BILL GATES ON EDUCATION -- NOT!

URBAN LEGENDS COME BACK TO HAUNT US!

Popular web wisdom --Urban eLegend -- has it that the rules below were written by Bill Gates. But I've recently been told that these rules on education are NOT from Bill Gates. These rules have been credited to a number of people, but according to the "Urban Legends Reference Pages: Language," at http://www.snopes2.com/language/document/liferule.htm, the rules are actually by Charles J. Sykes, an author of books on education. Moreover, this list omits 3 additional rules which you can view on the above web site. The "Rules For a New Economy" below the education rules list are apparently actually written by Bill Gates.

The rules, however, are worthy of discussion (I use them in my lectures on debate):

RULE 1 - Life is not fair; get used to it.

RULE 2 - The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

RULE 3 - You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone, until you earn both.

RULE 4 - If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.

RULE 5 - Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.

RULE 6 - If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

RULE 7 - Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents' generation, try "delousing" the closet in your own room.

RULE 8 - Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

RULE 9 - Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

RULE 10 - Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

RULE 11 - Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

To be "hit" on hits hard.

Women have, as far as I know, always been subjects to unwelcome compliments from men. The men, in their cocky ignorance have whistled after, shouted out or gestured what they thought were expressions of admiration, while women often have taken it as insults.

Not because it has been too obvious to both people they know and strangers alike. Just about anyone who hears what’s been said, and see who is commented upon, causes us to crumble up inside, because we are sure we know what’s going on in their head. The men who do this are not really affected or in any way looked down on, not in my experience anyway, but the women who have gotten the attention feel far from admired.

Men who pass by assess the woman, and I am sure they think: “Hmmm….. okey, nice legs, but what’s with the hair?”, “ Hmmm…. Too much make-up for my taste, but the low cut is pleasant”.

Women are not that nice, usually, when they evaluate other women. I am sure they think: “Hah, yeah, right; that’s the kind of guy she gets attention from”. Or “Really? She’s not that great looking, not really”.

To be commented upon, loudly, on the street, or anywhere for that matter, brings the self-centred sides of us out. We speed up a bit to get away as fast as possible… not too much, just enough to feel we get out of there quicker. We hardly ever slow down, to give the passers by an extra close look of how good we look… unless we are in an extra good mood and nothing can disturb the feeling of being extraordinary. We scan through every detail about our looks, from when we last washed our hair, if the mid-life spread shows really well in this top, if the nails looks fine,  if the coat is the right colour, if our legs are shaved… the list of visible and invisible details is pretty long. And sadly enough: we always find that one thing which makes the attention thought upon as spiteful.

At work I was told (by a man) that I should wear more colours… it would compliment my personality more. Another man then said “Oh, she looks great in black”, on which I replied “Yeah, everyone looks slimmer in black… you do realize that whatever you say now; it will be wrong, right?”

He just shook his head and told me it’s too hard to be nice to anyone these days. I know I was bad, even though I said it with a laugh and didn’t really mean to criticize, it was more like laughing it off, but men do have a hard time finding nice things to say to women these days, which is not perceived as being hit on. We tend to forget that people can be just friendly, and to say something nice to someone might be just that: a friendly comment.

Now the interesting new thing has emerged: Men get spooked when they get approached by another man, because he might be gay, and they feel hit upon. I don’t know why they expect everybody gay to jump them and want more than you are willing to give, but it seems like they have that impression of gay men.

Women, when they get approached or complimented by other women, feel appreciated and acknowledged (unless it is obviously an ironic comment and it hits a hundred times harder... and irony is most times how we perceive nice things said to us, and we turn out to be nasty in reply, rather than nice to each other.

Men… well, they feel giggled upon, as if everything about them is wrong. No matter what mood they are in; they feel the amusing value of it all entertain whoever is in the vicinity. No matter if it is a woman or a man, regardless sexual orientation, who approach them.

