Develop Good Habits

Rules, they say, are meant to be broken. Not all the time, of course — we are, after all, trying to have a society here. But while rules help, most of the time, to create an orderly and well-regulated society, sometimes their lack of flexibility hinders our creativity, and thus our ability to solve the problems that confront us.

Months ago, I wrote a post about improvisation advising readers to “Learn the rules, so you can break them.” Too often, people think that the breakability of rules means that they should be broken, early and often — and if that’s the case, it’s not worth bothering to learn them at all.

That’s not the case; in fact, it’s a pretty simple matter to tell the consistent rule-breaking of the ignorant and inexperienced from the proficient rule-breaking of the master. The master’s rule-breaking gains strength from her or his understanding of what the rules do, how they work, and why they are, most of the time, crucial.

There are, one could say, rules for rule-breaking, and it is these rules (along with all the others) that the lasy rule-breaker doesn’t know or understand. Here’s an example:

• Break the rules as a last resort. Whether you’re talking about writing and grammar, music composition, artistic composition, marketing, business management, or anything else, the rules that people usually follow exist for a good reason: most of the time, they work. Stepping outside the rules requires more energy, more forethought, more planning, and more creativity — in short, more work — and effective writers, composers, marketers, business people, and people from every other walk of life don’t lightly waste their efforts fixing what already works well. Rule-breaking is the step you turn to when the rules fail to work.
• Rule-breaking gains its power from the strength of rules, not their weakness. The ability of the great rule-breakers to shock and amaze us — from Van Gogh to Philip Roth to Ron Paul to Steve jobs — relies on the expectations the rules create. Constant rule-breaking creates the expectation of constant rule-breaking, which pretty soon loses its appeal. Master rule-breakers walk a narrow line between genius and incoherence; inexpert rule-breakers are usually simply incoherent.
• For every broken rule there are a dozen unbroken ones. Or a hundred, or a thousand. The ratio doesn’t matter, it’s the fact that the best rule-breakers follow almost all the rules. Consider the rules of grammar and style: almost all great writers know the value of simple sentences, a lack of unnecessary verbiage, and adherence to basic rules of grammar — and their writing is generally built around those principles, because to ignore them is to create a morass of incomprehensible gibberish. A word salad, if you will: throw everything in a bowl, toss it around a little, and slop it onto your plate.
• For every broken rule, there is a reason. The inexperienced rule-breaker breaks the rules because s/he doesn’t know any better. The master rule-breaker breaks the rules because, after careful consideration, s/he has decided that the most effective and meaningful way to get something done was to break a rule. They have an explanation for every single step outside the accepted boundaries of the “right and proper”.
• Accept the consequences. When called on the carpet to defend his or her choices, the ignorant rule-breaker is defensive and feels put upon. S/he tries to wriggle out of the consequences, seeing them as “The Man’s” effort to keep her or him down. The master, on the other hand, embraces the consequences, knowing that s/he was right to make the decisions s/he made — or that, if those decisions turned out to be wrong, that s/he made them in good faith and for the right reasons.

There’s a scene in Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard that sums up perfectly this approach to the rules. Rabo Karabekian, an artist reknowned for his giant canvases covered with single colors of household latex paint applied with a roller, is talking with his friend Slazinger in his studio:

“Tell me, Rabo–” said Slazinger, “if I put on that same paint with the same roller, would the picture still be a Karabekian?”

“Absolutely,” I said, “provided you have in reserve what Karabekian has in reserve.”

“Like what?” he said.

“Like this,” I said. There was dust in a pothole in the floor, and I picked up some of it on the balls of both my thumbs. Working both thumbs simultaneously, I sketched a caricature of Slazinger’s face on the canvas in thirty seconds.

“Jesus!” he said. “I had no idea you could draw like that!”

“You’re looking at a man who has options,” I said.

