1 . Early Childhood Education

Early childhood education is the formal teaching and care of young children. It primarily focuses on learning through playing to encourage children’s different kinds of development.     1    

Studies with Head Start programs throughout the United States have shown some evidence that there are quite a few advantages to early childhood education, which can produce significant gains in children’s learning and development. Compared with a child who does not attend pre-school, children completing their early education programs are found to be better at math and reading skills. They are excited to learn and have the tools to do so.     2     These children are more competent in their pre-school, kindergarten and school-age years, and they are usually reported as “friendlier” by parents and the children’s peers.

    3     In studies with matched control groups, more students who had early schooling experiences were employed at the age of 19, fewer were on welfare, and fewer were involved with the criminal activity. What’s more, some studies show that children attending pre-school are more likely to graduate and have higher education, and be well integrated as an adult.

Early childhood education gives most children a jump-start on education for their kindergarten and primary school years. It is clear that early childhood education do a lot of good to children.     4     If early childhood education is less effective, perhaps the best model is finding strategies for allowing a parent to stay home with his or her child for at least the first two to three years. Also important is considering a child’s own personality. Individual differences in children mean that not all children will get equal benefits from early childhood education.

3 . Will we ever fully be ready to remember 2020? The masks. The quarantines. Racial injustice. So much death.

Assembled from video footage shot by people from around the world on July 25 of last year, “Life in a Day” is a well-meaning but unnecessary crowdsourced documentary, a companion piece to a 2011 version of the same name, that thinks we’re ready.

The film gets off to an obvious start: with a symphony of child birth. Mostly, though, the breezy snippets capture everyday mundanities (世俗之事) that include a vast range of human experiences and multicultural behavior, bringing together beauty and darkness, birth and death.     1     What this video portrait doesn’t do is focus enough on its subjects to allow for any true investment in their lives.

Though participants’ experiences vary, their clips are cut together into montages (蒙太奇) to create a sense of pandemic-era interrelational connection.     2     The result is a tediously formatted stream of categorized clips that might as well fall into hash tagged classifications: Environmental Conservation, Zoom Life, Class of 2020, Love Is Love and You Weren’t the Only One Cooking All the Time.

The film indicates that the director Kevin Macdonald and the producer Ridley Scott received 324, 000 videos submitted from 192 countries for this project. That’s a lot of videos.     3     I know his pursuit is meant to be an unusual break from other cinematic portraits. But over and over in a film about 2020? When a young Black woman is only briefly shown lamenting the death of two of her brothers who died while in police custody? I want her story.

“Life in a Day” seeks to be a time capsule during a period of great racial divide and pandemic distress.     4     As it stands, it hasn’t captured anything that 90 minutes of TikTok surfing can’t.

4 . Fifteen per cent of the world’s population — at least one billion people — have some form of disability, whether present at birth or acquired later in life. Nearly 240 million of them are children.

    1    . They live in every community, and are born with or acquire distinct impairments that, in relation to their surroundings, lead to functional difficulties — like seeing, walking, communicating, caring for oneself or making friends.

The extent to which children with disabilities are able to function, participate in society and lead fulfilling lives depends on the extent to which they are accommodated and included. Yet, children with disabilities are among the most marginalized (边缘化的) people in every society.

    2    . For example, buildings, transportation, toilets and playgrounds that cannot be accessed by wheelchair users; textbooks unavailable in Braille (盲文), or public health announcements delivered without sign language interpretation.

Each of these is rooted in stigma (污名) and discrimination that reflect negative perceptions of disability associated with ableism (体能歧视).

Some children with disabilities face other forms of discrimination that compound (加剧) their deprivation (匮乏).     3    . Children with severe or multiple disabilities also tend to have a particularly hard time getting their needs met.

    4    . UNICEF works with partners to promote accessible learning spaces and materials. More importantly, it works with teachers and school administrations to promote inclusive attitudes and a mindset of support for all children. In 2020, UNICEF worked in 115 countries to strengthen laws, policies and plans to make sure all children and adolescents can enjoy their right to education on an equal basis with their peers.

We promote the accessibility of content, communication channels and platforms, and build strong partnerships with organizations of people with disabilities. Children and adolescents with disabilities are the experts on their own experiences: We amplify their voices and enhance their ability to claim their rights.

6 . Pay No Mind: People Admit to Driving, Texting, Drinking During Telehealth Visits

A recent study of 1,000 Americans revealed people are quite distracted during their virtual doctors and therapy appointments.