What used to be a friendly comment to gain contact with someone, is a threat to their manliness. At least that is how they refer to the incident, if they feel they have to comment upon it.

What if my best friend in the entire world, regardless of sex or sexual orientation, is out there, and the only way he/she knows to get in contact with people is to give a sincere compliment? Whose loss would that be?

Another autumn... of gale

Autumn or fall, both names trigger that mellow feeling of change. To me this season is about a new start, crisp mornings, morning dew, every day a new sensation of nature’s breathtaking colours.

Rainy afternoons when you slow down and stay indoors to read with a mug of hot chocolate topped with whipped cream in your hand, or the occasional warm and sunny hours to spend in the garden; preparing everything for a healthy, empowering winter sleep. Anticipating the early spring sunny days when everything is brought back to life and bloom.

Pretty laid-back and almost romantic, isn’t it? Well, those are the feelings I get when thinking about this season, and it is puzzles me why it is so.

As I am experiencing this season right now, I both live and remember what it is really like, and it is nothing of the sort I think of it being like.

Working life is hectic and straining. I get to meet new students, and they all have their own history to tell about what school is like for them. We try to give who need it a new start; to give them new possibilities to show what they actually know, instead of proving them wrong. It takes a lot of time and patience. To gain the trust of young people who have experienced failure way too often demand advanced tiptoe dancing between choice of words, choice of reaction and knowing when it is important to listen carefully. Often they disguise their problems in rude language or acting up.

Noone acts up because they are looking for trouble, there is always a reason. Most of the time it happens because this is how they have behaved in the past, and it is the only way they know how to behave. I understand why they do it: to talk about feelings is very hard. To find the right words is sometimes just too hard. As an adult it is important to ask the right questions to find out what is going on in their mind. We can’t perform magic, and we don’t read minds.

At home this is the time of year when the pile of laundry is at its biggest. The warm summer rain is history, now we get cold showers of rain, which often falls in all directions following the moody whims of the wind. Ones again the kids wear disagreeable rainwear and waterproof boots. Being hampered by what they wear, after a summer when shorts gave them freedom to be wild and vast and free.

The wet nature causes wet clothes, muddy boots, grass stained trousers and jumpers, the numerous changes of socks empty the sock drawer in no time.

Soccer season is at its most hectic, and towels pile up in the laundry basket and on the bathroom floor.

Beginning of the school year is an affliction for parents. Everything is to be read thrice with an adult, an adult must sign for homework done in every subject. An adult must check the kid knows the new words added to the vocabulary in foreign languages… it’s like we’re back in school; missing out on the lessons, but doing the homework.

Once again I leave the house every morning, having packed lunches and gym bags and satchels. Carrying five bags and outerwear for every kind of weather. There is no way I can keep up appearance, even though I started out pretty presentable.

This is the season when I never have a good hair day. Using an umbrella is very adult, but pointless. The rain is pouring down horizontally, and the umbrella dances in all directions… unless it turns inside out and point forward, like a satellite dish ready to  receive messages from the weather gods.

We have those crisp, sunny days, when the wind is still. But somehow they are easily forgotten in the overwhelming impact of autumn gale.

 

Some are heroes, some of us never are.

"Every hero becomes a bore at last."  I’m not quite sure whose quote this is, but I think it was Ralph Waldo Emerson...?

So…, I just googled it, and it is, in fact, R. W. Emerson who wrote it. (Heh, “googled it”; a new phrase which entered my vocabulary a couple of years ago. There is a world of meaning to it, and I think it is pretty international too.)

After a rather crappy day it was great to brag about myself, and feel an inch taller. I never remember names, dates or hours; I am one of those who need to write it down, and I have excess consumption of post-it pads… only problem is they grow so rapidly in number they drown in the chaos of notes… and I have to vary the colours, and soon all I see is a colourful clash of semi neon coloured notes, impossible to make sense of. So I tidy up a bit, throw away the outdated ones with messages I never remembered in time, and hang the rest in tidy order. The tidy order lasts for a little while until chaos strikes again. I don’t stick them just anywhere, you see, I stick them where I know I see them on regular basis. I used to use the messages on my computer screen, but that just failed. My screen looked as if I was hoarding messages, and chaos was a matter of fact. My screensaver (a pencil with an eraser and a message) was completely hidden for a while.