For the “wild child” who just can’t be bothered to learn the rules, because they were meant to be broken anyway and because his or her creative spirit is too strong to be held down by rules, man, there are no options. There is only a string of broken rules and all the misunderstanding, chaos, and incoherence that goes along with them. The master, though, knows that the rules are not only options, but usually the best options. And when they aren’t, s/he knows. S/he has in reserve what Karabekian has in reserve: true mastery.

Skills.Equals(null)

by Jake Vinson

All eyes were on Darrell as he swaggered past the rows of cubicles. Darrell was different than the other developers -- sharply dressed in an expensive suit with designer sunglasses dangling from his breast pocket. He left shortly after arriving with a huge smile on his face.

The interview had gone well. The company -- a midsize logistics software provider out of New England -- had been falling behind schedule and delivering their custom reporting tools with more and more bugs. Darrell had successfully sold himself as the company's savior who could improve code quality and deliver faster than the others.

Darrell was a C# guru who would work for no less than almost double what the other contractors were paid. Even better for Darrell, he'd get to work from home, remitting in to an on-site workstation -- a perk which none of the other contractors received.

Code Freeze

When Darrell returned home, he got right to work. He spent a few hours familiarizing himself with the app he'd be maintaining -- a custom-built system that tracked inventory, scheduling and members for several libraries in the area. After paging through a few files, he knew he had to make changes to several core modules.

He returned to the office the same day to berate the other developers for their unacceptably lousy code. "I'll fix this awful code, but then I need you all to follow my standards," he told them.

Darrell took it up with management, who immediately enacted a code freeze -- for everyone except Darrell. That's give him the opportunity to fix all of the modules that no one had even realized were broken.

So for three days, Darrell coded furiously while the rest of the staff watched You Tube videos and honed their solitaire skills. On a Friday afternoon, he showed up to the office in his characteristic suit and sunglasses, announcing to the staff that he'd finished.

"You guys use your weekend to examine all the changes I made. This is the way experts code! I want all future code to look like mine."

Rogue Trader

Darrell made other so-called improvements to the code. His next change was to re-tab every file in the solution with a code-formatting utility. The merge tool struggled with all of the white space changes, so it was up to the rest of the team to merge the changes: change by change, line by line, file by file.

In an eight-day programming blitz, Darrell checked dozens of files out of the main branch in their source control, and was apparently so busy improving the code that he never got a chance to check them back in. Other developers on the team were getting miffed, because they needed to edit the modules and had no way to access them. Worse still, Darrell had vanished -- he wasn't answering his phone or responding to e-mail. The team was skeptical that he was doing anything.

Complaints eventually bubbled up to management, who summoned Job to join in a conference call with Darrell. And finally, Darrell answered the phone.

"Darrell, we've been noticing some delays in your check-ins," Job's supervisor began.

"Delays? What delays?! Everything done!" exclaimed Darrell. "I've even done next month's work for no extra charge. It's just a lousy connection on your end -- you really need to update your connection. Right now I can't connect or even ping it!"

"Why didn't you let us know about this sooner? I'll restart it now."

"No, don't touch it!" It was too late, though. Job and his supervisor were sitting near Darrell's on-site computer, so Job had reached over to turn the monitor on.

To their surprise, it was in the middle of downloading a torrent. And the cursor was moving.

While Job watched Darrell's session, Darrell kept complaining: "I can't believe you have such old network equipment. I've been trying to connect for hours! Why haven't you bought newer network equipment?"

Darrell opened up an IE window and went to e Trade. He sold a few shares of one of his stocks.

"We haven't been able to get the budget approved," said Job's supervisor. "But maybe you'd be willing to help with the $7,000 in stock you just sold on e Trade."

"..."

Darrell's contract was cancelled that day, and management began requiring more rigorous technical assessments as part of the interview process.

College Student Credit Cards

Credit Cards for College Students: How to Make the Right Selection.

