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Teach Preschoolers to Write: The Evidence
By Shlomo Maital
“Preschoolers should be encouraged to write at a young age — even before they make their first step into a classroom.” This is the finding of a new study, published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly, by Tel Aviv Univ. Professor Dorit Aram and her colleagues. According to a Tel Aviv U. Press Release:
“Parents in the U.S. are obsessed with teaching their kids the ABCs,” said Prof. Aram. “Probably because English is an ‘opaque’ language. Words do not sound the way they are spelled, unlike ‘transparent’ Spanish or Italian. Parents are using letters as their main resource of teaching early literacy, but what they should be doing is ‘scaffolding’ their children’s writing, helping their children relate sounds to letters on the page even though the letters are not transparent.”
According to the Press Release, Prof. Aram spent the last 15 years studying adult support of young children’s writing. A major component of this support is a method, in which a caregiver (i.e. parent) is actively involved in helping a child break down a word into segments to connect sounds to corresponding letters. For example, parents using a high level will assist their children by asking them to “sound out” a word as they put it to paper. This contradicts the traditional model of telling children precisely which letters to print on a page, spelling it out for them as they go.
“Early writing is an important but understudied skill set,” said Prof. Aram. “Adults tend to view writing as associated with school, as ‘torture.’ My experience in the field indicates that it’s quite the opposite — children are very interested in written language. Writing, unlike reading, is a real activity. Children watch their parents writing and typing, and they want to imitate them. It is my goal to assist adults in helping their children enter the world of writing by showing them all the lovely things they can communicate through writing, whether it’s ‘mommy, I love you’ or even just ‘I want chocolate.'”
In the study, 135 preschool children (72 girls and 63 boys) and their parents (primarily mothers) in an ethnically-diverse, middle-income US community were observed writing a semi-structured invitation for a birthday party. The researchers analyzed the degree of parental support and assessed the children’s phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, word decoding, vocabulary, and fine motor skills. Overall support was most positively linked to children’s decoding and fine motor skills.
Prof. Aram and her counterparts found that “scaffolding,” or parental support, was most useful in developing early literacy skills. “The thing is to encourage children to write, but to remember that in writing, there is a right and a wrong,” said Prof. Aram. “We have found that scaffolding is a particularly beneficial activity, because the parent guides the child. And, if that parent guides the child and also demands precision in a sensitive and thoughtful way — i.e. ‘what did you mean to write here? Let me help you’ — this definitely develops the child’s literary skill set.
So, bottom line: Sit down with your very young pre-schoolers as parents or grandparents. Work with them on writing. “Sound it out” is the message…not “Here is how you spell a word precisely”. It makes sense to me.
Larry Page: As Innovator Role Model
By Shlomo Maital
Fortune magazine has chosen Larry Page (Dec. 1 issue) as Business Person of the Year. The feature article begins with a revealing joke, told often around Google. At Google’s “moon shot” Google X center, where self-driven cars, high-altitude wind turbines, and stratospheric balloons for Internet access are developed, a ‘brainiac’ creates a time machine. As the scientist reaches for the power cord to start a demo for Larry Page, Page says: “Hey! Why do you need to plug it in!?”
For a decade Page was one member of a triangle – Sergei Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Page – that led Google. In 2011 Page took over as CEO. Turns out he is a good manager. In the past three years, Google has grown 20% annually, and has quarterly revenue of $16 b. It has $62 billion in cash. Page invests heavily both in Google’s core business (he says he argued with Steve Jobs, who said, ‘you guys are doing too much’) and in far-flung new projects. According to Fortune, in the past year, Google has invested in artificial intelligence, robotics and delivery drones. It has expanded its venture unit, which invests in startups and is a kind of scouting team. It bought Nest, a smart-home startup. It invested in Calico, a biotech firm.
Originally Google set out to “organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible”. Today that vision is too narrow. Page says he wants Google to change the world in ways most of us cannot imagine.
Some say Google is too narrowly focused on advertising revenue. But YouTube now brings in $6 billion in annual revenues. Page continues to invest in bold ventures, to ensure the company’s future. He is making ‘credible bets’ on the home, the car, and wearable devices.
Most amazingly, Google has a secret facility where a team of scientists are working on a project that will chemically ‘paint’ tiny nanoparticles, with a protein, so they bind to things like cancer cells. And then concentrate them through magnetized wearable devices, so they can be ‘queried’. This would enable constant monitoring and detection of a whole host of devices. Outside Google’s core competence? Not at all.
Page regards some of his bold bets as a portfolio bucket. Some will pay off. Many won’t. He doesn’t think the risk is high. By the time you want to put large sums of money into something, you pretty much know whether it will be profitable, he says. For him, not taking risks is the biggest risk of all.
IT Burnout: The Problem, The Solution
By Shlomo Maital
In New Zealand, my wife and I went into a knitting shop to buy wool, so that Sharona can knit a shawl. The owner was a woman from San Francisco, an IT expert who studied at Stanford and held very good IT jobs. But she chose to open a wool shop. Why?
