| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
 Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2007 8:08 am Post subject: PokerPulse Gambler's School Guide - Best Bets for Success |
 |
|
| Quote: | WELCOME!
PokerPulse Gambler's Education Guide - Best Bets for Success at School
|
1. No time to read the book?
| Quote: | | At least read the introduction/foreward/preface, which is usually written by the author or an authority on the author’s work. Either way, a good intro often provides not only an overview of the salient features of the text but a description of any obstacles the author faced in the course of writing plus a list of previous academic works the author relied on. |
2. Even if you DO read the book, read the introduction and/or the preface, too.
| Quote: | | This is where authors and academics store background information and theories about the book and its subject – useful info for essays and assignments. |
3. Get assignments in writing .
| Quote: | | Never trust oral instructions. Memory is unreliable and teachers are almost always the last word in a dispute. Request that written instructions become the rule at your school if it isn’t already. |
4. Ditto the marking scheme.
| Quote: | | Get your teacher’s assessment strategy for each assignment so that you know clearly what it’s going to take to get an A. Knowing how many marks each portion of the assignment is worth helps you come up with an effective work plan. A clear marking scheme also helps rule out the possibility of subjectivity and favoritism. |
5. Rate your teachers and courses.
| Quote: | Institute a formal program at your school in which students fill out course evaluations anonymously at the end of term for submission to teachers' superiors for review and possible action. Too often, collective agreements shield teachers and school boards from valuable criticism. Complaint procedures like this one at the Vancouver School Board emphasize private, preferably oral confrontation rather than a fully-documented, independent review all parties are able to monitor. The VSB approach is one that effectively discourages criticism two ways: first, by providing complainants no protection from recrimination and, second, by reducing standards of professional conduct involving kids to informal matters of merely private concern. Now more than ever, people in positions of trust must be more - not less - accountable. More about the importance of teacher/course evaluations at Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation.
Click here for an excellent sample course evaluation form courtesy of the University of New Brunswick. For more samples, Google the terms, ‘sample course evaluation form.’ We netted more than four million hits when we searched Oct. 11/07.
If for some reason your school is unwilling to implement a program of teacher/course evaluations, DO IT ANYWAY. Fill out a sample form (above) and submit it anonymously to the principal, dean, school board, department head, parent advisory council (if you are lucky enough to have one with authority over something besides fundraising). The mere fact that you’ve felt compelled to submit a complaint anonymously should tell the brass their system isn’t working. |
6. Trouble with a gym teacher?
7. Start a dictionary collection.
8. (a) Commit to memory your legal rights in the unhappy event police ask to question you.
| Quote: | … the Miranda warning is a warning given by police to criminal suspects in police custody, or in a custodial situation, before they are asked questions relating to the commission of a crime. A custodial situation is where the suspect's freedom of movement is restrained although he is not under arrest. An incriminating statement by a suspect will not constitute admissible evidence unless the suspect was advised of his or her "Miranda rights" and made a knowing, intelligent, and voluntary waiver of those rights.
However, police may request biographical information such as name, date of birth, and address, without first reading suspects their Miranda warnings. (emphasis added) |
| Quote: | If you can’t remember Miranda, remember this:
“I wish to speak to an attorney, please.” Then SHUT UP! The next person you talk to ABOUT ANYTHING MUST be your lawyer.
More about Solicitor-client privilege also at Wikipedia, thus:
| Quote: | In the law of Commonwealth countries, solicitor-client privilege is a … privilege that protects all communcations between a solicitor and his or her clients from being disclosed in court against client's will. It is the strongest of all the types of privilege as it is permanent and the exceptions are narrow.
The purpose behind this legal principle is to protect an individual's ability to access the justice system by encouraging complete disclosure to legal counsel without the fear that any communications may prejudice them in the future. |
See also PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to Prison.
|
(b) Keep your local Youth Crisis Line number handy.
| Quote: | | I hate a song that makes you think you're not any good. I hate a song that makes you think you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are either too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that... Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun of you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling. I am out to fight these kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down nor rolled over you, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and your work. And the songs I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. (Woody Guthrie, from script for opening broadcast of WNEW radio show on 12/3/44) |
| Quote: | | You don't have to be standing on the edge of a building to call a crisis line. Operators are usually hand-picked from a roster of thousands of willing volunteers. They're trained quite extensively and tested repeatedly to ensure they're effective troubleshooters. If during the conversation you feel you need more than a pep talk by a listening professional, ask for two things: (1) a list of experts currently receiving new patients and (2) tips on how to interview mental health professionals to find the right one for you. |
9. Research Tips:
| Quote: | (a) Befriend a librarian. These good people are democracy’s ablest, most committed protectors. They hold the key to every escape hatch known to humanity and they live to serve. Even if you think you know what you’re looking for, ask a librarian, who will undoubtedly reveal sources of knowledge you never considered. Librarians provide a cheerful buffer between an earnest public and hard-to-please teachers. They are a tremendous yet unappreciated resource, willing even to provide a much-needed letter of reference for a job or entry into a particular faculty. Cultivate relationships among these noble savants.
