanded, it becomes more efficient for producers to sell at lower prices, so even more people will buy them. Every car counts.


You can even take it to the next level and talk to your representative about intensifying measures to harness free energy. Democracy is a pleasure to work with. We can each exert a tiny amount of influence on our governments, so let's take advantage of that. If you live anywhere but in the US, I don't know what to tell you, but I urge you to look it up for yourselves. For Americans, you can use this helpful website right over here to contact your representative. No matter where you are, it shouldn't take more than five minutes to shoot them an email. (Calling may take longer, but I try to avoid telephone conversations like the plague, so I wouldn't know.)


It really helps to talk to them. Most politicians already know what they should do to fix the world, but they are afraid that people are so abhorrent to change that any attempts to put forth their ideas will be met with a quick end to their political career. We need to show them that they have our support if they want to save us all from the grip of oil.


The last thing you should do is spread the revolution. You don't need to mention this blog at all (I'd appreciate it if you did) but at least bring the issue to the attention of your peers. Remember, everyone makes a difference, but a dozen people make 12x the difference of one.


Next week-- Middle Eastern Democracy.

Tomorrow's Schools, Tomorrow

From a very young age, we have had ingrained in our heads this formula: Go to school, work hard, get a good grade, get into college, get a degree, get a good job, work a few decades, retire, die. It seems worth the toil, right? At least if we work hard at something we don't like, we can live a subsistence lifestyle for the last couple of decades of our lives.

Or we could enjoy life without wasting any time on inefficient schooling. Here is my four part plan to change schools.

1. Core Curriculum- Before formal schooling, potential students should take a short, three month course that touches briefly on all basic subjects and skills. This course will assess their reading and writing levels, and make sure they are up to scratch. At the end, all who participated and attended satisfactorily will be issued a certificate that entitles them to continued education.

The purpose will become obvious in a moment, when you read about how much autonomy I want to grant students. We need to make sure that anyone who want to pursue their own choices has enough information to make those decisions.

2. Ageless Classes- Why are we packaging students by date of manufacture? It's hardly their most important feature. Different people learn at different speeds, and in vastly different ways. Also, it prevents older people who may have missed out on classes they wanted to take from returning to school. If you dropped out of middle school, for whatever reason, you can't go to college, or even high school, and people think it's weird for a 30-year-old to be sitting in a class with 13-year-olds. With the no-age system, anyone can join any class, as long as they have the requisite knowledge (see below).

Also, we can completely abandon what sociologists call "The Hidden Curriculum," where the school environment teaches children more than just the knowledge contained in textbooks. Teachers and faculty teach kids to respect authority, love their country, and other cultural lessons. However, the transmission of culture is less important today, since cultures are quickly mixing together, and creating a global culture. (I plan to replace the contents of these parentheses with a link to my Globalism post, as soon as it exists.) In any case, culture should be the job of parents and friends, etc, while school's purpose is knowledge. Without age as a factor, how would we keep track of cultural development? The answer is, we don't.

3. Heightened Specialization- Never again should a child who hates math have to sit through year after year of droning lectures on something they don't care about. We need to do research: interview professionals and ask them how relevant each mandatory class is to them now. We can collect precise data on what is necessary for each job, and design curricula for each field.

At any point after taking their three month core classes course, students can choose what career they think they want to take. Specialized tracks will be available to show what skills they eventually need to have, and thus what classes they will need to take. A certain level of groundwork may be required for some classes (you can't take calc-based physics without knowing calc), but classes are no longer age-based, so it doesn't matter if you haven't taken a class yet: just take it now.

Obviously, the school can also provide a helpful list of "core classes" for those who haven't decided what they like yet. Once they do decide, they can start enrolling in the classes they want to take.

4. No grades- Yes, that's right. No more A's, B's, or F's.

"But then how will we know how well the kids are doing in their classes?" you might ask. "How can the kids can't learn if they aren't motivated by academic success?"

Without grades, it is very possible to be motivated. Children are born with an internal desire to learn everything they can about the world. This exploratory urge is what makes babies and toddlers the fastest to learn a language. However, it seems to drop off very quickly, starting around 6 or 7 years old. What happened to this wide-eyed appreciation of knowledge for its own sake?

Education happened. We literally train the yearning for learning out of kids, by replacing their intrinsic desire with extrinsic rewards and punishments, like grades and little trinkets.

