Day: March 26, 2008

The U.S. of A: Which statistic is scarier?

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Just over one per cent (2.3 million people) of the population of America is in jail  at the moment.

One in 15 adult black men is incarcerated; this becomes one in nine black men aged between 20 to 34.

In case you missed that:  ONE BLACK MALE IN EVERY NINE AGED BETWEEN 20 AND 34 IS CURRENTLY IN JAIL.

America really is a country of contradictions.

Meanwhile, we got our own problems

Are these young people all “scumbags”? Certainly your heart goes out to whoever has to live in these areas and put up with this level of lawlessness.

I often wonder how I would have ended up if I grew up in an environment like this.

 I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be good news.

But damned if I have any of the answers.

How does school

  1. help these people
  2. help the rest of us deal with these issues?

Who needs school anyway?

Just read about these boys on Damien Mulley’s blog

John Collision is in fifth year in Castletroy College in Limerick. During transition year (and into his holidays) he and his brother Patrick set up an IT company. They later merged with two similar-minded colleagues from the UK.

Their company – Auctomatic – was recently acquired “in a multi million-dollar deal” by a Canadian multinational:

The Auctomatic mission is making selling online easy. We think it should be simple to take your stuff and list it on marketplaces like eBay, Amazon and Overstock. But it shouldn’t end there. Auctomatic does more than just let you list your items and manage your sales – it teaches how you can maximize your profits and to increase the success of your business. With Auctomatic you can be running your own successful online business in no time.

Must be kinda hard as a teacher to give out to someone who has earned more in a couple of years than the teacher has made over their whole career.

“Now John, one of these days you will be coming back to us for a reference . . .” 🙂

John studies Physics and Applied Maths as part of his Leaving Cert course. It would be interesting to hear his views on what -if anything – he has learned from his formal education.

John’s blog

auctomatic.com

Planet-scicast video competition

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The Institute of Physics used to run “Paperclip Physics”; a competition where students had five minutes to present/teach a given topic in an interesting fashion.

This year they have replaced this competition with “Planet-Scicast”, where students have to put together a two and a half minute video-clip on any aspect of Science.

It’s a wonderful idea. Entries are closed for this year but I hope to encourage some of my own students to think about it over the Summer and enter next year. I know that I learned more Phyiscs in my first year of teaching than I did in the previous six years of preparing for exams. Hopefully students will benefit in a similar fashion.

In the clip above there is a wonderful moment when the student says

It takes 365 days for the Earth to orbit around the Sun, but 366 on a leap year.

 Wouldn’t it be great to be able to ask the class why this might be so? 🙂

Hats off to the teacher – it is wonderful teaching, and much more importantly, wonderful learning

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