Showing posts from March, 2015

Day 290: Taking Education Reform a Step Further

I read this article today:
Goodbye, math and history: Finland wants to abandon teaching subjects at school  Finland already has one of the best school education systems. It always ranks near the top in mathematics, reading, and science in the prestigious PISA rankings (the 2012 list, pdf) by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Teachers in other countries flock to its schools to learn from a country that is routinely praised as just a really, really wonderful place to live.  But the country is not resting on its laurels. Finland is considering its most radical overhaul of basic education yet—abandoning teaching by subject for teaching by phenomenon. Traditional lessons such as English Literature and Physics are already being phased out among 16-year-olds in schools in Helsinki. Instead, the Finns are teaching phenomena—such as the European Union, which encompasses learning languages, history, politics, and geography. No more of an hour of history followed by an h…

Day 289: Parenting Questions and the Destiny of Family

Sitting in a restaurant today, a family sat down in the booth behind me. I had my back turned to them but I could hear a mother, a father, and two young boys. From what I could tell the boys were around 4 or 5, and there was also a young girl. The parents sounded like they were maybe in their early thirties. The two boys were from the get-go as the family sat down, what we would typically describe as 'rowdy', like asking lots of questions and climbing around and repeating words and sentences. The mother kept saying things like 'NO, don't go over there!' 'Come back here!' 'Sit down!' 'Stop doing that!' 'Knock it off!' And as she was speaking I could hear her teeth clenching and you could hear the frustration in her voice - you could hear the reactions of impatience and anger as the boys were obviously 'behaving' in a way that she didn't want - she was having a hard time 'controlling them'. So, the father returned …

Day 288: The Origin of Anger in My Life Part 1: Trapped in a Memory, Trapped in Survival

I made this picture because it illustrates how I had experienced a point that I had accepted and allowed myself to get locked into, and which over the last couple of years I experienced the consequences of. The point of being trapped in a memory! In recent weeks I realized and saw how I had specifically ended up locking myself into a survival mode, projecting memories into the future, thinking and believing I am seeing my actual future as what I am supposed to accomplish and experience as my 'purpose' in this life. Within this I manifested myself into an inner struggle between the fear of losing the future I believed was my purpose -- thus in essence 'failing my life / my purpose', and the deep desire and hope of achieving this projected future / purpose.
This survival mode within being trapped in a memory / memories ended up extensively influencing my starting point within how I viewed, experienced, and approached the primary points I am walking with and creating / d…

Day 287: Communication: Software Updates for Organic Robots

An interesting realization opened up the other day as my agreement partner and I were talking about our finances. First some context: My partner is in charge of our budgeting because she is more effective naturally with math and creating management systems. We share a joint checking account and generally the way we've been dealing with decision making regarding making purchases individually is that most of the time I'll let her know when there's something of moderate to high cost I need to buy, and most of the time she'll keep me updated about our available funds in relation to the expenses and bills we need to cover in a particular period, and when to hold off on buying things. We have a checking account and also a few credit cards with my partner managing our use of credit cards in a way where we make sure our monthly payments don't exceed what we can afford.

So now that you have some context, an interesting thing happened the other day when I bought a couple of…