TED Community » Alan Russell

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• A comment on Conversation: Whatever happened to the Oxford comma?

  Mar 1 2013: "At the costume party, I saw two strippers, Hitler and Stalin." How many people did I see?
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  A comment on Conversation: If you have to describe your best friend/s in one sentence - what would you say ??

  Feb 26 2013: Ah, there you are.
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  A reply on Conversation: Hacking democracy: a simple, legal way to put the power in the hands of the people

  Feb 25 2013: I like the idea of combining voter registration with identifying IP addresses. It seems like a good solution and something we should be using now anyway.

• A comment on Conversation: Should public schools be allowed to teach creation myths in science class?

  Feb 25 2013: "If you put faith in scientific ideas, that is nobody's fault but your own. With just a little effort, you could have researched the concepts that you did not understand.
  
  You may have put faith in science, but I do not. My confidence and trust in any specific theory is a direct result of my understanding of the evidence presented for it. If I am not convinced, then I have no right to say I believe based on faith or any other ridiculous reason that some people give for their beliefs."
  
  It's not a question of fault. It was more a question of adolescent expediency. I learned the theories and the experiments and evidence to support them, but initially I simply had to believe. I don't credit theories simply because I don't understand them or lack the knowledge they require. But as a student, I wanted good grades, so I believed what I was told.
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  A comment on Conversation: Hacking democracy: a simple, legal way to put the power in the hands of the people

  Feb 25 2013: How would keep me from voting over and over under multiple online guises?

• A comment on Conversation: Is Mathematics a pure language, free of the ambiguities and pitfalls present in ordinary language communication?

  Feb 25 2013: I am not fluent in math, but it seems to me that math is ultimately useful to describe. I can use words--with their abstractions, paradoxes, limits, and contradictions--to describe what I think or perceive, but math seems better suited to address ultimate reality. My favorite thing about laguage, though, is its ambiguity, which reflects being human better than math does.

• A comment on Conversation: If you could do anything in your life over again, what would you do?

  Feb 25 2013: On the one hand, my list would be pretty long, I expect. On the other, if I were to change anything, I would not be who I am today. So, I guess I would change nothing.

• A reply on Conversation: Should public schools be allowed to teach creation myths in science class?

  Feb 25 2013: Agreed. But at certain points, scientific facts are articles of faith. When my chemistry teacher taught us about atoms and subatomic particles, I smiled and nodded and memorized what she said. Later, I came to a more complete understanding of the facts and concepts.
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  A comment on Conversation: Are reality shows good for society?

  Feb 25 2013: Reality shows would be more accurately entitled "unscripted shows." No one's reality is the controlled and carefully edited version on television.
  
  Perhaps the better question is whether media shapes culture or merely reflects it.

• A comment on Conversation: Why do kids create social cliques in high school? Do they hinder the growth of others?

  Feb 21 2013: Peter and Aja are right, from what I've seen. We humans seek those we think are similar as a sort of shortcut to self-identity: the group has an identity that we can appropriate. It is not inherently harmful but turns out to be more often than not. Also, for my students, right now is the only time that's real and the only time that matters. If I try to get them to take a longer view, they smile and nod but do not understand or believe. Adults, I think, often forget how incredibly immediate every aspect of life is for young people. The mean thing someone said at lunch can be just as devastating for my kids as getting fired would be for me.
  
  Some schools do take steps to de-emphasize cliques, but I don't think one can eliminate the human need to associate and belong. Some teachers do let "Cool Kids" get away with things, so sometimes we are tacitly part of the problem.
  
  I do take issue with characterizing the "Cool Kids" as amounting to nothing. It's too individualistic for such a generality to be true. What Peter asserts is true, though, and one of my kids and I were talking about that very thing yesterday. She realized that she had begun to reduce her circle of friends to the handful she actually enjoyed talking to and spending time with. She said it's much better than trying to fit in with a larger group of superficially homogeneous classmates. She has recognized that, in a few months, she and her classmates will scatter to colleges near and far and build new lives.
  
  I have run into some of my old kids who defined themselves completely in high school as kings or queens; these folks are neither happy nor well-adjusted because they never figured themselves out as unique individuals. Another old kid, who was a "Cool Kid" and clique leader in high school, teaches down the hall from me and seems quite normal and happy (well, as normal as a teacher can be).