Intrinsic motivation has been shown to be the most powerful driving force for humans. However, when a reward is given to someone for doing an action, they suddenly abandon any internal desire to do that activity. Rewards become like crack to them, and they start needing more and more of the reward to do the same thing. If we dangle a carrot in front of a kid who has their nose in a textbook, their attention will shift to carrot. Eyes on the prize, right? We want the prize to be the knowledge, not the grade.

That doesn't answer the question: "How will their progress be monitored without grades?" The answer is simply "Why does their progress need to be monitored?"

They chose their own classes, so they clearly want to learn what they're learning. Teachers can usually tell who is engaged, and who isn't, and the students themselves definitely know if they are doing well in the class. If a student or a teacher feels that a student isn't understanding the material, they can schedule remedial lessons, or perhaps take the class again.

5. Tailored Teaching- We all know how vastly different people's styles of learning can be. Even if you weren't one, you almost certainly had a kid in your class who either couldn't sit still in class, wasn't paying attention, or simply didn't get what the teacher was saying. Chances are, you didn't focus 100% of the time either. I mentioned segmented attention last time: well now it's time for segmented teaching.

The best way to focus curricula for individual students is to have a higher ratio of teacher to student. Obviously this would require more teachers, since my system invites more students, not fewer. This is not a problem- it actually helps solve the problem of a dwindling job market. I am not qualified to formulate a curriculum generation system, but I think a little research could stand to be done on education training that focuses on teaching the teacher to adapt to each individual student differently.

It's as simple as that. With these 5 changes, students will be motivated to learn more, since they are learning what they want to learn, and aren't pressured by grades. We don't need to have so much of our old-fashioned structure, like set curricula. What is the exact usefulness of American Literature to an architect? Who knows? Obviously research needs to be conducted before we make any changes, but I feel confident that we can do it.

Drawbacks- I realize the biggest potential drawback to this system, which is that it almost eliminates one of the positive latent functions of the school atmosphere, which is the social aspect. For younger children, who may not have so much freedom to go out with friends, school is a necessary stepping stone to teach them how to make friends and behave socially. In my system, they may miss out on the opportunity to interact with kids their own age.

That is why I propose a bonus step 6: Social Class- An optional (yet recommended) extra type of class designed for children up until high school age. It would teach kids by age group, like the traditional classroom. They could be sort of like study hall sessions, or perhaps a more overtly social event, where the facilitator would direct them in creative activities. I don't know, I'm just spit-balling here.

A Changing World

Our society has evolved a lot, especially in the past decade. We live in an age of multitasking and constant engagement and control. Every day, we have the opportunity to do many different things, and we take advantage of that opportunity. Hundreds of channels on TV, smart phones, iPods, laptops, video games, social media, YouTube, etc. are all readily available, and the degree to which we control our everyday lives has greatly increased.

Children are experiencing this shift as much as, if not more than adults. They use the technology available to find out more about their world than their parents could when they were kids. Kids have a greater sense of stimulation now, and, like adults, they crave that feeling of ability granted by modern devices. Adults and children alike are different people than they were a couple of decades ago.

Do you feel different? Probably not. The changes taking place have been gradual. But, unless you are eleven-years-old (in which case, props to you for reading this) you probably remember a different world. Nobody in the 90s would text, rather than call each other. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and even Myspace didn't exist ten years ago, and who on Earth blogged before it become cool* in the 2000s?

Companies have been adapting to a changing environment. They are gaining an increasing respect for the competence of the individual, and innovative policies reflect the importance of individuality. The shifts in technology are creating many new careers and roles, allowing greater creativity and divergent thinking (what I call segmented attention). The world runs differently now, and people need to be prepared for a different lifestyle. However, they are not.

Our educational system is not catching on as quickly as it should be. It has stayed more or less unchanged since its inception in the 19th century. That's right, it's a two hundred year old system, barely meeting the technological aspect of our changing world, let alone the social aspect. We are different people now. We need to accept the fact that, just because a system is in place, doesn't mean it's the best possibility.

First of all, I admit that research must always be done before changing anything. However, I think the data speaks for itself. Although the unenrollment rate in percentage is actually falling, unemployment is rising. This means that people are being educated, but they're being educated inefficiently in comparison to the job market. Maybe people are being taught in a way that makes it hard for them to acquire the correct skills and attitudes.

Next week, I'll display my ideas for an educational revolution, one that might give our future generations a fighting chance in a changing world.

*Note: Coolness is defined subjectively. I am not to be held responsible for those people who can't balance blogging and real social life. The internet, while excellent, is not a replacement for physical human contact. Blogging only makes you cool if it helps you understand and identify with people better.