09:36 – Greece is on tenterhooks today, awaiting the decision by the eurogroup finance ministers as to whether the long-overdue €31.2 billion aid tranche will be released. It won’t be, at least not today. Germany and other guarantors require approval by their legislatures, which is unlikely to occur for at least a few weeks. And the IMF is not likely to approve any IMF funds being disbursed until it can be sure that Greece’s debt pile is “sustainable”, whatever that means.
At a minimum, it means Greece must default yet again to reduce its outstanding debt burden. The IMF categorically refuses to take any loss on its loans to Greece, as does the ECB, as does the EC. The IMF simply can’t do so under the rules that govern it. Even if it could, its major non-European financial supporters refuse to take any loss, arguing that Europe is rich enough to pay its own damned bills. The ECB also simply can’t do so under the rules that govern it. The EC–read Germany, Holland, and Finland–simply can’t take any loss because their voters would crucify any politician who agreed to do so. So. the short answer is that no one is willing to pay. They’ve all written off Greece, and are concerned only with minimizing their own losses on what they’ve already given to Greece and with buying time until the next elections have passed.
Meanwhile, pity the poor private-sector investors. You remember them. The last time Greece defaulted, they lost 75% of the value of their investments. And now Germany, grasping at straws to put off the inevitable until Merkel can be reelected, has proposed that those same PSI folks take another 75% writedown. That’s 75% off the remaining 25%, taking their total loss over 90%. Even that is a drop in the bucket against Greece’s gigantic debt pile, but Germany (read Merkel) hopes it’ll be enough to stave off the eventual collapse until next autumn, when she must again face her voters. It sucks to be Angela.
And then there’s France, which Moody’s has just cut one notch from AAA. That leaves Fitch, a French company, the only one of the Big Three ratings agencies that still rates France AAA. These sovereign bond ratings are pure fantasy anyway. As I’ve said before, there’s not a single country in the eurozone that deserves anything higher than a junk rating. They will all default eventually, either explicitly or by the euro being inflated to a small fraction of its current value. Either way, investors in “sovereign” eurozone bonds are going to lose most or all of their investments.
I’m building science kits today.
11:19 – Barbara stopped by the library the other day to pick up some books she had on hold. One of the ones she got for me was Last to Die, the most recent of Tess Gerritsen’s Rizzoli & Isles series.
On page 58, Dr. Maura Isles is touring a rather special private school, asking questions of her tour guide, Lily. The following exchange jumped out at me:
Lily: “Professor David Pasquantonio. He teaches botany, cell biology, and organic chemistry.”
Isles: “Rather advanced subjects for high school students.”
Lily: “High school?” Lily laughed. “We start those subjects in middle school. Twelve-year-olds are a lot smarter than most people give them credit for.”
My feelings exactly. You’ll seldom get any more out of even bright students than you expect. If your expectations are low, so will be their performance. If your expectations are high, they might surprise you. No one’s told them this stuff is too hard for them.
They aren’t, of course. Nor is the US rich enough to pay our bills – the net present value of government commitments is much higher than the GDP. It’s probably higher than the total value of all assets in the US, though that’s extremely squishy.
Exactly. I’ve codified it as Furlong’s second rule: People may not live up to your expectations but people will always live down to them.
I am a firm believer in expectations as others have stated. But I also remember taking my relatively bright children (then in the pre-high school mentally gifted minors program) with me to a night class in college biology because no babysitter was available. They discovered that perhaps they didn’t know everything yet after all, which greatly improved the atmosphere at home for some time. They are successful adults now.
I’ve always believed that the key to teaching really, really bright students is to challenge them. Nearly all of them are used to being by far the brightest kid in class. Putting them in an environment where they’re surrounded by other very, very bright kids means they can’t slack off. I suspect that if you’d given your kids more than such a brief exposure and instead had immersed them in college-level science classes, they’d have done just fine.