Credit card companies have changed their marketing strategy recently, electing to go after young consumers instead of targeting folks with established credit history. This is exciting for students, but it can also be a scary proposition. If used responsibly, credit cards can be used as a building block for better credit. If you get the wrong card or you use it without proper discretion, then your credit card could be the beginning of the end for your credit rating.

Start small

As a college student, there is absolutely no reason to go nuts when picking out your first credit card. Sure, a $2,000 credit line might sound nice, why on earth would you ever need that much? Having that much credit is a recipe for disaster if you aren’t used to having a card. Instead of going for the most over the top offer out there, choose a smaller line of credit and work your way up to something more substantial. Once you get the hang of making payments every month and how credit cards work, then you can start using it more.

Reading the Small Print

With so many offers coming in the mail and through email, students might be tempted to bypass the important details that make each card unique. Though they might all have fancy advertising and many of the cards will feature some of the same deals, they are not created equally. Make sure to take the time to read all of the small print and figure out the different details associated with each card. For instance, how long is your grace period? Does the card feature an introductory rate that will change over time? What happens if I am late with a payment? These are all questions that have very important answers and it is in your best interest to make sure that you know each and every answer before signing on with a card company.Stay away from multiple cards

Even if you are the most responsible user of credit out there, having too many cards can make it very difficult for you to gain other types of credit in the future. Everyone knows that late payments and missed payments will take a toll on your credit history over time, but few people talk about the fact that having a lot of credit will make it hard for you to get student loans or more important lines of credit in the future. When it comes time to finance a vehicle or purchase a house, you want lenders to know that they are dealing with a responsible person. Having too much credit tied up in credit cards can detract from that.

Student credit cards can be a blessing or a curse, depending upon what you do with them. Make your choice carefully and when you get your hands on a card, use it responsibly. Otherwise, you could suffer from long term consequences associated with ruining your credit score.

Lousey Death

Some pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) populations in British Columbia, Canada could be wiped out in four years--not by fishing, but by fish farming, scientists say. Researchers report in the journal Science that juvenile pink salmon are being infected with salmon lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis), a naturally-occurring parasite, as they pass fish farms on their way from the river (where they hatch) to the ocean. If current trends continue the researchers predict that these pink salmon populations could go extinct within two salmon generations.

Advocates say aquaculture decreases fishing pressure on wild fish populations by providing another source of fish. "Growth in seafood production almost certainly has to come from aquaculture. The question is what sort of fish do we raise, and where do we raise them?" says Rebecca Goldburg, a senior scientist at Environmental Defense, an environmental advocacy group.

Scientists have long suspected fish farming can harm wild stocks. "This study is the first time we've been able to quantify what the impact of sea lice is on the wild population," says Martin Krkošek, a graduate student at the University of Alberta and an author on the paper. Krkošek says he expected to see some effect, but what he and his colleagues found "was much more severe than we originally anticipated."

Lice are transmitted fish-to-fish. Adult pink salmon can tolerate lice--but juveniles can die from just one or two of the parasites, Krkošek says. In a natural system, the juvenile salmon have time to grow up--get scales, gain weight--before they encounter the parasites. Because lice can't live in freshwater, where the salmon hatch, the juveniles don't encounter lice-carrying salmon until they go out to sea. "By the time they encounter the sea lice several months later, they are large enough to tolerate them," Krkošek says.

But when salmon are farmed in net pens in inlets along salmon migration routes--as they are in the Broughton Archipelago where this study was conducted--the juvenile salmon can catch lice from their farmed cousins early in life. Krkošek says: "When the wild juvenile salmon enter the ocean the first thing they encounter are the salmon farms and the sea lice. They get infected as they pass the salmon farms, and a lot of them are dying. They aren't making it out to the ocean."

Not everyone agrees with the sea lice diagnosis: The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which is responsible for managing aquaculture and protecting wild salmon in Canada, told the Associated Press that sea lice can not be solely blamed for the collapse and that other factors may play a role.