Hello, people of the technologically advanced world. Remember how we all hoped technology would make us better, more evolved? How’s that going for us lately? Great, I suspect — because look at how far we have come!     1    

The only problem is that we all seem to be having a tough time concentrating. On Wednesday, a survey from a health company found people texting, driving, watching TV, playing video games and even drinking during telehealth visits.

The study was small, surveying only 1,000 Americans over the age of 18 — but people admitted to exercising (18%), scrolling through social media (21%) and even smoking (11%) during health visits.     2     When Forbes expanded on the study through case studies and doctors’ interviews, they found out it’s not even just patients-it’s doctors, too.

Confused? Well, let’s talk it through…

Who decided we should be sober during health visits anyway?

To be fair, I have always thought that conversations about fungal infections, or having to strip off completely naked in front of a complete stranger, are things best done drunk. But if you really want to take your health seriously, perhaps it’s better to start with a clear mind.

Oh, so you mean there are downsides to visiting the doctors from the comfort of our homes?

    3    

Get used to it! Now people are pretty good in the art of multitasking.

Yes. And for us to truly move forward we must constantly disrupt! Or be disrupted! By, er…drinking beers. At least some people were exercising during their health visits, I suppose.

Are there any dangerous behaviors which have been reported?

Some have admitted to driving during their health appointments. In fact, one doctor told Forbes that she has had to ask patients to pull over on to the side of the road during their appointments so that they can concentrate.

    4     Doctors have said that they are also finding it hard to concentrate in this new reality, where the buzzing of our phones, the allure of the television, or the unexpected knock on the door seem to be teaming up against us to steal our attention while at work.

Perhaps your life is not that interesting-your therapist might be busy doing more important things, like watching TV series.

8 . Too clever to be wise

I am not the calm, sensible person that I hope to be. It didn’t take much to discover this-just my answers to a couple of quick questions.

Here is the first: How many pairs did Moses take on the ark(方舟)? And the second: Jack is looking at Anne but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

It took me no seconds at all to answer the first: I couldn’t, but I thought the Bible would tell me. What I did not see, because I was too busy looking at the end of the question and not the premise(前提), was that the answer is zero. Moses was not busy building any arks; that was Noah.

As for Anne, George and Jack, I quickly concluded we could not know, because we had not been told the status of Anne.     1     If I had stopped to draw two diagrams of Jack, Anne and George looking at one another, I would have seen that no matter whether Anne was married, a married person was indeed looking at an unmarried one.

This is what the science writer David Robson has called “the intelligence trap”-our tendency to assume that general intelligence leads to good thinking. Actually, it doesn’t. It doesn’t protect us from cognitive biases(认知偏误)like the ones I have just demonstrated.     2     They seldom question their assumptions, learn from their mistakes, take advice or change their decisions when discovering new facts. Instead, they use their brainpower to skillfully defend their original positions.

    3    In health, 15% of all hospital diagnoses are wrong, often because they are made quickly and rarely rethought. In business, a reluctance to think through consequences, question optimism or challenge decisions leads to countless failures and some major disasters. Robson’s term for these failures is “functional stupidity”. These errors could be largely avoided if we could approach problems differently.

The intelligence trap is largely a cultural phenomenon. Western culture highly values quick decisions, dominant leadership and simple answers. From school onwards, they are taught to argue their case convincingly, persuade others to follow.     4    

The key insight is our pressing need to use intellectual humility, open-mindedness, curiosity and wide consultation, rather than the blind stubbornness and grandstanding(哗众取宠)that so often passes for judgement. It has never been more necessary to recognize and release ourselves from the intelligence trap.

10 . High school cheating on the rise

According to a recent survey, 61% of American high school students have admitted to cheating in exams at least once, an increase of 5% over last year. It can be argued such a response may not mean much. After all, most students have been faced with the temptation to peek at a neighbour’s test paper. And students can be hard on themselves in judging such behaviour.

More and more states are requiring students to pass academic tests in order to receive their high school diplomas. And many educators fear that an increase in the use of state exams will lead to a corresponding rise in cheating.

Cheating is now considered to be a major problem in colleges and universities. Several professors say they’ve dropped the traditional term paper requirement because many students buy prewritten term papers, and they can’t track down all the cheaters any more.

Colleges and universities across the nation have decided to do more than talk about the students’ cheating. For instance, the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland launched a campaign to stop one form of cheating. Students are required to produce an ID card with an attached photo so as to catch “ringers”, students who take tests for other students.

The majority of students at the University of Maryland applauded the campaign. The campus newspaper editorial said, “Like police arresting speeders, the intent is not to catch everyone, but rather to catch enough to spread the word.”