If I were running such a class, I’d make it clear to the kids that there were two grading methods. Internally, they’d receive an A through a D based on their performance relative to the other kids in their class. And I wouldn’t hesitate to fail any kid who wasn’t trying. For external reporting purposes, they’d all get A+/5.0 grades, because even D students in such a class would be doing better work than A students in public schools.
But then I wouldn’t be interested in teaching kids outside the top 1%, and ideally the top 0.1%.
So you’re saying you aren’t interested in teaching those students who end their study of science at the Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree level? Just the students who will get doctorates?
No. I wouldn’t care if they intended to go on in college to major in a STEM subject at all. I meant the top 1% or 0.1% in terms of IQ, a disproportionate number of whom are now being homeschooled because most public schools do a poor job of teaching them.
If I could offer just one piece of advice to parents of very bright kids, it’d be to do whatever it takes to get them out of public school.
Indeed. I learned more biochemistry in Catholic high school than I did in College…
We’re working on getting Precious Princess out of the public school, probably for next year. She’s only in kindergarten, but within a couple weeks we saw it’s essentially just babysitting and a bit of socializing. She’s been reading for over a year now and is currently reading books aimed at third graders, except for the “required reading” of three-words-per-page baby books. And she’s practicing spoken and written Chinese. And writing stories, three sentences a day. (Conceded, the plots are rather banal and the action tends to involve farts and ponies.) And working on cursive writing and Chinese caligraphy. And learning piano. And learning dance, gymnastics, ice skating, and Wing Chun.
Her kindergarten teacher has told us that all of that is too advanced for her and that it’s just going to make her frustrated. However, the kid is pushing herself, driven by a desire not to fall behind her friends, who are going to private or parochial school or are being homeschooled.
Damn. I’m still working on cursive writing.
Heh. I won’t say that her handwriting is better than mine, but it’s not much worse. And if I were to follow a “How to draw a flower” video like she does, I’m not sure my flower would look any better than hers. (I was never able to draw for beans, and I’ve had a lot of breaks and dislocations and punctures in my hands in the past several decades. That doesn’t help at all.)
Given the cult of mediocrity or worse in public schools, I’d not pay much attention to anything a public school teacher said.
I failed cursive in second grade and didn’t look back… heh. Still can’t do it!
Bob’s right. Getting a college chemistry textbook from my teacher in 6th grade (11 years here in US) was challenging and I loved it because I was already bored to tears of how “magnets have two poles”, etc.
Paul Hampson makes a good point too. Fast-forward 5 years (when I got sent to the Jebs) and it turns out the smartest kid in Tiny-town, pop. <4000, wasn't as smart as he thought. Some humility might have done me good.
Oh, certainly not. I related what she said. We haven’t cut back at all on the “enrichment” activities except to allow for sickness and other things coming up. And for the most part, Li’l Miss Sweatpee* is perfectly fine with it all.
* You may assume that was a typo. You’d be wrong, but you may assume it.
The bears are back ! They are explaining why we have to have more quantitative easing to fix the previous quantitative easing (“The Bernanke Zone”):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGIvw7T0GPI
Kids—especially teens—are capable of much, much more than society will allow them to do. And most have both the time and the drive to succeed. Fortunately, when I was in school, kids were segregated according to ability. I was in the accelerated classes. One thing I noticed, was that when somebody in the class proclaimed out loud that the class was too hard (usually girls in science or math classes), within a day or two, they were gone! moved to an easier level.
I have mentioned before that if you want your kids in good schools, look for concentrations in the Jewish communities. They always force their school districts to perform. In Indianapolis, that has long been North Central, and in Boston, Newton Central. When we lived in Boston, the Newton Central drama department put on plays that were as good—sometimes better than—the Broadway shows that ‘rehearsed’ in Boston performances before moving to NYC. And I am not kidding about that.