Salmon farms have existed in the Broughton Archipelago since the 1980s, but sea lice only became a problem in 2001. Krkošek suggests that the louse lag is related to the growing density of farms. Since the 1980s, the number of salmon farmed in the Broughton Archipelago has increased from 125,000 fish to 100 million fish, he says.

Since the first louse infestation in 2001, the number of pink salmon migrating past the farms has declined sharply. Krkošek and his colleagues predict that over the course of eight years (we're currently in the fourth year of this decline), the pink salmon populations, which supported fishing before the louse infestations, will suffer a 99 percent collapse, the researchers say.

One solution might be to move the fish farms away from the migration routes offshore. In the United States, there is legislation in the House and Senate advancing offshore aquaculture, Goldburg says. But offshore fish farming comes with another set of environmental concerns, she adds. "The current legislation doesn't include strong legal mandates for environmental protection. If one of the results of offshore fish farming could be harm to marine fisheries, it just doesn't make sense to pursue offshore farming."

--Flora Lichtman

Los Angeles' Combat High School

"A fight between rival groups of black and Latino students at Locke High School quickly escalated into a campus-wide melee Friday, with as many as 600 students brawling until police restored calm with billy clubs.

The troubled campus in South Los Angeles was locked down after the fight broke out at 12:55 p.m., as students returned from lunch to their fifth-period classes. Overwhelmed school officials called Los Angeles police for help, but students and faculty said it took about half an hour before dozens of officers, many in riot gear, restored order.

"The kids were crazy, running from place to place, jumping on other kids," said Reggie Smith, the school's band director, who said he ran to pull his students from the melee. "Some of my kids were crying because they were walking to class with friends and they got jumped."

Los Angeles Unified School District police said that there are only two officers assigned to Locke but that the school police force brought in about 60 officers after receiving word of the brawl. The Los Angeles Police Department also dispatched more than a dozen patrol cars and about 50 officers.

Susan Cox, an LAUSD spokeswoman, said police arrested four people -- three students for fighting and one non-student for illegal possession of a knife. Four students were treated in the school nurse's office for minor injuries.

The campus at 111th and San Pedro streets has long been one of the city's most troubled. This school year has been particularly difficult, with near-daily fights -- albeit on a much smaller scale -- during much of the fall and winter. Locke is about to be reorganized as a cluster of charter schools run by Green Dot Public Schools, which will take over in July, and some faculty and staff have accused the district of letting the campus drift in its final year as a traditional public school.

"Morale has really dropped because they don't feel like they have everybody behind them," cheer leading coach Marlo Jenkins said recently. "There are just fights upon fights upon fights now."

Faculty members and Green Dot complained that L.A. Unified nearly halved its funding for non-police security aides at the start of the year. The school has been especially plagued by tagging crews -- the school employs two full-time workers just to paint over graffiti, said Green Dot's Kelly Hurley, who is managing the transition.

Faculty members also complained repeatedly about in-school ditching and a massive tardiness problem. Finally, the district restored some of the trimmed security, faculty said, and also dispatched an additional administrator to help restore order. Until then, the district had relied on Principal Travis Kiel, who'd been brought back from retirement. In recent weeks, students and teachers have reported improved conditions -- less ditching, a little less graffiti.

But then came Friday's melee, which students and teachers said was by far the worst of the year, perhaps the worst in years.

Joseph Sherlock, a senior, 17, who has been at Locke for four years, called it "my first actual encounter with a riot." He added: "I've seen fights, and I've seen fights between black and brown, but I've never seen anything like this."

Sherlock, who said he saw police use pepper spray during the melee, said tensions between African American and Latino students have not been a serious problem at the school. With an enrollment of 2,600, Locke is 65% Latino and 35% African American.

"It's not the way it's portrayed in the media; that's not what it's like at all," said Sherlock, who is black. Another black student, Ronald White, said African American and Latino students commonly divide along ethnic lines but aren't necessarily hostile. "Everybody usually just sticks to themselves," he said.

White, a 17-year-old senior, said he had just stepped from a main building into the school's grassy quad when he was met with a scene of chaos.