I found the quote about heroes today, as I was helping a student looking up the lyrics to a song she is going to write about. It wasn’t the phrase I was looking for, but it caught my eyes, and stuck to my brains.

I am awful like that… especially song lyrics. Catchy songs tend to stick, and I end up walking about humming, with occasional outbursts of loud, not too well (not always in key), right out singing.

Initially the quote "Every hero becomes a bore at last" struck me as a strange, actually rather peculiar, statement to make, but thinking about it, it makes sense.

On my way back home from work today I was thinking about people who stand out, and how much I enjoy their company… and then I thought about people who stand out even more, and how I am not likely to ever get to enjoy their company… and why not.

I think everybody, who face up to the fact they will never be a standing out hero (opposed to an everyday hero, which I think we all are, at some point) would like to be friends with a hero: To be in the position to say: “That guy’s my friend!”

As if the character rubs off, just by being in the same room together. In many settings we tend to try to earn credits through who we include in our circle (they may not include us, but that’s not really important, as long as we include them….)

It is important to us humans to have people to look up to. We need idols, we need someone to compare ourselves and our lives to.

If we can’t find someone compatible to what we strive for, we comfort ourselves with half the truth about famous people who apparently are just bad, at just about anything…  (or so we think, judging by the looks of their handbag or something).

Or we try, real hard, to be as good as, if not better.

The minute we see a chance to get closer to someone who is talked about in a favourable manner, we grab the opportunity with everything in us.

There is an old saying “the grass is always greener on the other side”. Funny how those old sayings seem to have everlasting truth in them.  We want what we haven’t got, even character. I guess that is a big part of being human.

And yet… as much as we admire people who are exceptionally good at something: People who are good at something somehow scare us. I can’t think of any other reason why so many brilliant people are surrounded by followers, but hardly any true friends, let alone confidenciality.

First of all: when people are really good at something, we like them because their qualities and skills make them stand out and be brilliant… which is admirable, and we like.

But to be that good at something, you need to engage, be interested in and put down a lot of hours, days, months and years to achieve the level of ability. To watch anyone that absorbed in a narrow topic is fascinating for a while, but then most people get bored, because they don’t have the same stamina and dedication, and when the hero continues: we drop out.

You may think that I don’t understand what a hero is. I think I do. I think a hero is as a person or a group of people that do something on for others in need, or defend honesty and integrity or a moral cause.

Heroes don’t stand by and watch or wait. They make things happen, they stand up for what they believe in, and through dedication and curiosity they make things better for others.

Doctors, musicians, engineers, gardeners... we find them in every trade, and in every layer of society.

It takes a lot of tenacity and dedication to become so good at something that you make a difference.

I have neither. I am a jack of all trades, but not a specialist of anything. My mind flutters in unexpected directions as I am rather distracted. I am not smart, but some wisdom has rubbed off on me through the years.

It is clear I will never be a hero, of any sort, but I am good at keeping them company. I am an expert at acting as if the deed they did, and do, was nothing less than what I would have expected of them.

(How much I admire their dedication... nah... they don't need to know.)

having a woman advocate of feminism, as a teacher

Part of the curriculum in Norwegian is to learn about communication.

We use our language in many ways and for different purposes, one of the lessons I talk about is the power of language.

Power of language includes:

Ø  To talk on a level the listener/reader has problems understanding

Ø  Deliberate use of foreign words

Ø  Long and complicated sentences

Ø  technical language when the listener/reader doesn’t understand/has learned it

Ø  threats

Ø  arrogance

Ø  irony

Ø  harassment

Ø  ignore the listener

Ø  body language

Ø  address or attack weak points of the listener/reader

As a whole: make the listener/reader as insecure as possible.

