Develop your passion

When we were kids, my sister was a picky eater who said no a number of vegetables.  The elders almost always had the same advice: By refusing to even taste those dishes, she had no idea what she was missing.

Decades later, she talks about some of those tasty dishes that she has now discovered.  "Remember that amma used to make it?" I have asked her more than once.

We do not know what we are missing out on. It is one thing to reject tasty veggie dishes, but another to make decisions on choices that will have implications for the rest of our lives.

I have forever complained about forcing 17 and 18 year olds to commit to studying fill-in-the-blank in college.  What the hell do we know at that age, and what the hell are we missing out on when we make those decisions?

Except for a tiny percentage, the overwhelming majority of kids in their late-teens have no idea what they want to do.  They don't know what their "passion" in life is.  Well, ok, for most boys there is only one passion ;)  Kidding aside, how do we know what we are passionate about when we have not even tasted the dishes that the academic and the professional worlds offer?

From a Stanford study:

Mantras like “find your passion” carry hidden implications, the researchers say. They imply that once an interest resonates, pursuing it will be easy. But, the research found that when people encounter inevitable challenges, that mindset makes it more likely people will surrender their newfound interest.
And the idea that passions are found fully formed implies that the number of interests a person has is limited. That can cause people to narrow their focus and neglect other areas.

Exactly!

Being narrowly focused on one area could prevent individuals from developing knowledge in other areas that could be important to their field at a later time

Seriously, don't people ever find out anything contrary to what I have been ranting about for years?

[After] reading a challenging scientific article on the same topic, students’ excitement dissipated within minutes. The researchers found that the drop was greatest for students with a fixed mindset about interests.

I have seen this over and over with many students.  They think they know about a field of study, which they think they are passionate about, and when they start getting into it, they begin to quickly lose interest in that field.

So, what is a better route?  The title of this post says it all.

How does a 18-year old develop their passions?  A two-word phrase that will be familiar to even a casual reader of this blog: Liberal Education.  Students get to taste the awesome dishes and then they figure out what their interests are, and how they can be productive members of society.

Your teenager troubles you? Read on ...

It was an inconsequential, and yet a serious, chat with "S" about parenting and children.  Coming from different backgrounds and age didn't seem to matter at all when he and I speculated that the troubling adolescent behavior is coded somewhere in the human genes only to ensure that the child will wean away from the parent.  Else, given the unique ways in which humans take care of their young, well, this split might not happen--in an extreme case--and that could threaten the propagation.

Hey, every casual conversation doesn't have to be about politics, you know.

Speaking of which, did you catch this beauty from Bill Maher on the allegation in the book that Sarah Palin did cocaine?  Maher said, “Sarah Palin doing cocaine? That’s ridiculous. That stuff can make you yammer like an imbecile.”

Ok, stay focused here. Adolescent behavior. No, for the final time, this post on adolescent behavior is not about Palin :)

One of the typical adolescent attitude is towards risk--they seem to care less about actions that we older folks might think are way too risky.  

Teens take more risks not because they don't understand the dangers but because they weigh risk versus reward differently: In situations where risk can get them something they want, they value the reward more heavily than adults do.

Interesting.  I had always worked with the assumption that the teenage behavior is framed by the context of inadequate information about the risks.  But, if they are aware of the risks, at levels comparable to adult understanding, then it has tremendous implications for public policies too, right?  Ok, I am getting ahead of myself.  The researchers add:

"They didn't take more chances because they suddenly downgraded the risk," says Steinberg. "They did so because they gave more weight to the payoff."
Researchers such as Steinberg and Casey believe this risk-friendly weighing of cost versus reward has been selected for because, over the course of human evolution, the willingness to take risks during this period of life has granted an adaptive edge. Succeeding often requires moving out of the home and into less secure situations. "The more you seek novelty and take risks," says Baird, "the better you do." This responsiveness to reward thus works like the desire for new sensation: It gets you out of the house and into new turf.

Risks and the high that comes from novelty, which are further enhanced in the company of peers.  Gets them out of the parents' shadows:

The move outward from home is the most difficult thing that humans do, as well as the most critical—not just for individuals but for a species that has shown an unmatched ability to master challenging new environments. In scientific terms, teenagers can be a pain in the ass. But they are quite possibly the most fully, crucially adaptive human beings around. Without them, humanity might not have so readily spread across the globe.

A painful aspect in parenting.  But, a critical part of the remarkable success we humans have had as a species.

Hmmm ... so, "S" and I were really on to something in that casual chat; maybe I should forward this to him.

Colbert pays homage to Salinger

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bananafish Tale - Henry Allen
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Real news, versus the Onion News Network

My students, and readers of this blog (ed: really? there are readers?) know how much I am a fan of The Onion. But, some times, real news items are so outlandish that they confirm that it is only a very fine line between the Onion's satire and the real world itself. Here is one such example, which one would think that The Onion made it up, but, alas, is a real world news:

A teenage girl agreed to have under-age sex because she wanted to lose her virginity before the Large Hadron Collider caused the end of the world, it has been reported.

I would laugh this off, but for the fact that this is a report in the Telegraph, and it is not an April 1st issue either. How unfortunate that scientific illiteracy results in horrible outcomes!

The Telegraph further notes that:

[Police] in Brisbane, Australia believe that the teenage girl was so scared by the doomsday speculation that she agreed to have under-age sex with a boy in their school lavatories.

Her fears came to light after their sex acts were filmed by another boy at the school, with the footage circulated among pupils via their mobile phones.

Police have launched an investigation under child pornography laws, although The Courier-Mail newspaper reported that they did not expect to bring any charges.

Oh boy!

BTW, if you are curious about the status of the Large Hadron Collider, which came to a halt after a great deal of hype about what the scientific knowledge that it would add:

Unfortunately on 19th September a serious fault developed damaging a number of superconducting magnets. The repair will required a long technical intervention which overlaps with the planned winter shutdown. The LHC beam will, therefore, not see beam again before September 2009.

Given that we are already almost at mid-September, ..... I wonder whether the re-start will not be for a while?

Youth today are far better than youth of the past

A few years ago, when we lived in Bakersfield, I wrote an opinion piece on how teenagers seem to be handling things really well, despite the environment being saturated with explicit and implicit messages that were all about but sex, sex, and more sex. I am not sure if I would have even completed high school in such an environment!

In other ways too, I find the youth to be far better--in general--than the youth of the past, and agree with Christopher Ferguson's observation in the Chronicle of Higher Education: According to several significant indicators, today's youth are actually faring much better than did other recent generations: They are less violent, less suicidal, less likely to use drugs and alcohol, and less likely to experience teen pregnancy (despite a small increase in teen pregnancies in 2006, they remain much lower than in 1991). But why doesn't anyone seem to know that?