All that arguing with your teenager is, basically, teaching them how to argue. You yell, they learn to yell. You listen, and make your rationalargumentsrespectfully, and they learn to do the same — both with you and with others; so much so that it inoculates against peer-pressure.
Patti Neighmond has a nice story about the benefits of parent-teenager arguments, on NPR’s All Things Considered. One particularly interesting is that adolescents who learn to argue well are much less susceptible to peer-pressure.
I’ve fielded the question about if the world is going to end in 2012. My first-order answer has been to cite the poor level of success that previous predictions of apocalypse have had. NASA has had to address the problem, while C.G.P. Grey has a nice little video explaining the sources of the hysteria (he’s not very happy with the History Channel).
Brian Cox explains (on the BBC) explains how electron shells are like standing waves, and how that relates to the sizes of atoms, and explains why atoms are mostly space.
Teachers are, I believe, human too. So it should not be surprising that more motivated teachers perform better. Oscar Marcenaro-Gutierrez and Peter Dolton highlight an OECD report that shows the benefits of increasing teacher pay.
Image from Dolton and Marcenaro-Gutierrez (2011).
What’s most interesting though is their explanation of the data. It’s not necessarily that if you pay an individual teacher more they work that much harder, but that if you pay more you increase the status of the profession and so you attract more potential teachers and are able to select better teachers:
… improving teachers’ pay improves their standing in a country’s income distribution and hence the national status of teaching as a profession. As a result of this higher status, more young people will want to become teachers. This in turn makes teaching a more selective profession and hence facilitates the recruitment of more able individuals.
Higher status and higher pay are invariably linked but the two can provide separate driving forces to engineer better recruits to the profession. The key hypothesis is that better pay for teachers will attract higher quality graduates into the profession and that this will improve pupil performance.
So the actual pay is secondary to the status conferred by the job. I would further speculate that teachers motivated more by status rather than pay are more likely to want to excel at their work, since the quality of their work is tied more on their self-worth.
The iron gets into the water when pyrite crystals (FeS2) in the coal dissolves. While the iron precipitates, the sulfur remains in the water, making it more acidic. Dealing with the acid can be a huge problem in large coal and metal mines.
The pool of water that collects at the base of the quarry, is probably fairly acidic.
Not all the pyrite is dissolved however, and since this particular coal seam has a lot of pyrite, it is not economical to burn since the burnt sulfur (as sulfur dioxide gas) would have to be captured — otherwise it produces acid rain.
The rich black coal seam sits on top of blocky limestone rock. Above the limestone is a red, weathered soil.
Impromptu concert. The choir practices in the keeping room.
Although we’re not precisely sure why, the choir was quite the popular choice this year. The students are enthusiastic, and our music teacher, Mr. E., does an awesome job. It’s really nice to run into them practicing in the commons.
In this case they were in the Keeping Room — long, vaulted ceiling, remarkable acoustics. They practiced at one end; people accumulated at the other.