It should be obvious that this really isn’t a kind thing to inflict on another person, but teenagers have their jargon, and more and more often I hear them talk eachother "down", and I know they are thinking they are friendly, when what they really do is to degrade each other.

One of the tasks I use to illustrate the power of language is to make them write a list on synonyms for boy/man and girl/woman.

They are to add all the words they use in everyday speech and words they know from media and literature.

I feel very uncomfortable every time I give this exercise to my students, but I do it anyway, because they learn A LOT from it.

Without exception, they write a lot more words for girl/woman, than they do for boy/man. Boy/man has about equally amount of positive and negative words. The negative words refer to sexual preferences.

Girl/woman is an even sadder matter. There are many more words on the lists; only a few of them are positive. The negative words have, to a large extent, sexual character, and not in a good way.

They try to argue that they don’t mean it degrading, but when we talk about it, they admit they understand what they say, they know the words they use are really suppressive and that words have a meaning they usually understand the extent of.

I just curl up inside in shame after class, when I see the students bring their lists with them for recess. They read it, discuss it and compare. The hall becomes a cacophony of profanity and rudeness.

The good thing about this exercise is I notice there is a change of tone in the classroom afterwards. They think more before they talk to each other and choose better words. We get less swearing too, at least in the classroom.

How they express themselves after school hours I have no hand over, but communication works a lot better at school. Not only in my lessons, but our department as a whole.

So, while the other teachers grin with a smug sneer and shake their heads, I just feel like crumble up, or wish for a big hole to open up underneath me.

BUT, as a teacher I have done worse. I have talked to classes about what socks to wear in safety shoes (you would never believe the stench synthetic socks create) and personal hygiene. Now that is “fun” in a classroom full of teenage boys. Especially when they comment upon what I have said in class, to other teachers.

I comfort myself thinking at least we have cleaner student now, both language and bodies, than most other departments of building- and constructionwork.

I guess that is the drawback of having a woman advocate of feminism, (who wears black leather jacket, jeans and high heels at work) teaching them.

Some things are hard to write about.

As much as I like to write about this and that and nothing at all, I sometimes feel there are subjects I am really concerned about, but which I don’t feel I am competent enough to write about. And yet; there is, however, sometimes things I would like to mention, just because I feel it is fair to address the issue.

There are some things about modern time I have problems accepting. The only thing I find even harder to accept is the fact that we allow it.

I don’t point fingers or accuse anybody for consciously, or deliberately, to condone the trends, but I am worried because I never hear critical voices questioning the experts.

One of these issues, which I tried to write about, but discarded because it was too hard to get my point through, was how we tend to use equal terms when we talk about children and adults.

You see: Some smart person introduced the term “children’s sexuality”. What, what? Every time I hear it, or read it, everything inside me just writhes. I strongly oppose to the term, and I do so because I don’t believe there is such a thing, at least not the way adults usually interpret the term. Kids should not be made objects like that. The experts really shouldn’t use expressions the common man on the street has specific interpretations of.

There is something totally wrong in adults apprehending children as miniature adults, and by that believing children are subjects to the same issues adults are.

Languages all around the world, at all times, have given us strong understanding of how children differs from adults: Children will grow up to be adults/ children will be adults: It is in the future! But they are not adults yet.

Oh, I know I disagree with a lot of experts and researches, but I really don’t understand why we are so eager to make children into miniature adults, rather than just accept they are children.

I want for us to accept that childhood has stages of development, some which include exploring and getting to know one’s body, but that is not, in my opinion, the same thing as sexual behavior.

I get really upset when the medias tell about assaults involving children, using the same language they do about assaults where only adults are involved.

We shouldn’t compare. There are no similarities between the two. (Sorry, yes, there are similarities, but in my opinion they are more different than the same.)

