A Hen and her Little Boy Friend

I love this video.  It's a little boy opening his arms to a chicken, and it comes to him and accepts a warm hug.  Pretty amazing, and a beautiful thing to see. How lucky this hen is. Poultry rarely gets anything close to kindness from humans   How many billions of these docile birds are killed and turned into McNuggets and drumsticks every year.  They have been reduced to commodities on a balance sheet, and their lives are an endless, horrific cruelty in the name of cost savings and profit.

H.G. Wells wrote a book called, The Time Machine. In it, a 19th century man created a machine that carried him into a distant future, where he found humans living a seemingly idyllic life. Only later did he learn the dominant species were a grotesque deviation of humanoid called Morlocks, who raised humans to live only long enough to mature, whereupon they were killed and eaten.  At least in that instance, the Morlocks  allowed their human food stock a few years of cruelty-free existence.  Animals raised for human consumption these days get nothing like that. Chickens are jammed in cages from the time they hatch. Their feet become infected from standing on wire mesh all day, every day. Their beaks are cut off to prevent them from pecking each other, thus damaging their commoditized flesh.  It diminishes us as humans to treat other creatures this way.

The boy in this video has been taught to express empathy to his feathered friends, and they in turn have learned to trust him. Yes, it's idealistic, but kindness is always a wonderful thing to witness.

Here is the video of a hen accepting some love from a little boy...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxo1mZeY68&feature=youtu.be

In 17 States, More than Half the School Kids Are Poor

Think that's astonishing? Check out the map below.  It's amazing. All but a handful of states have  more than 40% of students living in households with incomes below 185% of the poverty level.  That's the official definition of what is considered poor in this country.  It's shameful, and so much of it is due to political neglect.  In Europe, almost no kids in school are considered poor. 

I was shocked but not surprised when I saw the report below.

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In 17 U.S. states, the majority of public school students are low-income. But the poverty isn’t distributed evenly across the country, according to a new report from Southern Education Foundation. Thirteen of the states are in the South, and the other four are in the West.

The situation is dire. Researchers measure the landscape by the numbers of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch, a rough proxy for gauging poverty. Students are eligible for free or reduced meals if their family household income is 185 percent beneath the poverty threshold. In 2011, a student from a single-parent home with an annual income of $26,956 or less would qualify for free or reduced lunch. In Mississippi, 71 percent of public school students qualify for free and reduced lunch. In New Mexico it’s 68 percent; in California 54; in Texas it’s 50 percent.
The recession that began in 2008 certainly exacerbated trends, but childhood poverty is a problem much older than the recession. Between 2001 and 2011, the numbers of children in public schools who classified as low-income grew 32 percent, or by some 5.7 million kids. As a result, by 2011 low-income students made up nearly half of all public school students.
While 30 percent of white students attend schools where the majority of students are low-income, 68 percent of Latino students attend schools classified as such. And 72 percent of black public school students go to schools where the majority of students are low-income.

The situation has serious implications for the educational futures of the nation’s youth, especially as budget-crisis-stricken cities and states are cutting first and deepest from their public schools.

From colorlines.com
Reporter - Julie Anne Hing

Here is a link to the full report...   http://www.southerneducation.org/Programs/P-12-Program/Early-Ed/NewMajority.aspx

A Hero's Journey - Craig Kielburger

Years ago, I remember seeing a piece on 60 Minutes about a 12 year old Canadian boy, who started Kids Save the Children, a non-profit focused on helping children in labor sweatshops in India, Pakistan, and other lesser developed countries.  The heroic 12 year old's name was Craig Kielburger.  After raising money for his cause, young Mr. Kielburger went overseas and saw first hand some of the sweatshops that brutally exploited children.  With a little help, he then wrote a book about his experience and his passion to make a difference.

Free the Children is still going strong. Craig Kielburger is now 31 years old, but his life remains focused on rescuing and elevating exploited children in the world's poorest places. Recently, 60 Minutes did another profile piece on Kielburger and what has become his life's work. Free the Children is now a $25 million dollar non-profit enterprise with 90% of its annual budget going directly to its activist work.

I admire Craig Kielbuger. He found his purpose at a very young age and he has remained with it ever since.

Here is a link to the Free the Children webpage...  http://www.freethechildren.com/about-us/our-story/

Here is a link to the recent 60 Minutes piee on Craig Kielburger...  http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50135739n

What Happens When You Give Uneducated Ethiopian Kids a Tablet PC?

The short answer: remarkable things.   

The following piece tells the story.  Imagine a child of five who's never seen a written word or operated a switch suddenly coming into possession of a tablet PC designed to  teach and inspire illiterate kids.  It's a beautiful story in so many ways, and it really happened recently in Ethiopia, an African nation riven with poverty and illiteracy.

