The Best Way to Learn Most Things: A Tutor

I believe that tutoring is the best way to learn most things, especially if you use them right.

For example, to do his job well, a client of mine needed to learn some electrical engineering. Rather than recommending he go back to school for a certificate let alone a degree, I encouraged him to find an electrical engineer in or out of his workplace who is willing to answer his emailed or phoned questions when he gets stuck.

Learning on a need-to-know/ just-in-time basis is so much more time-effective than taking a course. In the latter, you're taught a mountain of content, most of which you'll never need, and what you will need, you'll long have forgotten by the time you need it. Oh and of course, courses are much more expensive and time consuming.

A Key to Time Management

Key to being time-efficient is to think of yourself as a transmission. You decide which speed is appropriate to the task:

For some tasks, you can stay in Park--not do them or delegate them.

Other tasks, 1st gear: slow and steady.

Other tasks, 2nd gear: do them midspeed, mid-quality.

Other tasks, overdrive: fast, cut corners.

Just don't go into reverse.

Reason Must Trump a Visceral "Ugh!" Response

It's long been said that our greatest advances are first met with ridicule, then with reluctant acceptance, and then thought to have always existed.

As science develops ever more rapidly, it becomes ever more essential that we don't let our initial "ugh, yuk!" response prevent us from doing a reasoned analysis of proposals.

For example, Julian Savulescu, director of Oxford University's Center for Ethics, wrote, "Our fundamental cognitive abilities, physical ability, even capacity to love could be influenced by changes in human biology." In other words, if society were to allow such research to be funded, parents could eventually use gene therapy to ensure their children had high intelligence, immunity to cancer, and a loving nature.

Many people viscerally cringe at such a prospect, recalling, for example, the Nazi eugenic atrocities. Yet as with all technologies, they can be used for good or evil. The Nazis goal was extermination of all non-Aryans. Allowing parents the freedom to ensure their children are intelligent, cancer-free, and loving is vastly different. And not only would the parents and children benefit, the world would be enriched by billions of wiser, kinder people. The likely result will be fewer wars, a cure for AIDS, not to mention unimaginably amazing iPhones.

Yes, we must address issues such as "Because it will be expensive, only the rich will do it. Won't that further increase the gap between society's haves and have nots?" A reasonable question. Society would have to decide, as with all health care, whether to, like immunizations, make it affordably available to all citizens, to subsidize it for the poor, or like a Lexus, to assert that the rich should be allowed to reap the benefit of their having earned more money without having to fork over more taxes so the poor can get it too. That's a reasoned discussion, not a visceral, antiintellectual "yuk" response. Let the discussion begin.

The Media's Liberal Bias: A Compelling Example

From the American Thinker, Oct. 16, 2010

If George Bush Had...
by Eileen Toplansky

If George W. Bush had doubled the national debt in one year, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within ten years, would you have concurred?

If George W. Bush had criticized a state law that he admitted he never even read, would you think he was just an ignorant hothead?

If George W. Bush joined the country of Mexico and sued a state in the United States to force that state to continue to allow illegal immigration, would you question his patriotism and wonder whose side he was on?

If George W. Bush had put 87,000 workers out of work by arbitrarily placing a moratorium on offshore oil drilling merely because one company had an accident, would you have thought this was disproportionate and harmful to American workers?

If George W. Bush had forced a change in your health care coverage even though the majority of people did not seek or approve of these changes, would you begin to worry about an abuse of power by the executive branch of the government?

If George W. Bush continually bashed the United States and seemed to side with known dictators, would you feel comfortable?

If George W. Bush had been the first president to need a teleprompter installed to be able to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how linguistically inept he is?

If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in New York City, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan's holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you have endorsed this move?

If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have chuckled with approval?

If George W. Bush had given British Prime Minister Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, would you have considered this shabby and not befitting proper presidential protocol?

If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?

If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have been taken aback?

If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference to the nonexistent "Austrian language," would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?

If George W. Bush had filled his Cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current with their income taxes, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had stated that there were 57 states in the United States, would you have said that he is an embarrassment?

If George W. Bush had flown all the way to Denmark to make a five-minute speech about how the Olympics would benefit him, would you have thought he was a self-important, conceited, egotistical individual?

If George W. Bush had been so Spanish-illiterate as to refer to "Cinco de Cuatro" in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was the 5^th of May (Cinco de Mayo), and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment?

If George W. Bush had misspelled the word "advice" and mispronounced the word "corps," mistaking it for a dead body, would you have wondered about this man's ability to articulate English and represent his country?

If George W. Bush had burned nine thousand gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have concluded he's a hypocrite?

If George W. Bush's administration had approved of Air Force One flying low and then sending in a jet fighter in downtown Manhattan, thus causing widespread panic, would you have wondered at the lack of sensitivity displayed by the Commander-in-Chief?

If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood victims throughout the Midwest, with more people killed or made homeless than in New Orleans during Katrina, would you wonder if this lack of assistance had racial overtones? Clearly you would have been incensed by the gross incompetence -- wouldn't you?

If George W. Bush had created the positions of 32 czars who report directly to him, bypassing approval by the House and Senate, would you have begun to wonder if American democracy was being trampled?

If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though the president has no constitutional authority to do so, would you have worried about the moorings of this country and the abuse of power?

If George W. Bush had ignored outright voting rights violations and did not recommend that the Department of Justice render justice, would you begin to wonder if the man was the president of all the people or just some of the people?

