Noteworthy: Sandwich (Bag) Art

SANDWICH ART – WHEN A FATHER DRAWS ON THE SANDWICHES FOR HIS SON, EVERY DAY SINCE 2008

Check it out:
http://www.ufunk.net/en/insolite/sandwich-art/

College Expenses - and Teaching as a Profession

Some interesting thoughts from a VP of finance at a top college:

Why College Costs So Much

As high-school seniors around the country open their mailboxes looking for thick envelopes from colleges and universities, their parents are undoubtedly thinking, "Why does college cost so damn much?"—particularly if those children are headed to elite private institutions. Based on my experience as the vice president for finance and administration at a prominent college in the early 2000s, I suggest that the answer is simple: Top private institutions charge what they do because a substantial number of people will pay it.

Setting College Costs

... at the beginning of my tenure as an elite school's chief financial officer, I was surprised to learn from my colleagues that tuition and fees were not set by analyzing budget projections. Instead they were set by looking at a chart of the prior year's tuition charges at comparable schools and then trying to predict their increases for the next year. The goal was to maintain the college's position in the pecking order of total charges. I learned that the most prestigious and desirable institutions have a good deal of information about the shape of the demand curve for the families seeking to obtain elite higher education for their offspring. These schools have the capacity to estimate with some precision how many applicants will go elsewhere for each additional dollar they charge in tuition and fees. Each sets its tuition so as to produce a targeted "yield"—the percentage of accepted students who actually enroll there. If in any year we over- or under-estimated the price changes made by the other schools, and we had moved up or down in rank, we corrected the following year by raising or lowering tuition by more or less to compensate. We essentially followed the price leadership of the wealthiest, most prestigious institutions.

Teaching: A Good Idea?

The results of this market pricing power are straightforward. First, and most significantly—given that 60% to 75% of college costs go to salary and benefits—is handsome compensation for senior faculty and administrators. In the not-so-distant past, the stereotypical scholar was a tweedy professor in a worn sports coat who did underpaid but satisfying work. Today, most junior faculty continue to receive relatively low pay. But senior, tenured faculty at elite schools are firmly entrenched in the well-compensated professional class (top salaries at elite schools often exceed $150,000; and for scholars in economics, business and law schools, earnings can be substantially in excess of that) with superior benefits, such as university-subsided housing, lifetime heath care and seven-figure retirement accounts. Once tenure has been achieved, generally after less than ten years of work, top college teachers face no professional risk and, by and large, teach three or fewer courses a semester. Also, college faculty members usually receive free or highly subsidized higher education for their children—making them even less sensitive to the burden that college tuition and fees impose on other families.

The Wall Street Journal reports:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304017404575165730979629178.html

Parenting: 3 Things NOT to do for your Child

This is an interesting article that is a good topic of conversation.  From the article's ratings, many people don't agree -- but nevertheless, these are issues parents should think about:



As parents, we only want the best for our children. But sometimes our judgment is clouded, and our actions can actually impede our kids' progress. By nature, we want to see our children succeed, even if it means giving them a gentle nudge. Unfortunately for some parents, that nudge often turns into a huge push, and before we know it, we're actually doing things for our children that they should be doing for themselves.


Read more here:
http://www.mydailymoment.com/moms/parenting/3_things_you_should_never_do_for_your_kids.php?page=1

Steve Carrell's Words of Wisdom for Princeton Grads

Be kind, make someone laugh and don't take yourself too seriously, Carell told Princeton seniors.

In his Class Day address, actor and comedian Steve Carell gave the graduating seniors a lighthearted scolding for relying too heavily on technologies like texting and tweeting in favor of personal interactions. "You are young," he told the students. "And because of that, you are wrong." 

When comedian Steve Carell went to college, girls rejected him in person.

Carell was once on track to attend law school. But the 1984 Denison University graduate became stumped while filling out his application to Stanford Law School. The essay question read:  "Why do you want to be an attorney?”

“I really had no idea,” Carell told Princeton’s graduating seniors. “It sounded good. My parents had worked extraordinarily hard to give me a great education, and I felt that I owed them some sort of valid career choice.

"So I sat down with my folks, and asked them what they thought, and they proceeded to give me the best advice that I had ever received, or would ever receive. Their words were profound, wise, and they completely altered the rest of my life.

“They said something like ‘blah, blah, blah, follow your dreams, blah, blah, blah.’ I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I didn’t go to law school.”