(b) Google words, phrases, full questions and, if you’re studying a particular text, the title, author and the words, ‘study guide,’ to see if your assignment has already been parsed online. As Shakespeare wrote, there are no new stories. Ditto school assignments. |
10. Balance the frequently awful stuff they make you read in school with humor and laugh your brains out.
| Quote: | | Roar at least a third of every day with gentle humorists, such as P.G. Wodehouse, J.D. Salinger, MAD magazine, Martin Earthquake Amis, Joseph Heller and others for whom we'd be happy to supply links on request. Write to legal@pokerpulse.com. Life, after all, is stern and life is earnest. Beauty probably and tragedy certainly will find you. Your mission is to seek comedy and, if possible, share it. Good luck, gamblers. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3017#3017
Last edited by editor on Tue Aug 04, 2009 2:41 pm; edited 40 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 12:30 pm Post subject: |
|
|
On getting started in math and physics:
From Gambling Scientists:
Not Even Wrong
The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics
Hardcover
By Peter Woit
| Quote: | Since my research interests involved the parts of quantum field theory closest to mathematics and I did not want to do superstring theory, it seemed that it would be a good idea to try my luck looking for employment among the mathematicians. I moved back to Cambridge, where the physics department at Harvard let me use a desk as an unpaid visitor, and the mathematics department at Tufts hired me as an adjunct to teach calculus. From there I went on to a one-year postdoctoral research associate position at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley, followed by a four-year non-tenture track junior faculty appointment in the mathematics department at Columbia.
This change of fields from physics to mathematics turned out to be a wise move, and I have now been at Columbia in the maths department for more than sixteen years. Currently, I'm happily in the non-tenured but permanent faculty position of 'Lecturer', with one of my main responsibilities being to make sure that the department's computer system keeps functioning properly. I also teach classes at the undergraduate and graduate level, as well as continuing to do research in the area of the mathematics of quantum field theory.
My academic career path has been rather unusual and I'm very much aware that it has been based on a significant amount of good luck. This began with the good fortune of having parents who could afford to send me to Harvard. It continued with being in the right place at the right time to take advantage of an uncommon opportunity to work in an excellent maths department surrounded by talented and supportive colleagues. (Introduction, pgs. 4-5) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3557#3557
Last edited by editor on Thu Jul 23, 2009 2:24 pm; edited 4 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 2:23 pm Post subject: |
|
|
On knowing when to fold:
From Advice to Gamblers:
New York Times Magazine
Newspaper Subscription
The 7th Annual Year in Ideas
Quitting Can Be Good for You
By Clay Risen
Dec. 9/07
| Quote: | | In a paper published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science, Gregory Miller of the University of British Columbia and Carsten Wrosch of Concordia University found that teenage girls who are unable to disengage themselves from trying to attain hard-to-reach goals exhibited increased levels of the inflammatory molecule C-reactive protein (C.R.P.), which in adults is linked with diabetes, heart disease and early aging. There's this traditional idea in Western culture and science literature that being persistent is good, that if you work hard, you can achieve antying," says Miller, who has published several papers with Wrosch on the psychology of quitting. "Our take is that persistence is good, but there are times when the most adaptive thing is to say, 'This goal is not going to work out.'" (-- p. 92) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3656#3656
Last edited by editor on Thu Jul 23, 2009 2:29 pm; edited 2 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 10:53 am Post subject: |
|
|
On the education gamble and the helpful role games of skill/chance play in early education and beyond:
From Unusual Bets:
Atlantic Monthly
Magazine Subscription
BOOKS
Kiddie Class Struggle
One mom's breast-milk-curdling tour of lower education's higher end
By Sandra Tsing Loh
June, 2005
| Quote: | | Because, like many American mothers with children at home, I am a juggling, multi-tasking, somewhat less than full-time freelance employee, the hours I spent reading Camille Peri and Kate Moses's Because I Said So, Judith Warner's Perfect Madness, and Miriam Peskowitz's The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars also involved a lot of weeping in parking lots. In the spirit of motherly sharing, let me rush to explain why. It began with the - I thought simple - wish that our daughter attend kindergarten. In the strange voodoo that is California, although houses in our neighborhood have shot up to $500,000, the corner school's demographics are 95 percent Hispanic; 76 percent of the students are learning English as a second language, and 92 percent qualify for a free lunch. Like most families just one year into the crowded magnet system, we've been waitlisted for schools with more English speakers; any openings materializing locally will be assisted by lottery, the odds notoriously poor. (Opening paragraph at p. 105) |
| Quote: | | Editor's Note: 'Strange voodoo' indeed for a modern Western democracy to relegate public education, one of the first tenets of liberty, surely, to a mere game of chance, although kids whose parents are rich or famous enough may opt out. The story is an excellent first-person account of a Lutheran private school kindergarten entrance exam which the author's daughter somehow failed and something called Academic Performance Index (API), a statistic which apparently measures out of a possible thousand each school's chances of producing Ivy-Leaguers. A school API of 810, for instance, is considered "UCLA-on-scholarship-ready." |
More on the value of games in education:
The Immortal Game
A History of Chess or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science, and the Human Brain
Hardcover
By David Shenk
| Quote: | | In New York, Chess-in-the-Schools, formerly known as the American Chess Foundation, had been offering free instruction to underprivileged New York City students since 1986. By 2005, thanks largely to support from New York philanthropist Lewis Cullman, they had a $4 million annual budget supporting fifty instructors in 160 schools. "Chess is not a game of luck," the foundation declared in its mission statement. "Children who practice and develop skills will reap rewards. The confidence they develop extends to other areas of their academnic and emotional lives... Our program has proven to be a cost-effective way to inspire and empower children to succeed, one move at a time." (From The Next War, p. 231) |
Poker at Harvard AND in elementary schools:
The Economist
Magazine Subscription
A big deal
Poker is getting younger, cleverer, duller and much, much richer
Dec. 22/07
| Quote: | Parents are increasingly encouraging their children to play, he (Phil “Poker Brat” Hellmuth, arguably the most celebrated (not least by himself) modern player) adds, because it is mentally more rewarding than video games and does not mix well with alcohol (at least if you care about winning). “When I started it was seen as a bit of an outlaw pastime, for rogues and cheats. Now it's a huge bottom-up movement,” he says.
