Friday, March 6, 2009

What Does One Trillion Dollars Look Like?

I posted a link to a site that gave size perspective to collections of pennies. Here is a site, PageTutor.com, that gives us perspective on how big a trillion is in one hundred dollar bills.



Doubling the image, we have 2 trillion dollars. The deficit is at 1.75 trillion dollars. Can you see the little guy in the corner?

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Teach a Man to Fish

"Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime."

—Author unknown


Education is about learning how to think. It is only when a person can truly think and analyze her own process that he or she will become an independent life-long learner with the ability to be skeptical when necessary. We call the ability to analyze one's own thoughts 'meta cognition' in education lingo.

It follows that the emphasis on any education should be about teaching students to think, in a variety of disciplines... the more the better.

If you look at our system, at least in California, you will see that we teach students how to perform on multiple-choice, standardized tests. Thus we will have a generation of students who can perform well on standardized tests. I am fairly certain though, that this type of training is not teaching the students to think.

More on that later.

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