Remember to send your children to Khan Academy!

The Khan Academy

"My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he told me recently....

But to Mr. Khan, occasional mistakes are part of his method. By watching him stumble through a problem, students see the process better, he argues. Sometimes they correct him in comments on his YouTube videos, and he says this makes students more engaged with the material. "Sometimes when it's a little rough, it's going to be a better product than when you overprepare," he says.

The Khan Academy explicitly challenges many of higher-education's most sacred assumptions: that professional academics make the best teachers; that hourlong lectures are the best way to relate material; and that in-person teaching is better than videos. Mr. Khan argues that his little lectures disprove all of that....

Clay Shirky, an associate teacher at New York University and a popular Internet guru, recently challenged his more than 50,000 Twitter followers with a similar thought exercise:

"If you were going to create a college from scratch, what would you do?"

-College 2.0: A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube

'Life is a Kind of Chess'

At what age should we be teaching children to think? Is Chess an effective way? Which Board games are the best?;

Research shows, there is a strong correlation between learning to play chess and academic achievement. In 2000, a landmark study found that students who received chess instruction scored significantly higher on all measures of academic achievement, including math, spatial analysis, and non-verbal reasoning ability (Smith and Cage, 2000).

Related:
Bedtime Stories for Children

Chess program has students feeling like kings and queens

It exposes them to sportsmanship -- the thrill of victory and gracious defeat,” said Sears.

Parent Michael Scholfield agrees. He has been more than impressed with his 6-year-old son Matthew’s improved behavior since learning the game at Jones.

“He’s more disciplined and patient,” said Scholfield.
“Chess has taught him to lose gracefully and to win gracefully -- not to gloat. It’s all about doing your best.”

Chess Links

Play Shredder Chess Online

Teaching critical thinking: A Parenting Science guide

How to teach kids to be entrepreneurs

Kumon- can someone do a randomised trial?

Seeking feedback on the effectiveness of Kumon.

Related:
Kumon -UK
Kumon India

HomeSchool Creations

Is it the device or the technique?

Those days are gone. Dr. Berger started complaining to Zimmer a while back that one of its artificial-knee models was failing prematurely, and he went public recently with a study that he says proves it. Zimmer told him that the problem was not the artificial knee, but his technique, and pointed to data overseas indicating that the knee was safe.


Last year, Zimmer did not give Dr. Berger a new contract. The company says it routinely rotates consultants.

“I trained hundreds of doctors for them and made them tens of millions,” Dr. Berger said in interview here, in which he also lambasted Zimmer executives as dissembling, out-of-touch bureaucrats. “So was this just a coincidence? Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t.”...

Amid the booming use of artificial joints in the United States, the breakup between Dr. Berger and Zimmer highlights what experts say is a troubling situation for patients and doctors: when disputes arise about orthopedic implant safety, there are no independent referees or sources of information because no one tracks the performance of the devices.

“There is no way of knowing who is right because we don’t have the data,” said Dr. Kevin J. Bozic, a professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of California, San Francisco....

While producers of implanted heart devices have a voluntary system in which outside panels investigate problems, American makers of orthopedic devices do not. Many of the artificial joints that surgeons like Dr. Berger use, including the Zimmer knee at issue, are cleared under law by the Food and Drug Administration for sale without testing in patients. In addition, no one in the country tracks the long-term performance of artificial hips and knees, a $6.7 billion annual business that surged as baby boomers reached middle age....

As he tells it, his relationship with Zimmer frayed over a version of a widely used Zimmer knee, known as the NexGen. The model at issue, called the NexGen CR-Flex, is designed to provide a greater range of motion than the standard NexGen.

Most surgeons implant an artificial knee using a cement-like adhesive to bond the thigh bone to the portion of the device that bends. But some specialists, like Dr. Berger, try to avoid adhesives because the cement can break down and cause device failure. So Zimmer also sells an uncemented version of the CR-Flex that relies instead on the bone naturally fusing with the implant.

-Surgeon vs. Knee Maker: Who’s Rejecting Whom?

A Happy Father's Day

Bryan Caplan reflects on being a father;

Father's Day is a time to reflect on whether you want to be a parent--or want to be a parent again. If you simply don't like kids, research has little to say to you. If however you're interested in kids, but scared of the sacrifices, research has two big lessons. First, parents' sacrifice is much smaller than it looks, and childless and single is far inferior to married with children. Second, parents' sacrifice is much larger than it has to be... Instead of trying to mold your children into perfect adults, you can safely kick back, relax and enjoy your journey together--and seriously consider adding another passenger.

Book Cover Art

Agree, Disagree?

Question for the Day

What dividing moments do you remember of your children’s childhood? Which ones did you not notice until they had passed?

Eat Brown Rice

Just replacing a third of a serving of white rice with brown each day could reduce one’s risk of Type 2 diabetes by 16 percent, a statistical analysis showed. A serving is a cup of cooked rice.

The study, which used data from two Harvard nurses’ health studies and a separate study of health professionals, isn’t the first to point a finger at foods like white rice as a culprit in Type 2 diabetes. A 2007 study of Chinese women in Shanghai found that middle-aged women who ate large amounts of white rice and other refined carbohydrates were also at increased risk for diabetes compared to their peers who ate less....

