godarderik

The Midwest also lacks the intellectual vibrancy that a place like Boston does. It just seems to me that there are overwhelming concentration of smart, ambitious people from the coasts compared to those from the Midwest.

Personally, I love it here in Boston, way more than I do at home. Ohio was a good, safe place to grow up, and I imagine that it’s a great place to raise a family. However, I couldn’t imagine spending any more of my life there than I already have without dying from boredom or a creeping sense of mediocrity.

Here are the first ten pages, I can post more if anyone wants me to.

We do have one program that allows students to graduate early or earn a masters degree in four years. Most people here have enough AP credit to do so, yet they rarely elect to use it.

I wonder if a similar approach could be taken with language construction. Instead of spending 25+ years fleshing out the details of a language in painstaking detail, computer programs could be devised that, using large amounts input, determine the most "efficient" means of expressing information. The approach would not only be far less labor intensive, it could also accommodate the rapidly evolving nature of language, for example adding to its "dictionary" in response to new phenomena in need of naming.

This does seem to suggest that biology may be the limiting role in controlling the rate at which humans convey information. Indeed, the language mentioned in the article seems almost laughably cryptic and dense. However, I feel that the limitation of the mentioned study results from the fact that it treats information on a relatively limiting per syllable basis. Quijada seems to suggest that an artificially constructed language has the ability to incorporate all the implicit meanings of a phrase that are left unsaid in normal conversation.

Ultimately, while Quijada's project seems quite unlikely to catch on among those who are not fringe pseudoscientists, it poses interesting philosophical questions about the nature of speech and communication and perhaps earns its title as a "conceptual-art project."

[1] http://rosettaproject.org/blog/02012/mar/1/language-speed-vs...

While I do agree this is an issue, how would you actually go about solving it? I mean, what useful contribution can someone make in math without having learned algebra first? You need to start with the fundamentals before you can do actually important things. In fact, it seems that the ability to suck it up and "just do it" without any immediate gratification is what sets other cultures apart with respect to education.

One area where I think young people can do potentially important things is with computers, especially with programming. With only a small base of knowledge, it is possible to do many original and useful things. When I was 15, I wrote apps that were used by hundreds on thousands of people, and I don't think it requires any special talent.

Ing

(As a side note, I self-studied AP Computer Science and it isn't much better. Its pretty much all Java syntax and logic with a few sorting algorithms thrown in so that they can call it "computer science").

You can add a /n to the end of the URL, where n is the page you want it to point to.

Then how are obesity rates at all times highs?

While in principle I agree with this, I think there are many other factors that figure into a student's success in school that his "intelligence." Students may have different aptitudes for different subjects, care more about certain things than others, or have access to better resources.

> So, if we allocate the same resources to the smart and the less smart, we're creating inequality.

This assumes that both the smart and less smart students both pay attention diligently for the one hour session.In reality, when confronted with a topic that is trivial for them, a smart student will often learn the concept in twenty minutes and spend the next forty minutes sitting there bored. In contrast, the less smart student, assuming they care, will have the full hour to learn the material and ask any questions they have. In the end, they will both have learned the same amount. For this reason, education can be said to be equalizing.

> Is a smart person slighted by getting less attention in school? I would argue no.

I would argue that there's no moral distinction between paying more attention to a less smart person or slighting a smarter person. Are you punishing them for being born smart? Restraining the potential of smart kids in order to make society "more equal" seems quite unfair to me.

> In this case, "advantaged people" doesn't mean economically advantaged, but intellectually advantaged

Except that there's a remarkably strong correlation between the two.

What's really sad about this is that what it has done to the motivation of some of my friends. Being in classes with lower performing students also means that you are surrounded by their attitudes, which are usually not too favorable towards learning, and by extension, school. This creates a sort of stigma around learning that its something that you "have to" do and it's very uncool to do on your own.

I have channeled my frustrations about school towards learning programming and other topics outside of school, but it's sad to see many of my friends, equally as capable as me, become totally turned off from learning by being in clases with people who don't care. They barely resemble the curious and inquisitive children they used to be.

I think that's a little backwards, shouldn't it say less expensive?

However, one thing that Facebook is good for is coordinating groups. I'm in a class council group as well as groups for a few AP classes. Since everyone is always on Facebook, it makes setting up and coordinating things while getting feedback super easy. For example, a couple days ago, someone posted after school in the AP Stats group about getting together for a study session. A few hours later, around seven of us got together at Barnes and Nobles.

I imagine this would be very frustrating for a child who is considered "clever". By lumping everyone together in the same classroom, the kids who are ahead of the others could quickly grow bored and lose interest. I live in America, and I know that I was bored as hell until 6th grade, where classes started to be filtered based on abilities. While this article focuses on standardized test scores for all students, I would be interested to see data on "gifted" education in Finland using this one-size fits all approach.