We hear about so much cruelty, and I believe it is time we find expressions which define the differences between childhood and to be an adult, both in everyday- and professional terms.

When we talk about children the same way we do about adults, it weakens the power of the contents, for victims of either age.

We kind of wear the expressions out, and by that make them more normal and less dangerous or scary.

And now that I read my text, which I intended to be about how hard it is to write about controversial issues, or things I find disturbing, I just realized I wrote it anyway.

Budding Pop Princess

There was once a budding pop princess with a star as bright as the future that laid ahead. But as tends to be the case with these girls, her star began to dim. Every young girl everywhere wanted to be like her and she was a role model for kids growing up. She was smiling all the time and it always inspired other people to do the same.

Her father, the King, made sacrifices for her: pulling strings and did his best to give her what she wanted, but it wasn’t enough. He was left with an achy breaky heart, and a heartbreaking comment was given to the press about how he would always love her regardless. She is his little girl, and always will be! And that’s just what it should be like between a father and a daughter.

Family do that, you see, fans don’t. Ok, true, persistent fans do, but not the masses.

The first sign of a falling star was the absence of a smile. She wasn’t the easy going and companionable girl anymore. Much to the dismay of parents all over the world she insisted on being an adult long before her age.

She often wore sunglasses, which were cool, but too bad the look on her face said she's battling a hangover. It looked like she just rolled out of bed and grabbed some clothes off the floor; she started to care less and less about her looks.

She stopped smiling, cut her hair, started to wear low cut clothes, so low she skipped the shirt all together, and just wore a halfway buttoned suit jacket.

Her loyal audience made excuses and kept up her popularity by playing her old albums and watching her bygone series, but as her rebel escalated… helped by her access to means… and she never offered her adherents an explanation, an excuse, an apology or in any other way uttered she still had thoughts for those who made her famous: her audience, it became harder to support her actions.

For most adults it would have felt just wrong to buy their little girl the princess’ spinoffs today.

Her latest performance was an embarrassing show, not based on talent or musical quality, but a desperate, predictable and cheap appearance on stage showing her lightly dressed chafing body.

Some people may not know that back in school she was actually nicknamed Smiley because of her beautiful smile. She was smiling all the time and it always inspired other people to do the same. She still has a wonderful dazzling smile, but discontent took the best of her… hopefully for a limited time.

The nicknames she gets nowadays are quite different and not so complimentary. It would be great if she could start the process of getting her act together by keeping her tongue in. My 6-year old shows his tongue, and makes funny faces, on pictures. It’s only funny a very few times.

Artists start out being public property in various ways, and at different ages. (I am sad to say that when Justin Bieber was in Oslo, not long ago, the news named him "the product" rather than "the artist". What makes it sadder is the impression I get it is true.)

Some are incredibly young when they enter the limelight, and often they begin their career in children’s programs on TV.

They establish themselves as idols for very young children, and within soon they think that because they can afford it, their rebel should be somewhat prototype. So, they turn to alcohol, tobacco and drugs; all the things parents don’t want for their children to pick up for a habit.

And then these very young artists go to the predictable and boring step to simulate awkward, badly choreographed, sex on stage. Upsetting and outrageous as it is, it is still what is expected to be the desperate, cheap way out, to get attention.

Their behavior becomes outrageous, and the respect for their fans flies out the window along with their integrity, artistic development and innovative expressions.

It’s like as if they have no sense of normality. I don’t think the average teenager would want to go for a lifestyle like that, even if they had the chance.

They have a remarkable sense of responsibility and commitment, they take pride in what they achieve. They work to achieve their goals and to be splendid.

Now and again they go too far in exploring the different aspects of life, but usually they put themselves together and try to do their best.

Unlike famous kids, who seem to think they can afford to ignore the inherent urge I believe is to be found in all of us: to be the best possible version of ourselves; In every aspect of life.