It might seem a bit of a leap to go from here to putting poker on the curriculum. But some academics see it as a worthy subject of study. Chief among them is Charles Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School. Earlier this year he founded the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society (GPSTS), whose awkward name belies a clear set of goals: to highlight poker's role in teaching patience, strategy and money management, and in improving cognitive skills. “Poker offers metaphors for a range of life skills and could be a wonderful educational tool,” says Mr Nesson, who plays a regular game with other law professors, including Alan Dershowitz—though he has yet to play with Antonin Scalia, a Supreme Court justice known to have a fondness for poker.
Poker is, first and foremost, a game of managing resources, argues Mr Nesson, teaching a cautious approach to risk-taking, not recklessness. There is some evidence for this. One study, comparing experienced poker players with financial- market traders, found the players less likely to exhibit over-confidence.
An unlikely social-welfare tool
Determined to counter what he sees as the demonisation of poker by the American right, and the resulting squeeze on personal freedoms, Mr Nesson is working on a pilot programme to teach the game to disadvantaged children in schools in America and Jamaica. He muses about turning a property he runs in Second Life, a virtual world, into an online poker university. ...
Poker has long fascinated America's great and good, from politicians to generals to captains of industry. Presidents Roosevelt (both), Truman, Eisenhower and Nixon were all keen players. Nixon was famously good: most of the funding for his first congressional run came from poker winnings. Poker was said to have inspired cold-war tacticians. It is still a useful military motif: recall the playing cards used to represent Saddam Hussein and his most-wanted cohorts. Poker financed a sizeable chunk of Microsoft's start-up costs. Bill Gates once said he learned more about business strategy at the baize than in classrooms - though these days he apparently prefers the more stately game of bridge.
Not all famous players have made such good role models. As he partied away the declining years of his career, Errol Flynn incurred some excruciating poker losses, including, on one particularly bad night, a Caribbean island he had hoped to develop into a holiday resort. John Wayne had some shockers too, though in one memorable game he won Lassie from the canine star's desperate owner.
Getting serious
What Nixon, Flynn and Wayne have made of poker today? They would surely have marvelled at the transformation of "the cheater's game" into a multi-billion-dollar industry, pumping out new millionaires almost daily. Even they might have been shocked at the latest season of "High Stakes Poker," a television series in which players buy into each game for $500, 000 apiece and the winner takes home more than $5m.
They might, perhaps, have been disappointed that the game had lost some of its backroom edginess. Miss Obrestad's generation are more likely to put their excess winnings into tax-free bonds than blow them betting on a single round of gold, as Mr Brunson and his Las Vegas pals used to do in their madder moments. Still, those hoping to win over poker's skeptics will find no better example than young Annette, 19. She is stern, sober and chillingly focused on her game. She appears to be exceptionally good at it too. Either that or amazingly lucky. (-- pgs. 36-38) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3736#3736
Last edited by editor on Mon Aug 17, 2009 9:31 am; edited 9 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 8:44 am Post subject: |
|
|
Study the favorite works of writers you admire.
From The Horses:
Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription
The History Boys
In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush and his inner circle have been feeding the press with historical parallels: he is Harry Truman - unpopular, besieged, yet ultimately to be vindicated - while Iraq under Saddam was Europe held by Hitler. To a serious student of the past, that's preposterous. Writing just before his untimely death, David Halbertsam asserts that Bush's "history," like his war, is based on wishful thinking, arrogance, and a total disdain for the facts.
August, 2007
| Quote: | ... when I hear the president cite history so casually, an alarm goes off. Those who know history best tend to be tempered by it. They rarely refer to it so sweepingly and with such complete confidence. They know that it is the most mischievous of mistresses and that it touts sure things about as regularly as the tip sheets at the local track. Its most important lessons sometimes come cloaked in bitter irony. By no means does it march in a straight line toward the desired result, and the good guys do not always win. Occasionally it is like a sport with upsets, in which the weak and small defeat the great and mighty - take, for instance, the American revolutionaries vanquishing the British Army, or the Vietnamese Communists, with their limited hardware, stalemating the mighty American Army. ...
You don't hear other members of the current administration citing the lessons of Vietnam much, either, especially Cheney and Karl Rove, both of them gifted at working the bureaucracy for short-range political benefits, both highly partisan and manipulative, both unspeakably narrow and largely uninterested in understanding and learning about the larger world. As Joan Didion pointed out in her brilliant essay on Cheney in The New York Review of Books, it was Rumsfeld and Cheney who explained to Henry Kissinger, not usually slow on the draw when it came to the political impact of foreign policy, that Vietnam was likely to create a vast political backlash against the liberal McGovern forces. The two, relatively junior operators back then, were interested less in what had gone wrong in Vietnam than in getting some political benefit out of it. Cheney still speaks of Vietnam as a noble rather than a tragic endeavor, not that he felt at the time - with his five military deferments - that he needed to be part of that nobility.
Still, it is hard for me to believe that anyone who knew anything about Vietnam, or for that matter the Algerian war, which directly followed Indochina for the French, couldn't see that going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet's nest in the world. As in Vietnam, our military superiority is neutralized by political vulnerabilities. The borders are wide open. We operate quite predictably on marginal military intelligence. The adversary knows exactly where we are at all times, as we do not know where he is. Their weaponry fits an asymmetrical war, and they have the capacity to blend into the daily flow of Iraqi life, as we cannot. Our allies - the good Iraqi people the president likes to talk about - appear to be more and more ambivalent about the idea of a Christian, Caucasian liberation, and they do not seem to share many of our geopolitical goals.