Indy Catholic schools just announced that they are re-evaluating their objectives. They have already determined that they will head more towards being trade schools, rather than college prep schools. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. One thing my mom learned from working in the Indy Catholic school system, is that when they announce a change or closing, NOTHING will change that decision. Objecting, complaining, protesting, is futile; it has already been vetted by the hierarchy and is written in stone. This is a big change in direction for them.
Got a notice from Firefox earlier in the day to upgrade to v17. The last 2 weeks have been crazy busy, with no let-up in sight. Although I had intended to get the new Asus laptop running as my preferred video editing machine, there has not been sufficient time to get that set up. So I am still on the old Asus with much less RAM. At this moment, I have 14 Firefox windows open, with about 12 or more tabs in each instance—a couple with only one tab. Lockups of Firefox have been frustratingly many. Fortunately, using the native Firefox session manager, I just kill the process if it won’t recover, and open it again, and I am good to go for a few more hours.
However, after installing v17, I have been running for a good 3 hours with no lockups or failures. At this point, my experience has been that each major version update of Firefox is a significant improvement over the last. The incremental upgrades usually make no discernible difference, but the increases left-of-the-decimal are noticeable improvements, and this one is no exception.
I have one FF instance with 20-30 tabs, and two or three more with 5-10 tabs each and it’s been crashing a lot lately. My money is on a memory leak. I get these patchworks of crazy colours that usually won’t go away, sometimes the tab at either end becomes inaccessable. Very annoying.
Hayfever is driving me nuts at the moment.
RBT wrote:
“If I could offer just one piece of advice to parents of very bright kids, it’d be to do whatever it takes to get them out of public school.”
My siblings and I went to a state school, and did okay. Well, *I* did okay.
My sister’s kids all went to a state school where you either had to live in its district or be really smart, or have had a parent or older sibling that went there. They also did okay. Two are private school teachers, one is a structural engineer and the other is, well, diplomacy forbids. She’s the smartest of the four but is 26 and has no job. That’s one of the reasons I’m a bit skeptical about IQ as the only predictive measure of life outcomes.
To me, it doesn’t matter whether a kid goes to a public or private school, or is homeschooled. If everyone has the right attitude it’ll turn out okay.
OFD wrote:
“Damn. I’m still working on cursive writing.”
My father had very untidy handwriting until he was about 40, then did a course in cursive writing. He put in the effort and it paid off. So you always have a chance.
Rod Schaffter wrote:
“Indeed. I learned more biochemistry in Catholic high school than I did in College…”
I would have failed Year 12 chemistry if I and two of the other boys in our class hadn’t asked the chemistry master for a new teacher. The guy we started the year with probably knew a lot of chemistry but had no control at all, and we just drifted. His replacement, Peter Badcock, drilled us really hard. I didn’t do chemistry beyond first year university level but I still remember the stuff he drilled into us in 1975. He was a good pal of my brother and told him he couldn’t believe I’d passed his subject.
Here are some fun-loving phony Palestinians enjoying a little motorcycle ride through the city:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2235635/Gaza-conflict-Egyptian-president-says-peace-Gaza-imminent-predicts-lasting-ceasefire-begin-tomorrow.html
And no doubt not far away some Israeli soldiers or settlers are kicking a child to death or something for throwing pebbles at them.
A pox on them all.
It appears that your Search Box (top right hand corner) only searches YOUR posts but not the comments. Is this by design, or can something be done about this?
Or alternatively, could one maybe search for all the comments by a specific commenter?
I was trying to find the post where SteveF mentioned the tires……
Thanx
I have no idea if this is the case, and if so whether there’s anything that can be done to fix it. I’ve never used the search box on my page. I continue to use google, which does index everything.
bossbovan: My first suggestion was at http://www.ttgnet.com/journal/2012/11/19/monday-19-november-2012/#comment-14297 with further thoughts at http://www.ttgnet.com/journal/2012/11/22/thursday-22-november-2012/#comment-14357