Hundreds of students were outside, and from what he could see, "Most people was fighting." Eventually, police began to swarm onto the campus, and White said the students began fighting the officers, who responded with their batons.

"I was in the corner, just watching," he said. "I saw a girl get hit by the police and she went down."

Senior Victor Wong, 18, said the brawl grew out of a fight two days earlier between a Latino student and an African American student. Wong said Latino students who are friends of his asked him to participate in a fight planned for Friday that was to pit 10 Latino students against 10 African American students.

"It was a crew-on-crew thing," he said, referring to graffiti gangs. "They asked for my help, but I'm graduating," he said. "I'm done with all that."

Wong said the two groups of instigators met as planned at the school's handball courts, and "all of them started going at it." Within seconds, he said, the fight escalated beyond the original two groups, and people began running throughout the campus fighting.

"They would finish one place and run to another corner and fight," he said.

"Security didn't know where to go," Wong added. "They'd concentrate in one spot and something would happen somewhere else. This is the worst I've seen."

Minor injuries at the scene were treated by the school nurse and L.A. Fire Department personnel. No one required hospitalization, the school district said. There were, however, some descriptions of students being badly beaten.

Wong said he saw one student beaten unconscious on a handball court. Sherlock said he saw one Latino student walking along Saint Street, the road that bisects the campus, when he was surrounded by a large group of black students who began hitting and kicking him. "He was bleeding real bad," Sherlock said. "When they stood him up, he kind of collapsed back down."

Sherlock, who is a member of the Black Student Union and the school's new House of Representatives, which was formed to help guide the transition from traditional school to charter, added that he had tried to stop the fighting, but to little effect. After securing order, authorities rounded up the students who hadn't returned to class and segregated them by race, holding Latinos in the boys gym and African American students in Hobbs Hall, the school's multipurpose room.

Beginning at 2 p.m., school officials began releasing students in small groups to go home. The school remained on lock down until the last group had left about 3:15 p.m.

LAUSD's Cox said that there would be an enhanced police presence at Locke during school hours next week and that the district would send human relations staff to the school to talk to students.

In recent years, melees have broken out periodically at many campuses with a black and Latino presence, including in Los Angeles, Lyn wood and Compton. There have been fights between Latinos and Armenians in other areas that led to campus lock downs.

In nearly all cases, no serious injuries have resulted, but the incidents have frightened students and parents, marred the reputation of schools and hindered the learning of students who frequently already face substantial academic challenges.

"How do you build anything here when something happens and adds to the negativity?" asked band leader Smith.

Higher education

Higher education, also called tertiary, third stage or post secondary education, is the non-compulsory educational level following the completion of a school providing a secondary education, such as a high school, secondary school, or gymnasium. Tertiary education is normally taken to include undergraduate and postgraduate education, as well as vocational education and training. Colleges and universities are the main institutions that provide tertiary education. Collectively, these are sometimes known as tertiary institutions.Tertiary education generally results in the receipt of certificates, diplomas, or academic degrees.

Higher education includes teaching, research and social services activities of universities, and within the realm of teaching, it includes both the undergraduate level (sometimes referred to as tertiary education) and the graduate (or postgraduate) level (sometimes referred to as graduate school). Higher education in that country generally involves work towards a degree-level or foundation degree qualification. In most developed countries a high proportion of the population (up to 50%) now enter higher education at some time in their lives. Higher education is therefore very important to national economies, both as a significant industry in its own right, and as a source of trained and educated personnel for the rest of the economy.

Adult education

Lifelong, or adult, education has become widespread in many countries.

However, education is still seen by many as something aimed at children, and adult education is often branded as adult learning or lifelong learning. Adult education takes on many forms, from formal class-based learning to self-directed learning. Lending libraries provide inexpensive informal access to books and other self-instructional materials. The rise in computer ownership and internet access has given both adults and children greater access to both formal and informal education. In Scandinavia a unique approach to learning termed folkbildning has long been recognised as contributing to adult education through the use of learning circles. Mode of Education. 1-formal education, 2-informal education , 3-Non formal education.