The book that brought me to history some 53 years ago, when I was a junior in college, was Cecil Woodham-Smith's wondrous The Reason Why, the story of why the Light Brigade marched into the Valley of Death, to be senselessly slaughtered, in the Crimean War. It is a tale of such folly and incompetence in leadership (then, in the British military, a man could buy the command of a regiment) that it is not just the story of a battle but an indictment of the entire British Empire. It is a story from the past we read again and again, that the most dangerous time for any nation may be that moment in its history when things are going unusually well, because its leaders become carried away with hubris and a sense of entitlement cloaked as rectitude. The arrogance of power, Senator William Fulbright called it during the Vietnam years. (-- pgs. 124, 168) |
| Quote: | The New York Review of Books
Magazine Subscription
Cheney: The Fatal Touch
By Joan Didion
Oct. 5/06
| Quote: | | It was in some ways predictable that the central player in the system of willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration would turn out to be its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man with considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He was never a star. No one ever called him a natural. He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up. The son of two New Deal Democrats, his father a federal civil servant with the Soil Conservation Service in Casper, Wyoming, he more or less happened into a full scholarship to Yale: his high school girlfriend and later wife, Lynne Vincent, introduced him to her part-time employer, a Yale donor named Thomas Stroock who, he later told Nicholas Lemann, 'called Yale and told 'em to take this guy.' The beneficiary of the future Lynne Cheney's networking lasted three semesters, took a year off before risking a fourth, and was asked to leave. (Sample paragaph online) |
|
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3749#3749 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 8:49 am Post subject: |
|
|
From Hedge Fund Gamblers:
Harvard Business Review
Magazine Subscription
How Resilience Works
Confronted with life's hardships, some people snap, and others snap back
By Diane L. Coutu
Sept. 1/02
| Quote: | Prior to Setpember 11, 2001, Morgan Stanley, the famous investment bank, was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center. The company had some 2,700 employees working in the south tower on 22 floors between the 43rd and the 74th. On that horrible day, the first plane hit the north tower at 8:46 a.m., and Morgan Stanley started evacuating just one minute later, at 8:47 a.m. When the second plane crashed into the south tower 15 minutes after that, Morgan Stanley's offices were largely empty. All told, the company lost only seven employees despite receiving an almost direct hit.
Of course, the organization was just plain lucky to be in the second tower. Cantor Fitzgerald, whose offices were hit in the first attack, couldn't have done anything to save its employees. Still, it was Morgan Stanley's hard-nosed realism that enabled the company to benefit from its luck. Soon after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, senior management recognized that working in such a symbolic center of U.S. commercial power made the company vulnerable to attention from terrorists and possible attack.
With this grim realization, Morgan Stanley launched a program of preparedness at the micro level. Few companies take their fire drills seriously. Not so Morgan Stanley, whose VP of security for the Individual Investor Group, Rick Rescorla, brought a military discipline to the job. Rescorla, himself a highly resilient, decorated Vietnam vet, made sure that people were fully drilled about what to do in a catastrophe. When disaster struck on September 11, Rescorla was on a buyllhorn telling Morgan Stanley employees to stay calm and follow their well-practised drill, even though some building supervisors were telling occupants that all was well. Sadly Rescorla himself, whose life story has been widely covered in recent months, was one of the seven who didn't make it out. (-- pgs. 49-50) |
| Quote: | | Note: The publication is generally so well written and researched that it manages to overcome what is to us, I'm afraid, painfully dry subject matter. Above is an especially gripping example. Highly recommended as a guide to formal essay writing on any subject. Though formal, the writing also achieves an enviable conversational tone. Readers may also find some valuable business advice. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3770#3770
Last edited by editor on Thu Jul 23, 2009 12:54 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 2:55 pm Post subject: |
|
|
The ultimate study guide for the poetry of Robert Frost:
Homage to Robert Frost
Hardcover
By Joseph Brodsky Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский,
Seamus Heaney and
Derek Walcott
| Quote: | ... Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of his own negative potential - with his sense of what he is capable of. And it is the latter that was Frost's forte, not the former. In other words, his posture is radically different from the Continental tradition of the poet as tragic hero. And that difference alone makes him - for want of a better term - American.
On the surface, he looks very positively predisposed toward his surroundings - particularly toward nature. His fluency, indeed, his "being versed in country things" alone can produce this impression. However, there is a difference between the way a European perceives nature and the way an American does. Addressing this difference, W.H. Auden, in his short essay on the poet), suggests something to the effect that when a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, filled with either friends or family, and goes for an evening stroll. If he encounters a tree, it's a tree made familiar by history, to which it's been a witness. This or that king sat underneath it, laying down this or that law - something of that sort. A tree stands there rustling, as it were, with allusions. Pleased and somewhat pensive, our man, refreshed but unchanged by that encounter, returns to his inn or cottage, finds his friends or family absolutely intact, and proceeds to have a good, merry time. Whereas when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective primal power, free of references: neither has a past, and as to whose future is greater, it is a toss-up. Basically, it's epidermis meeting bark. Our man returns to his cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock or terror.
Now, this is obviously a romantic caricature, but it accentuates the features, and that's what I am after here. In any case, the second point could be safely billed as the gist of Robert Frost's nature poetry. Nature for this poet is neither friend nor foe, nor is it the backdrop for human drama; it is the poet's terrifying self-portrait. ... (On Grief and Reason, by Joseph Brodsky, pgs. 7-9) |
Literary heavyweights converge on one of America's best-loved poet laureates. The student's best guide to writing an essay on an individual poet or poem.
