After a bit of searching, I found this link...both interesting and disturbing at the same time. Turns out that the "girl" that led the ring was actually an adolescent male:
College, and going to school in general, isn't just about taking classes. Getting the opportunity to interact with a diverse group of people helps broaden enriches their education and is great preparation for the "real world."
While some of this interaction could be moved online, I suspect that it would make it easier for people to seek out people that are similar to them since they're not being thrown into a environment where you would have to see your classmates every day whether you find them agreeable or not.
"I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together."
Here are most of the suggestions from the link:
- Have fan with a pan of ice in front if it pointed towards you
- Keep a damp hand towel on your forehead
- Put an ice pack under your neck
- make a rice sock, put it in the freezer and then inside of your pillow
- sleep nude
- sleep in a 'spread eagle' position
- take a cool shower, wet your face, run your wrists under the cold tap
Please correct me if I'm mistaken - How does an air conditioner use less energy than a fan turned on for the same amount of time? I did a quick search and most of the hits say that air conditioners use more power. (Here is one of the links that came up: http://www.todaysgreenconstruction.com/2008/07/battle-green-...).
Not disagreeing with the rest of what you said, but I just wanted to point out that the article does state that the city moved the cameras to intersections with yellows shorter than 4.0 seconds.
I find that when I am learning something new, memorizing some facts is an important part of the process, kind of like establishing a set of axioms before using them to prove something. As I build more expertise, I can revisit those memorized facts later with greater understanding instead of simply being able to recite them. I find flash cards to be useful for that purpose.
You definitely have a point: you can't exclusively use flash cards to develop a good understanding of any subject. However, I think that they are one of many useful techniques that you can use for studying and question whether using flash cards automatically means that you are a "DUMB" kid.
It's great that you were able to learn outside of the classroom by reading books and newspapers on your own, but I don't think that incident means that flash cards are in ineffective technique. Relying on outdated flash cards to teach the children geography means that the teachers were not up to date on current events and that the school did not update their learning materials frequently enough.
http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/12/12/sims_onli...