I pulled the following piece off the Dvice page on the internet.  www.dvice.com

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Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction


by Evan Ackerman,  10/30/2012

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they'll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.
The One Laptop Per Child Project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell "neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.
Rather than give out laptops (they're actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, "hey kids, here's this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!"
Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren't unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you're going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?

 

 

But that's not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here's how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference last week:

"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."

This experiment began earlier this year, and what OLPC really want to see is whether these kids can learn to read and write in English. Around the world, there are something like 100,000,000 kids who don't even make it to first grade, simply because there are not only no schools, but very few literate adults, and if it turns out that for the cost of a tablet all of these kids can simply teach themselves, it has huge implications for education. And it goes beyond the kids, too, since previous OLPC studies have shown that kids will use their computers to teach their parents to read and write as well, which is incredibly amazing and awesome.
If this all reminds you of a certain science fiction book by a certain well-known author, it's not a coincidence: Nell's Primer in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age was a direct inspiration for much of the OLPC teaching software, which itself is named Nell. Here's an example of how Nell uses an evolving, personalized narrative to help kids learn to learn without beating them over the head with standardized lessons and traditional teaching methods:

Miles from the nearest school, a young Ethiopian girl named Rahel turns on her new tablet computer. The solar powered machine speaks to her: "Hello! Would you like to hear a story?"
She nods and listens to a story about a princess. Later, when the girl has learned a little more, she will tell the machine that the princess is named "Rahel" like she is and that she likes to wear blue--but for now the green book draws pictures of the unnamed Princess for her and asks her to trace shapes on the screen. "R is for Run. Can you trace the R?" As she traces the R, it comes to life and gallops across the screen. "Run starts with R. Roger the R runs across the Red Rug. Roger has a dog named Rover." Rover barks: "Ruff! Ruff!" The Princess asks, "Can you find something Red?" and Rahel uses the camera to photograph a berry on a nearby bush. "Good work! I see a little red here. Can you find something big and red?"
As Rahel grows, the book asks her to trace not just letters, but whole words. The book's responses are written on the screen as it speaks them, and eventually she doesn't need to leave the sound on all the time. Soon Rahel can write complete sentences in her special book, and sometimes the Princess will respond to them. New stories teach her about music (she unlocks a dungeon door by playing certain tunes) and programming with blocks (Princess Rahel helps a not very-bright turtle to draw different shapes).
Rahel writes her own stories about the Princess, which she shares with her friends. The book tells her that she is very good at music, and her lessons begin to encourage her to invent silly songs about what she's learning. An older Rahel learns that the block language she used to talk with the turtle is also used to write all the software running inside her special book. Rahel uses the blocks to write a new sort of rhythm game. Her younger brother has just received his own green book, and Rahel writes him a story which uses her rhythm game to help him learn to count.

Read more about Nell in this paper, and if you haven't read The Diamond Age, do so at once.
Via MIT

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Here is a link to the One Laptop Per Child Project     http://one.laptop.org/

 

 

 

 

 

Never Seconds

In Scotland in a small town named Lochgilphead, a nine year old school girl from named Martha Payne took an interest in the lunches served at her school.  She began photographing them and posting the photos along with a rating on a blog she created called 'Never Seconds'.  She soon found many other young students from other countries sending in photos and reports about what they were eating at their school lunches. Her blog became such a sensation that one day the authorities at her school called her in to the 'office',  and told her she could no longer photograph her school lunches and write about them. 

Martha Payne

Martha reported to her blog followers that she was being shut down.  What followed was a minor firestorm, with internet followers from around the world coming to Martha's defense.  The school board backtracked and gave their blessing to Martha to resume her daily ritual of photographing and reporting on her meals at school. 

Now Martha's blog is largely focused on the stories of students and school lunches around the world.   Martha has a donation link on her page to a group called Mary's Meals that is raising money to build kitchens at schools in places like Malawi in Africa.  Martha's effort has raised a lot of money for Mary's Meals.

Martha Payne and her father have co-authored a book about her experience.  Next, they will travel to Malawi to visit students there who were touched by her blog.


Here is a story from the U.K. Guardian newspaper about Martha's story...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/jun/16/martha-payne-never-seconds-blog-climbdown


Here is the link to Martha Payne's Never Seconds webpage...
http://neverseconds.blogspot.com

I love stories like this.  They give me hope...

Twelve Year Old Takes Bankers to the Woodshed

Just saw this video on the net.  It's 12 year old Victoria Grant speaking to a gathering of the Public Banking Association of America.  She makes a compelling case that bankers, in collusion with government regulators, need to be put back under a strict regulatory regimen.   Pretty powerful stuff, particularly when it comes from a child.

Here is the link to Victoria's presentation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx5Sc3vWefE&feature=youtu.be