Do you agree?
| Quote: | COME IN
As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music--- hark!
Now if it was dark outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went--
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.
(-- p. 9) |
| Quote: | The Poetry of Robert Frost
Audio Cassette
Narrated by Various Artists, including popular
U.S. actors Elliot Gould and Alfre Woodard,
both of whom enjoy the gift of good diction
|
| Quote: | | All questions and comments gratefully received and posted. Send them to legal@pokerpulse.com. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3853#3853 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 2:17 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Impossible Odds:
The New York Times Magazine
Magazine Subscription
Two-tier Teacher Contract, The
8th Annual Year in Ideas
By Paul Tough
Dec. 14/08
| Quote: | One of the big debates in education today is over teacher quality: how do you reward successful teachers, get rid of unsuccessful ones and attract more high-performing applicants? Michelle Rhee, the young, controversial new chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools, thinks she has the answer.
Last July, Rhee presented the membership of the city’s teachers’ union with a proposal for a new and very different contract. The basic deal: surrender some job security in exchange for the potential to earn a much higher salary. Under the proposed contract, each Washington teacher would choose between two alternatives. The red tier, the more cautious option, would require teachers to give up a few seniority protections in exchange for a considerable pay increase. Teachers choosing the riskier green tier would lose even more tenure and seniority rights. They would spend the first year of the new contract on probation, at the end of which they could be fired. But if they were good enough to survive, they would receive huge raises, before long earning as much as $131,000 a year in salary and performance bonuses, more than twice the average salary for an American public-school teacher.
Rhee’s proposal is based on recent research that suggests that teacher quality has a huge impact on the success of students, especially poor and minority students who lag behind their peers academically. And yet in most school systems, teacher pay is tied only to length of tenure and the accumulation of professional credentials, neither of which has much correlation with student success. (The Washington union’s leadership, so far, has declined to put the new contract to a vote.)
Rhee isn’t the only administrator experimenting this year with the idea of elevated teacher pay. Zeke M. Vanderhoek, the founding principal of the Equity Project Charter School, opening next fall in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, says he wants to attract “highly qualified individuals” to teach at his school. To be hired, according to the school’s Web site, you need to be able to prove you have “expert subject-area knowledge,” present a “portfolio of achievement of past students” and score above 90 percent on the verbal section of a graduate-school entrance test. In exchange, every teacher gets a starting salary of $125,000, plus an initial annual bonus of up to $25,000: high pay for high expectations. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4181#4181
Last edited by editor on Thu Apr 23, 2009 1:09 pm; edited 3 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 2:29 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Impossible Odds:
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Annals of Education
Most likely to succeed
Malcolm Gladwell
Dec. 15/08
| Quote: | One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is “value added” analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year. Suppose that Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown’s class scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith’s students have fallen to the fortieth percentile. That change in the students’ rankings, value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more effective Mrs. Brown is as a teacher than Mr. Smith.
It’s only a crude measure, of course. A teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test. Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students’ test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. (emphasis added) Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers. ...
Then there was the superstar—a young high-school math teacher, in jeans and a green polo shirt. “So let’s see,” he began, standing up at the blackboard. “Special right triangles. We’re going to do practice with this, just throwing out ideas.” He drew two triangles. “Label the length of the side, if you can. If you can’t, we’ll all do it.” He was talking and moving quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this was trigonometry. It wasn’t easy material. But his energy seemed to infect the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can’t, we’ll all do it. In a corner of the room was a student named Ben, who’d evidently missed a few classes. “See what you can remember, Ben,” the teacher said. Ben was lost. The teacher quickly went to his side: “I’m going to give you a way to get to it.” He made a quick suggestion: “How about that?” Ben went back to work. The teacher slipped over to the student next to Ben, and glanced at her work. “That’s all right!” He went to a third student, then a fourth. Two and a half minutes into the lesson—the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer—he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.
“In a group like this, the standard m.o. would be: he’s at the board, broadcasting to the kids, and has no idea who knows what he’s doing and who doesn’t know,” Pianta said. “But he’s giving individualized feedback. He’s off the charts on feedback.” Pianta and his team watched in awe. (-- pgs. 37-40) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4183#4183 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 3:13 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Impossible Odds:
The New York Times Magazine
Magazine Subscription
Judgment Day
Student ratings are becoming an influential factor in academic promotions. Will professors fight back?
By Mark Oppenheimer
Sept. 21/08
| Quote: | Annemarie Bean, who goes by Anna and is a distant, poorer cousin of the family that owns the L.L. Bean clothing business, is the kind of professor who draws students to small New England liberal-arts colleges like Wesleyan. She is funny, enthusiastic, devoted to her students and passionate about what she teaches. Her subject areas are offbeat and slightly avant-garde, the kind of stuff that students, and their ostensibly liberal faculties, are said to find thrilling: African-American theater, the history of minstrelsy, “whiteness studies” — essentially, the intersection of race and theatrical performance in modern America. Beyond her subject matter and top-notch education, including a Ph.D. from New York University’s acclaimed performance-studies department, she just seems like a good fit for Wesleyan. She is an alumna of the college, class of ’88; she is informal in her manner, tall and limber like a dancer, bright-eyed, the opposite of stuffy, eminently approachable; and she suggested lunch at It’s Only Natural, the pride of Middletown, Conn., a regional mecca for vegetarian, vegan and macrobiotic dining. (Nothing says “Wesleyan” like lunch at It’s Only Natural, where you eat bulgur wheat beneath paintings by local artists.) Bean knows that she belongs at Wesleyan, which is why she’s especially sad that her students fired her.