She explained the reason. IT experts fix problems with computers. That means they are daily dealing with unhappy people, who are grumpy and bitter about a computer crash, and tend to ‘blame the victim’ – i.e. blame the IT person, who after all is responsible for anything that goes wrong with software and computers in the organization. She simply got tired of dealing with complaining angry people. Those who buy wool are far happier and more appreciative.
I’ve encountered this phenomenon of IT burnout all over the world. And it is ironic. Because IT experts are the one group within an organization who truly understand the entire organization and its ecosystem. But rarely if ever is this knowledge fully utilized by senior management. IT experts are simply regarded as technicians. But they are not – they are systems experts who do understand how the organization works, how the flow of information works, and how people interact. And of course, they are sitting on massive amounts of value intra-organizational data.
If you are in IT, and are experiencing some of the burnout phenomenon described above, think about building some alternatives. Either – seek positions within your organization outside the IT realm (you’ll need to do some homework before you do), or, find something about which you are passionate outside your organization, and it can be an “adjacent possibility” (something close to IT), or a distant endeavour about which you are truly passionate.
But – don’t continue to suffer. Life is short.
Why Tea-Party Individualism Has a Basic Flaw
By Shlomo Maital
The extreme right-wing of the Republican Party, known as the Tea Party, demands maximum individual libertarian freedoms, lower taxes, less government, less or no social welfare. It is named after the Boston Tea Party, which initiated the American Revolution when Bostoners refused to pay taxes levied by the British on imported tea, and dumped tea overboard. But Tea Party is no party. It has disrupted American politics, divided the Republican Party and elected substantial numbers of House members and Senators.
The best refutation I’ve found of the Tea Party ideology comes not from an economist or political scientist, but from an anthropologist named John Terrell, the Regenstein Curator of Pacific Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History and professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. His basic argument, presented in an Op-Ed in the New York Times:
“The basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish and self-serving individual. Philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have emphasized that human beings are essentially social creatures, that the idea of an isolated individual is a misleading abstraction. So it is not just ironic but instructive that modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Contrary to libertarian and Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others.”
Human beings have evolved for over 50,000 years. We survive by joining with other people, to support them and receive their support. This happens within the key family unit, within neighborhoods, cities, places of work, organizations, schools and indeed in our social networks. We thrive when we love others and receive their love. We thrive when society works smoothly to provide mutual support, emotional physical and financial.
The Tea Party arose from the ashes of Ron Paul’s failed Presidential Campaign in 2008, so it is only 6 years old. It was strengthened by the disastrous financial collapse of 2008, which the Tea Party blamed on government rather than on greedy individualism rampant on Wall St. There is a social evolution of ideas, not just people and societies. The failed, failing and refuted ideas of the Tea Party groups will be dumped on the trash heap, by the evolutionary process of ideas.
Why Capitalism is (Not) Committing Suicide
By Shlomo Maital
David Brooks has another superb column in the weekend new York Times. Titled: The Ambition Explosion, he quotes work by sociologist Daniel Bell, who wrote in 1976 that “capitalism undermines itself because it nurtures a population of ever more self-gratifying consumers. These people may start out as industrious, but they soon get addicted to affluence, spending, credit and pleasure and stop being the sort of hard workers capitalism requires.”
Add to that capitalism’s tendency to concentrate wealth, corrupting democracy with it, and you have two huge reasons for its demise. Right?
Perhaps not. My wife and I are returning home today from a long trip, which included mainland China. There, I found highly ambitious young people, full of aspiration and amibition, some working as waiters while studying, and one, who started a vending machine business while working one of seven jobs and studying for his B.A. “For instance” is not a proof, as the Yiddish saying goes, but it sure convinced us.
Brooks cites what he thinks is the real Achilles Heel of capitalism – not the lack of ambition, or even wealth concentration, but the lack of real meaning!
“The real contradiction of capitalism is that it arouses enormous ambition, but it doesn’t help you define where you should focus it. It doesn’t define an end to which you should devote your life. It nurtures the illusion that career and economic success can lead to fulfillment, which is the central illusion of our time.”
In the end, the ‘toys’ you buy with great wealth – like Lamborghini’s, we saw a dealership for them in Hong Kong and it was active and profitable — do not in themselves provide meaning or satisfaction or fulfilment. So what does? Some try philanthropy. Others, social entrepreneurship.
Make meaning, not money, counsels Guy Kawasaki, serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist and Macintosh guru. For young people — at the start of your career, define your legacy and your life goals, goals that will at the latter end of your life give you satisfaction and make your life meaningful. THAT will make your boundless talent and ambition focused and directed toward a worthy goal. It will also keep capitalism from committing suicide through sheer boredom. Listen to what Brooks counsels: “Capitalist ambition is an energizing gale force. If there’s not an equally fervent counterculture to direct it, the wind uproots the tender foliage that makes life sweet.“
TIMnovate 