Formal Education:- the hierarchically structured, chronologically graded education system, running from primary school through the university and including, in addition to general academic studies, a variety of specialized programs and institutions for full time technical and professional training.

Informal Education:- The truly lifelong process whereby every individual acquires attitude, values, skills and knowledge from daily experience and the educative influences and resources in his or her environment from family and neighbors, from work and play, from the market place the library and the mass media.

Non-Formal Education

any organized educational activity outside the established formal system- whether operating separately or as an important feature of some broader activity that is intended to serve identifiable learning clienteles and learning objectives.

Alternative education

Alternative education, also known as non-traditional education or educational alternative (for all age groups and levels of education). This may include both forms of education designed for students with special needs (ranging from teenage pregnancy to intellectual disability) and forms of education designed for a general audience which employ alternative educational philosophies and/or methods. Alternatives of the latter type are often the result of , is a broad term which may be used to refer to all forms of education outside of traditional educationeducation reform and are rooted in various philosophies dissatisfied with certain aspects of that are commonly fundamentally different from those of traditional compulsory education. While some have strong political, scholarly, or philosophical orientations, others are more informal associations of teachers and studentstraditional education. These alternatives, which include charter schools, alternative schools, independent schools, and home-based learning vary widely, but often emphasize the value of small class size, close relationships between students and teachers, and a sense of community

20 Tips to Promote Positive Self-Esteem

Author: Richard Lavoie, M.A., M.Ed.

1. Value each child as an individual with unique strengths, needs, interests, and skills.
2. Focus on the child's strengths. Emphasize and celebrate his "islands of competence."
3. Reject the child's behavior, but never reject the child. Use affectionate terms and nicknames when scolding ("Your room is a mess, honey. Now turn off the TV and make your bed.").
4. Remember that sincere interest can be more effective and meaningful than praise. Demonstrate a genuine interest in her activities, hobbies, etc.
5. Establish realistic, achievable goals for your child. Anticipate success.
6. Avoid using sarcasm with kids; children with language problems often misinterpret it.
7. When discussing an issue or a problem, avoid bringing up past difficulties.
8. Never compare one child to another.
9. Help the child develop decision-making and problem-solving skills.
10. Understand that mistakes are an inevitable (and valuable) part of any learning experience. Use mistakes as an opportunity to teach and assist.
11. Divide large tasks into smaller, manageable ones. This will ensure success, mastery, and retention.
12. Maintain a file of his academic work. Use this to demonstrate his progress and development when he is feeling down.
13. Encourage him to maintain "collections" (e.g., baseball cards, stamps, rocks, etc.). This allows him to be the resident expert on a topic.
14. If she does not participate in team sports, promote individual sports (e.g., skiing, golf, swimming). This will provide opportunities for success, exercise, and peer interaction.
15. Communicate your confidence in the child and in her future.
16. Permit and encourage the child to follow the normal fads of his peer group (e.g., clothing, music). This will enhance his acceptance at school and in the community.
17. Emphasize the positive aspects of her behavior or performance, even if the task was not completely successful. Reward direction, not perfection.
18. Anticipate that the child will have plateaus, failures, backslides, setbacks, and regressions. Support and encourage him at these times. Kids need love most when they deserve it least!
19. Look for opportunities to offer him choices to allow him to practice decision-making skills.
20. Never communicate disappointment to your child. The disappointment of an adult may be too great a burden for a child to carry.

Remember:

• Your child's self-esteem will be determined by the conditional acceptance that he receives from others - and the unconditional acceptance that he receives from you. Your child's self-esteem will be determined by success and progress in four areas:
  • Social (acceptance, friendships)
  • Competence (in a skill area)
  • Physical (clothing, attractiveness)
  • Character (effort, generosity, etc.)