They did not actually give her the pink slip, of course, and for that matter Bean did not receive a pink slip. A visiting professor on a one-year contract with the African-American studies department, Bean was fired by not being rehired. Before her first year of teaching, she received a letter from Renee Romano, her department chairwoman, saying that she would be recommended for a second year if she met certain benchmarks in her students’ evaluations of her. Specifically, for the fall 2007 term her teaching and the overall quality of the course had to be “rated in the top two categories (Outstanding and Good) by at least 85 percent of the students in both your courses.” When, at the end of the semester last December, she got only 76 percent in one of her classes and 73 percent in the other, she knew her job was in jeopardy. In January, she asked Romano if she should begin looking for another job. She heard nothing until mid-March, when the dean, Donald Moon, still wavering, asked her to write a self-evaluation.
Finally, Bean says, Gayle Pemberton, the new chairwoman of African-American studies, told her she was out of a job — partly because, Pemberton said, Bean had not received high-enough marks in the category of “student effort,” a category unmentioned in Romano’s letter. According to Pemberton, not enough students had marked “strenuous” to describe their own effort in Bean’s class. Put another way, Bean was being punished for her students’ admitted laziness. When Bean asked Dean Moon what had happened, he referred back to the original criteria of quality of the course and quality of the teaching. Neither Moon nor Pemberton, who has since retired from Wesleyan, would speak on the record about Bean’s case. A university spokesman, citing Wesleyan’s policy of keeping personnel matters confidential, would say only that Bean’s description of her contract “is not accurate.” But Bean maintains that her students — about three-quarters of whom, after all, rated her class and teaching “good” or “outstanding” — gave the administration sufficient reason to end her time at Wesleyan. (-- pgs. 28-29) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4189#4189 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009 9:56 am Post subject: |
|
|
From the PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to Writing - Tips from the Masters:
Write essays on English literature like an English major!
| Quote: | The History of English Literature
CD Audio
By British author and English teacher since 1973, Perry Keenlyside
Read by celebrated British actor Derek Jacobi and Cast
A TREMENDOUSLY effective guide to English literary highlights according to a long-time teacher and highly-respected author who clearly enjoys his subject. An excellent first source for essays on literature. |
| Quote: | I have tried to convey here something of the texts - and contexts - of the major writers in the English literary canon, quoting enough to give a flavour of each author and attempting to show a little of how they represent or express the age in which they lived. Many of us (myself included) find it helpful to be reminded who was alive and writing at a certain time, and who were his or her contemporaries: the very speed of this survey may provide a clearer overview of changes and developments through the centuries.
A history like this inevitably begs the question: what is literature, and how does it differ from other kinds of writing? It is impossible to provide a satisfactory short answer, but here goes...Literature is writing which is born of a consciously artistic intent to creat something not only expresses a perceived truth about the human condition, but also tries to do so in a manner which is aesthetically satisfying and productive of pleasure. (From the liner note by Keenlyside, whose last sentence was rudely excised midway by the often careless publisher, Naxos, which nevertheless releases a good number of excellent audiobooks). |
... or come up with an excuse as charming as this one:
Making History
Hardcover
By Stephen Fry
| Quote: | …Had I the patience and the discipline I should have chosen literature. But, while I can read Middlemarch and The Dunciad or, I don’t know, Julian Barnes or Jay McInerney say, as happily as anyone, I have this little region missing in my brain, that extra lobe that literature students posess as a matter of course, the lobe that allows them the detachment and the nerve to talk about books (texts, they will say) as others might talk about the composition of a treaty or the structure of a cell. I can remember at school how we would read together in class an Ode by Keats, a Shakespeare sonnet or a chapter of Animal Farm. I would tingle inside and want to sob, just at the words, at nothing more than the simple progressoion of sounds. But when it came to writing that thing called an Essay, I flubbed and floundered. I could never discover where to start. How do you find the distance and the cool to write in an academically approved style about something that makes you spin, wobble and weep?
I remember that child in the Dickens novel, Hard Times, I think it is, the girl who had grown up with carnival people, spending her days with horses, tending them, feeding them, training them and loving them. There’s a scene where Gradgrind (it is Hard Times, I’ve just looked it up) is showing off his school to a visitor and asks this girl to define ‘horse’ and of course the poor scrap dries up completely, just stutters and fumbles and stares hopelessly in front of her like a mong.
‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ Gradgrind says and turns with a great sneer to the smart little weasel, Bitzer, a cocksure street kid who’s probably never dared so much as pat a horse in his life, gets a kick out of throwing stones at them I expect. This little runt stands up with smirk and comes out pat with ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth …’ and so on, to wild applause and admiration.
‘Now girl number twenty you know what a horse is,’ says Gradgrind.