So what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive? He's done all this in fifteen months -- and we still have another two years and nine months to go.

Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com

A Plan for Improving Our Ethics

Per the previous post, I am deeply concerned that poor ethics is devastating society. That post briefly described a possible solution. I flesh that out here.

To effect such a fundamental change in people's values I believe requires a program that starts nearly at birth and continues well into adulthood:

-- Parenting education (as part of LaMaze and other pre-birth parenting education--e.g,. in the post-birth hospital room), including stressing the primacy of teaching your child that ethics must trump expediency.

-- Pre-K-through-graduate school. Every year or two, students create (for example, as a term paper) a model ethics training program for slightly younger students. Such an approach immerses the students in the process, unlike in a lecture should generate minimum defensiveness, and provides an ongoing source of improved ethics courses.

There would be only three rules for that course development:
-- Its goal must be to change the fabric of a student's thinking process so s/he will almost reflexively choose ethics over expediency.
-- It must be critical-incident based, e.g., for elementary school students: bullying, for high school students: cheating, for business-school students: withholding negative information to sell a product.

-- It must put students in the shoes of the victim of ethical malfeasance. For example, when, to make more money, a surgeon recommends surgery when drug treatment would do, imagine how the patient feels on hearing he "needs," how his family feels, how he feels when he's checking into the hospital, wheeled into surgery, etc.

Optional component: A contest for the best ethics courses. Every year, there would be winners--a la the National Science Fair or Spelling Bee.

-- To extend the ethics "curriculum" beyond the school years, producers of public-service announcement, TV dramas and sitcoms, movies and video games would be encouraged to create story lines that present thorny ethical dilemmas: for example, where expediency would yield great benefit and the ethical violation to derive that benefit is not great.

Ethics Education: The most important topic that's so rarely taught

Today I received yet more reminders of how ethically deficient we are. On top of the Charlie Rangel outrage, in my own private practice just today, clients made the following statements:

"Lawyers often double-bill."

"I want to milk the education thing as long as I can so I don't have to grow up." Professional students waste class slots that could have gone to people who would use that slot to be productive, to better society.

"I flirt to get what I want and then I claim I feel violated when they flirt back." Beware.

As I've written before, physician clients admit to me that they do procedures, including surgeries, that could have more wisely been treated medically. Why? Simply to make more money.

All that ethical filth is on top of the corporate excesses, priests screwing parishioners (including children,) people lying on the resumes and income taxes, using synthetic urine to pass drug tests, and as I wrote about yesterday, hiring people to write their theses, etc., etc., etc.

A society in which integrity is lacking will be so much less than it otherwise could be.

What could help? Ethics courses have, of course, been taught for decades, especially in law and business schools, alas with only modest effectiveness. Nevertheless, my best proposal is, as I wrote yesterday, that a critical-incident-based ethics curriculum in which we feel the effects of unethical behavior on the victim, be suffused through K-16 education, including emphasizing the primacy of parents BEING ethical--No matter how much a parent urges their child to be ethical, if the parent behaves unethically, the kid will realize that the words are empty.

The message of ethics over expediency need be so woven into the fabric of all our citizens that people will reflexively, with little temptation, make the ethical choice, even if it leads to poverty.

Fortunately, ethical people are probably no more likely to end up impoverished by their integrity. They may even be rewarded for it.

How to Reduce Academic Dishonesty

This morning, I was on a syndicated Canadian radio show to comment about the now well-publicized company that writes college admissions essays, term papers, and theses for students.

The existence of such companies is, alas, not surprising, especially as times get ever tougher, because many people will do what's expedient to get into a good school, get good grades, land a job etc.

That, of course, is why ethically challenged people hire resume writers--to deceive employers into thinking the candidate writes, thinks, and organizes better than s/he, in fact, does. (If that's not the reason, as some resume writers have argued in response to a previous post, then why don't candidates add "This resume was written by Mary Jones, a professional resume writer?" Why don't resume writers, ever eager to get more clients, insist that candidates do so?

In this post, I propose solutions:

To reduce academic dishonesty, if professors made term papers, theses, etc. of greater learning value to the students, many more students would write them rather than pay someone else to write them in their name. After all, few students hire others to do their fieldwork or internship. For example, rather than asking students to write about the significance of the doppelganger in 18th century literature, why not ask them to interview ten people about how they managed to use their liberal arts education to improve their lives?"

Speaking of academic fraud, I know two people who went to Yale Law School. Both got in dishonestly. One wrote an admission essay claiming her father was a terrible sexist pig and she had to fight to conquer that. In fact, her father was a full-fledged feminist. The other student claimed to be Native American, when in fact, she was not.

Here's an approach to improving societal ethics more broadly: Have a K-16 ethics curriculum filled with simulations of real-life ethical dilemmas. That curriculum would also teach the primacy of teaching the students' children that the cosmically ethical choice is always wiser than expediency. And that that must not only be preached but practiced. If a parent preaches ethics but to get a discount, tells a restaurant cashier the child is 12 rather than the true 13, the kid gets the message that expediency trumps ethics.

Of course, colleges have filled even k-12 curriculum with so much arcana that professors deem essential (from the Peloponnesian Wars to quadratic equations), that there's no room in the curriculum. So let's wrest curriculum selection from those trivia-obsessed research professors and replace them with successful people from all walks of life, from ethical businesspeople to social workers, scientists to blue-collar workers.

We'd have a more ethical and better world.