But, Dr. Sun said, there were many possible explanations for why brown rice eaters are at lower risk for Type 2 diabetes. In addition to having a lower glycemic index than white rice, brown rice also contains important nutrients like magnesium that are stripped during the refining process; it also contains much more fiber. Earlier studies have found that having these nutrients in the diet protects against diabetes, Dr. Sun said.

-Eating Brown Rice to Cut Diabetes Risk

Three Little Pigs- which one grew up to be an engineer?

An interesting article about a new fad in teaching kindergarten kids engineering;

All 300 students at Clara E. Coleman Elementary School are learning the A B C’s of engineering this year, even those who cannot yet spell e-n-g-i-n-e-e-r-i-n-g. The high-performing Glen Rock school district, about 22 miles northwest of Manhattan, now teaches 10 to 15 hours of engineering each year to every student in kindergarten through fifth grade, as part of a $100,000 redesign of the science curriculum....

“We say they’re born engineers — they naturally want to solve problems — and we tend to educate it out of them.” ...

At the same time, Congress is considering legislation, endorsed by more than 100 businesses and organizations like I.B.M. and Lockheed Martin, to promote engineering education from kindergarten through 12th grade...

Engineering is not a requirement in most states. (New Jersey is an exception: the state standards mandate some exposure to engineering by second grade.)...

They plan multiday projects, often built around classic and popular stories like the Three Little Pigs, and take students step by step through the engineering process: design, build, test, evaluate.

“They have to have the thinking skills of an engineer to keep up with all the innovation that’s constantly coming into their world,” Ms. Morrow said.

First graders were recently challenged with helping a farmer keep rabbits out of his garden.

In teams of four, they brainstormed about building fences with difficult-to-scale ladders instead of doors and setting out food decoys for the rabbits. They drew up blueprints and then brought them to life with plastic plates, paper cups, straws and foam paper.

Then they planned to test their ideas with pop-up plastic rabbits. If the fences were breached, they would be asked to improve the design.

“It gets your brain going,” said Elizabeth Crowley, 7, who wants to be an engineer when she grows up. “And I actually learn something when I’m doing a project — like you can work together to do something you couldn’t do before.”

In the kindergarten class that was designing homes — none out of hay, wood or brick — for the three pigs, Ms. Morrow started the lesson by asking the 20 children sitting cross-legged on the carpet if they knew what engineers do.

“They can write poems?” one girl guessed.

“Well,” Ms. Morrow allowed, “they could write a poem about something they build.”

But if they were still unsure about the language of engineering, the students were soon immersed in its nuts and bolts.

They tweaked their houses, adding ever more elaborate improvements to thwart the wolf. Then they huffed and they puffed.

And not a single house blew down.

Parenting Advice from Ken Arrow

When my PhD thesis advisor, Ken Arrow, found out that I was soon to have my first child, he said to me, "Just remember, it is an investment."

-Joshua Gans, Parentonomics, p 212

Assorted on Potty Training

Why I don't care if my son goes to kindergarten in pull-ups;

Depending on which website you peruse, the average age of toilet training for boys ranges from about 31 to 38 months. At 46 months old, Dashiell is long in the (baby) tooth to be sporting diapers. According to his preschool teachers, everyone else in his class is running around happy and dry in their X-Men and Ni Hao Kai-Lan underwear.
 
In this laissez-faire attitude toward the toilet, I am apparently unusual. Potty training — and the anxiety related to it — is big business: Toilet Training in Less Than a Day is a bestseller on Amazon; there are chapters of the organization Diaper Free Baby in over 35 states; and sites like Pottytrainingconcepts.com sell charts, pee-on-demand dolls, and “toilet-time targets” (for your son or daughter to aim at). And then there’s the Potty Mate, which allows you to record encouraging audio messages that play back when your child unfurls the toilet paper roll (like, say, “Nice #2 there, Junior!”). I’d venture to say I’d rather have my son potty-train at age 5 than think that the Charmin should be speaking to him.

Diapers in Kindergarten?

Toilet Training and Incentives: Child No.2 (Part I)

The Infant Brain

For obvious reasons, what happens in the minds of very young, pre-verbal children is elusive. But over the last century, the psychology of early childhood has become a major subject of study.

Some scientists and researchers have argued that children develop skills only gradually, others that many of our mental attributes are innate.

Sigmund Freud concluded that infants didn't differentiate themselves from their environment.

The pioneering Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget thought babies' perception of the world began as a 'blooming, buzzing confusion' of colour, light and sound, before they developed a more sophisticated worldview, first through the senses and later through symbol.

More recent scholars such as the leading American theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky have argued that the fundamentals of language are there from birth. Chomsky has famously argued that all humans have an innate, universally applicable grammar.

Over the last ten to twenty years, new research has shed fresh light on important aspects of the infant brain which have long been shrouded in mystery or mired in dispute, from the way we start to learn to speak to the earliest understanding that other people have their own minds.

-The Infant Brain, (BBC In Our Time)

Welcome to ABCs of Parentonomics

Has been reading Joshua Gans Parentonomics. This blog is my attempt to make sense of parenting and its economics, science and psychology.