Well, each time I was asked to write an essay at school, with a title like ‘Wordsworth’s Prelude is the Egotism with the Sublime: Discuss’ I felt, when I got back my paper marked E or F or whatever, as if I were the stuttering horse-lover and the rest of the class, with their As and Bs were the smart-arsed parroting runts who had lost their souls. You could only write sucessfully about books and poems and plays if you didn’t care, really care, about them. Hysterical schoolboy wank, for sure, an attitude compounded of nothing but egotism, vanity and cowardice. But how deeply felt. I went through all my schooldays convinced of this, that ‘literary studies’ were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days. You can’t talk about movies now without a methodology. Once they start offering courses, you know the field is dead. (From the chapter entitled, Making Coffee, at pgs. 4-6) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4193#4193
Last edited by editor on Sat Apr 11, 2009 11:14 am; edited 5 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009 10:13 am Post subject: |
|
|
From Punters:
COUNTRY LIFE
Magazine Subscription
Gradgrind is no more
From kettles in the loo to poker and dead swans, a schoolmaster's work is never done. John Humphreys recalls his days in charge and reveals a few secrets
SCHOOL LIFE
Autumn, 2008
| Quote: | | George Edwards, the chief education officer for Cambridgeshire, once went to inspect a one-horse school out in the fen, arriving at lunchtime when the pupils were at play. Deciding not to intrude into the head's well-earned break, he strolled around the building, finding nobody on duty. Peering through a classroom window, he saw the head, his two assistant teachers and the caretaker, sitting round a school desk playing poker. As he gazed in disbelief, one rose, crossed the room and pulled the school-bell rope, four sonorous strokes ringing out across shimmering cornfields. As the echoes of the last one faded, the door of the pub opposite opened and the landlord emerged, bearing a tray with four foaming tankards, bound for the schoolroom. (-- p. 24) |
From Loaded Dice:
| Quote: | Win the bursary lottery
Called West and live in Twickenham: Congratulations - you've just won the bursary lottery. For everyone else, Janette Wallis investigates the Byzantine world of school bursaries and gives a guide on how to strike it lucky
| Quote: | ... what can the average family do to grapple with the fee burden?
Choose a minor, off-beat sport and major on it. ...
Consider smaller schools. ...
Force your child to learn to play the organ (or another instrument). ...
Join a religion. ...
If boarding is your goal, check out the State sector. ...
Get divorced. ...
Local boy can make good. ...
Change jobs. ...
Seek unusual bursaries. ...
Finally, don't be flattered into accepting a place at a school on the basis of an honorary scholarship - one that carries no fee reduction. These are becoming more common as schools struggle to offer more financial aid to the neediest families. Being a scholar can mean extra work and duties for your child, with little in return. (-- pgs. 10-12) |
|
| Quote: | Exams under the spotlight
Your child may now face BTECs, IGCSEs or a Cambridge Pre-U - but do you know what they mean? Janette Wallis demystifies school exams
| Quote: | Time was when two Bs and an A on your A-level exams were more than adequate to win a place at the UK's top universities. Then came the Laura Spence row in 2000, when the girl with 10 A*s at GCSE and four predicted A grades at A level was turned down by Oxford. According to Gabbitas, Oxbridge now rejects more than 10,000 pupils a year with at least three As at A level.
To separate the wheat from the chaff, universities are allowed to see students' individual grades in each of the six modules that go towards an A-level result, and, from 2010, a new A* grade for those achieving more than 90% in A-level exams will be added.
Advanced Extension Awards (AEAs) can also help to identify high fliers, and, in addition, Imperial, along with Oxbridge, UCL and the Royal Veterinary College, require applicants for medicine and veterinary medicine to sit the BioMedical Admissions Test (BMAT).
International Baccalaureate (IB) the new gold standard?
The IB exam has been taken up by 131 British schools and is usually offered beside A levels. An IB is viewed as more demanding than A levels, as pupils are required to study six subjects, write a dissertation and take part in community service. Its increasing popularity could be because it boosts schools' league-table position, owing to the high points UCAS assigns to IB results. (-- p. 22) |
|
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4194#4194
Last edited by editor on Sat Apr 11, 2009 1:10 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 9:08 am Post subject: |
|
|
From the Will to Win:
Lexus
Magazine Subscription
Words, Words, Words
The Manhattan-based organization Girls Write Now show the power - and pleasures - of the pen
By Grace Bastidas
Q4 2008
| Quote: | The teenage girls I know write in pink spiral notebooks. Like other New York City students, they commute to class on the subway every day, but instead of staring off blankly, closing out the world with the help of their iPods, they watch the bustle of strangers rushing to work and the confusion of tourists unforlding maps that never seem to fold back up in the right way. They observe because observation is a writer's training.
They are the wordsmiths of Girls Write Now (www.girlswritenow.org), a volunteer organization that pairs creative teenage girls, from 13-20 years old, with professional women writers, like me, who serve as mentors and writing coaches. The girls are recruited from public high schools throughout the city; the mentors are magazine editiros, newspaper reporters, and even waitresses waiting to turn their prose into bestsellers.
I once read somewhere that a mentor is someone whose hindsight can become your foresight, but the mentor/mentee relationship is mutually beneficial. My 16-year-old mentee, Thea, writes descriptive personal essays in between Regents exams, soccer matches, and an internship at a local hospital, inspiring me to create new work despite my own hectic schedule. Thea and the other girls are all college bound (Girls Write Now has a 100 percent college acceptance rate).
A native of the Philippines, Thea has lived here for only a year, yet her command of the English language is flawless, much like her fashion sense - her Nike sneakers always match the color of her T-shirt. ... (-- p. 64) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4218#4218
Last edited by editor on Thu Jul 23, 2009 2:59 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 9:42 am Post subject: |
|
|
From Advice to Gamblers:
Mad
Magazine Subscription
Signs You'll Grow Up to be a Degenerate Gambler
January, 2009
| Quote: | It has been said that the first stirrings of talent and greatness in athletics, the arts and science can be observed in someone when they are very young. Likewise those destined for a life filled with bookie joints, pawn shops and flophouses also exhibit unquestionable signs during their formative years. For a list of these 'tells,' you need look no further than ...
Your mounting debt has occassionally prompted visits from a mob Lego breaker.
You plead with your parents to buy you a puppy but only if it's a Greyhound.
You regularly engage in the questionable practice of "Flashcard counting."