Read more here:

http://haddonfield.patch.com/articles/steve-carell-tells-princeton-seniors-dont-take-yourselves-too-seriously-c01f00b7#photo-10184501

Credits: 

Princeton University, Office of Communications, David Kelly Crow

Haddonfield Sun

Parenting: Achieving & Working Hard

One of our contacts, a sports psychologist and co-author of the "Who Will Win the Big Game?" book had a chance to interview Shannon Miller, the Gold Medal Olympic gymnast.  The interesting thing is that -- even at that high level -- she talks about:

• hard work
• focus (and getting into "the zone")
• mental toughness and not getting derailed
• performing "smart" (when you are not 100%)
• setting goals

http://whowillwinthebiggame.blogspot.com/2012/01/co-author-of-who-will-win-interviews.html

Humor and Parenting

Line of the day (from a parent on motivating children to take ownership and be responsible / proactive):

"Do you think Christopher Columbus' parents nagged him to discover America?"  

from the TV Show "The Middle."

On parenting: it's always good to keep your sense of humor!

Parenting: The Trouble with Bright Kids

Here's an excerpt from a good article at Business Week (bolding below by zRoundtable.com):

It’s not easy to live up to your fullest potential. There are so many obstacles that can get in the way: bosses that don’t appreciate what you have to offer, tedious projects that take up too much of your time, economies where job opportunities are scarce, the difficulty of juggling career, family, and personal goals.

But smart, talented people rarely realize that one of the toughest hurdles they’ll have to overcome lies within.

...

When I was a graduate student at Columbia, my mentor Carol Dweck and another student, Claudia Mueller, conducted a study looking at the effects of different kinds of praise on fifth-graders. Every student got a relatively easy first set of problems to solve and were praised for their performance. Half of them were given praise that emphasized their high ability (“You did really well. You must be really smart!”). The other half were praised instead for their strong effort (“You did really well. You must have worked really hard!”).

Next, each student was given a very difficult set of problems — so difficult, in fact, that few students got even one answer correct. All were told that this time they had “done a lot worse.” Finally, each student was given a third set of easy problems — as easy as the first set had been — in order to see how having a failure experience would affect their performance.

Dweck and Mueller found that children who were praised for their “smartness” did roughly 25% worse on the final set of problems compared to the first. They were more likely to blame their poor performance on the difficult problems to a lack of ability, and consequently they enjoyed working on the problems less and gave up on them sooner.

Children praised for the effort, on the other hand, performed roughly 25% better on the final set of problems compared to the first. They blamed their difficulty on not having tried hard enough, persisted longer on the final set of problems, and enjoyed the experience more.

Read more here:
http://www.businessweek.com/management/the-trouble-with-bright-kids-11212011.html?campaign_id=rss_topStories

How to Buy a Higher IQ

Some interesting studies on IQ, economic development (wealthy/poor countries & industrialized nations), health, etc....

A controversial 2002 book titled "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" gathered existing data on IQs to map them by country. North American and Europe looked good. Sub-Saharan Africa did not. Asia shined. Critics cried racism; there's a long history of intelligence research that blurs the divide between bigotry and investigation. In 2007, research by James Flynn published in "What is Intelligence" proved race-based arguments lacking. IQs the world over have been climbing for half a century, and they tend to jump quickly in poor countries that experience a spasm of economic growth--a phenomenon now called the Flynn Effect.

Read more: How to Buy a Higher IQ - SmartMoney.com http://www.smartmoney.com/spending/budgeting/how-to-buy-a-higher-iq-1304720009965/#ixzz1LfBLALTw

"Bring Our Children to Work" Day

Today is "Bring Our Children to Work" Day (or "Bring Our Daughters & Sons to Work Day").  Here are a few links about this special day:

http://www.daughtersandsonstowork.org/wmspage.cfm?parm1=936

http://www.ivillage.com/bring-your-child-work-day-2011/6-a-344272

If you have children and are bringing them to work -- enjoy the day.

Amy Chua & Parenting Revisited

The topic of parenting and raising children is important to all of us.  We think that much can be learned about people's ideas and thoughts -- as reflected in the thousands of comments on the Wall Street Journal article by Amy Chua.

Here's an article from Time Magazine.  Excerpt below:

Among those who are decidedly not following Chua's lead are many parents and educators in China. For educated urban Chinese parents, the trend is away from the strict traditional model and toward a more relaxed American style. Chinese authorities, meanwhile, are increasingly dissatisfied with the country's public education system, which has long been based on rote learning and memorization. They are looking to the West for inspiration — not least because they know they must produce more creative and innovative graduates to power the high-end economy they want to develop. The lesson here: depending on where you stand, there may always be an approach to child rearing that looks more appealing than the one you've got.(See TIME's special report on what makes a school great.)

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2043313-5,00.html#ixzz1Gso0mAv6

Please let us know your thoughts.

WSJ article on Amy Chua's controversial parenting ideas

This article on parenting, called, "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior" has generated a lot of buzz because everyone wants what's best for their children.  We feel that the author, Amy Chua, is trying to sell books -- and is thus being very extreme and controversial -- but because it is generating so much interest, here are some excerpts:

Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids?  And what happens when they fight back? 

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too.  

  

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html