Your prom date is an Atlantic City cocktail waitress.
In math class, before the teacher even gets to finish the "One train leaves Chicago and another leaves Toledo..." question, you're down for a five spot on Toledo.
You're barely nine and you've already invented a loaded dice version of 'Trouble.'
The only time you opened your social studies textbook was for a gambling raid perp walk.
Your 4-H project centers on cockfighting.
You show up at a pre-game pep rally with signs imploring the team to keep the score within seven points. (-- pgs. 44-45) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4221#4221 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 2:06 pm Post subject: |
|
|
93.7 percent of Cuban children complete high school, far more than in the United States or elsewhere in the Caribbean.
The New York Times Magazine
Magazine Subscription
The End of the End of the Revolution
Castro's Cuba is turning 50. It's been dying for years. What can Obama - or anyone else - do to help bring the island into the 21st century?
By Roger Cohen
Dec. 7/08
| Quote: | ... Looking out on the ocean, I searched in vain for a single boat.
It was not always so, 90 miles off the coast of Florida. In 1859, Richard Henry Dana Jr., an American lawyer whose “To Cuba and Back” became a classic, sailed into Havana. He later wrote: “What a world of shipping! The masts make a belt of dense forest along the edge of the city, all the ships lying head into the street, like horses at their mangers.” Over the ensuing century, Cuba became the winter playground of Americans, a place to gamble, rumba, smoke puros and sip mojitos, the land of every vice and any trade. Havana bars advertised “Hangover Breakfasts.” They were much in demand. The mafia loved the island, the largest in the Caribbean; so did the American businessmen who controlled swathes of the sugar industry and much else.
Then, a half-century ago, on Jan. 1, 1959, Fidel Castro brought down the curtain on Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. America’s cavorting-cum-commerce ceased. Miami became Cuba’s second city as, over the years, hundreds of thousands fled communist rule. ...
... A repressive society long under a single ruler — the ailing 82-year-old Fidel still holds Cubans in his thrall even if he formally handed the presidency to his younger brother, Raúl, in 2006 — develops a secret lexicon of survival.
Through a labyrinth of rations, regulations, two currencies and four markets (peso, hard currency, agro and black), people make their way. Stress is rare but depression rampant in an inertia-stricken economy. Truth is layered. Look up and you see the Habana Libre, the towering hotel where Fidel briefly had his headquarters after the revolution: it began life as the Hilton. The seafront Riviera hotel, now so communist-drab it seems to reek of cabbage, once housed the rakish casino of the mobster Meyer Lansky. ...
One official stop was with Elena Álvarez, who was 15 when Fidel’s revolution came and now, at 65, works as a top official at the Ministry of Economics. She tried to make sense for me of the voodoo economics I’d seen.
Here’s what she wanted me to grasp. Cuba, at the time of the revolution, was “one of the most unjust, unequal and exploited societies on earth.” Illiteracy was running up to 40 percent, a quarter of the best land was in U.S. hands, a corrupt bourgeoisie lorded it over everyone else. Fidel’s initial objective was a more-just society, but U.S. pressure radicalized his revolution and pushed it toward all-out socialism within the Soviet camp.
Álvarez reeled off some numbers. There were 6,000 doctors in Cuba at the time of the revolution; there are now close to 80,000 for a population of 11.3 million, one of the highest per-capita rates in the world. The U.S. embargo has cost Cuba about $200 billion in real terms. When the Berlin Wall crumbled, 80 percent of Cuba’s international trade was with Soviet-bloc countries. About 98 percent of oil came from them. Back to the Communist bloc states, at inflated prices, went Cuba’s sugar and rum.
“We’ve had to reinsert ourselves in the global economy twice in 30 years, once in 1960 and again in 1990,” Álvarez said.
O.K., I said, that shows some resilience, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, why didn’t Cuba do what Moscow’s other satellites did: take down totalitarianism, become a market economy and set people free? The real totalitarianism, she countered, was Batista’s. Cuba now has different values. Despite scarcities, attributable in large part to the embargo, it’s a society that wants to protect everyone. The rationing system guarantees that all citizens have a minimum. Everyone gets low-cost food at work. Free health care and education mean a $20 monthly salary is the wrong way to view the quality of Cuban life. Going to a market economy in 1990 would have meant wholesale factory closures, as in East Germany, and 35 percent unemployment. “We decided we had to protect our workers,” Álvarez said. “We have another philosophy.”
That “philosophy” has produced results. According to the World Health Organization, life expectancy for men and women in Cuba is 76 and 80 years, respectively, on par with the U.S. The comparative figures in Haiti are 59 and 63, and in the Dominican Republic they are 66 and 74. The probability of dying before the age of 5 is 7 per 1,000 live births in Cuba — nearly as good as the U.S. figure — compared with 80 per 1,000 live births in Haiti and 29 in the Dominican Republic. Illiteracy has been eliminated. United Nations statistics show 93.7 percent of Cuban children complete high school, far more than in the United States or elsewhere in the Caribbean. (emphasis added)
That raises the question: Why educate people so well and then deny them access to the Internet, travel and the opportunity to apply their skills? Why give them a great education and no life? Why not at least offer a Chinese or Vietnamese model, with a market economy under one-party rule?
Álvarez said there was some “space for the market.” She insisted, “We are not fundamentalist.” But the bottom line, of course, is that the authorities are scared: opening the door to capitalism on an island 90 miles from Florida is very different from doing that in Asia. (-- pgs. 44-51) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4238#4238 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
FAQ 
Search 
Memberlist 
Usergroups
Profile 
Log in to check your private messages 
Log in 
