Smoking Pot Can Make Kids Lazy

Does smoking marijuana make kids lazy?  Scientific evidence says, "yes."  Marijuana Makes for Slackers? Now There’s Evidence by Susan Pinker says,

"... marijuana’s two psychoactive ingredients, tetrohydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), have contrasting effects on the brain. “THC makes you feel high,” said Catharine Winstanley, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia who does research on marijuana, while CBD “is responsible for its analgesic, antiseizure and purported anticancer effects.” 

The results? “Whether they were workers or slackers to begin with,” Dr. Winstanley reported, “even small amounts of THC made them all slackers.”

“Thinking that it’s harmless, that you can smoke cannabis and you’ll be fine, is a false assumption,” said Michael Bloomfield, a University College London professor in psychiatry and one of the UCL study’s authors. “THC alters how willing you are to try things that are more difficult.”

Our children need to know that while 25 states and the District of Columbia have legalized pot for various purposes, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration considers marijuana as illegal as heroin.  Companies with good jobs and high pay sometimes do drug testing, both in the hiring process and in the work place, doing random drug tests.  I have been drug tested, so this is personal testimony.  Smoking pot can cost your child a good job. On more that one occasion I have had to submit to lie detector tests and I was asked about drug use in these tests.  Even if your children wait to get the drugs out of their system, they might still be tripped up by a lie detector test.  There is an economic incentive in addition to a health incentive to avoid marijuana.

This article appeared in the printed edition on Saturday Sept. 17, 2016, page C2.  This should be available in your public library if you have trouble reading the article online.  Susan Pinker has a column called Mind & Matter in the Wall Street Journal.

We cannot assume our children will absorb our values because they are in our home.  We ought to explicitly state and promote our values to our children, in my opinion.  We need to speak against drug use to protect our children from harm.

Wishing the best for you and your family,
Robert

Coaching Writing with Strunk and White

A friend of mine was telling me how hard it was to coach his daughter on writing.  He was coaching her by red-lining her compositions and explaining why he marked up sections.  When I asked what book or guidelines he used to teach her, he said he had none.  I asked him if he had a copy of Strunk and White and found he had not heard of the book.

For all you parents who are helping your children with their writing, I recommend The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White.  William Strunk, a professor at Cornell, taught E.B. White, one of America's better known writers.  Dr. Strunk's concise notes on writing style, used in Cornell starting in 1918, are a great starting point for teaching competent writing because the small amount of material for a student to master makes the teaching and learning of the material manageable.  It is brilliant.

I still have a copy from my college days and I got a copy for my son when I coached him on writing.  The second edition is 78 pages long, but the first edition was only 26 pages.  You can download a PDF copy of the first edition from this website: https://faculty.washington.edu/heagerty/Courses/b572/public/StrunkWhite.pdf  Being only 26 pages long, you can easily print the entire 1st edition.  I recommend you start using the book in middle school.  Children are more cooperative in middle school.  High school age children can be very temperamental and hard to coach.

At some point you will want a book on grammar when you coach your child on writing.  As I mentioned earlier,  Painless Grammar by Rebecca Elliot is excellent for middle school grammar

Children need personal attention to improve their writing.  They will not get personal attention at school.  A teacher with over 100 students will not be red-lining child's compositions and explaining the markups.  If you can coach your child in writing, that would be a blessing to your child.

Robert

PS
Among the blurbs on the back of my copy of Strunk & White is one by Dorothy Parker:  "It is a book to put alongside Fowler's works, and I can think of no higher praise."  So who is this Fowler?  Henry Watson Fowler is probably the source for much of Strunk's stylistic guidelines.  There is certainly some overlap in their advice.  The King's English by Henry Watson Fowler and Francis George Fowler (brothers) was published in England in 1906.  However, The King's English is much longer than Strunk's work.  The 2nd edition of The King's English, 1922, is 392 pages long.  Strunk at 26 pages is a godsend!  Here is a PDF online for Fowler's The King's English:  https://ia801408.us.archive.org/6/items/kingsenglish00fowliala/kingsenglish00fowliala.pdf

Canadian lawyer Julian Burnside said this in his tribute to The King's English:  "My  affection  for  this  book  began  50 years ago, when my father decided that my English education needed to be supplemented." Notice his father coached him on his writing!  There is an online copy of The King's English here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_King's_English

Later, Fowler wrote in 1926 a follow-on book, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.  This is the book referenced by Dorothy Parker.  This book is usually called Fowler’s Modern English Usage or Fowler’s for short, as Dorothy Parker said.  This was the book educated people turned to for a reference on rhetoric.  It is said Winston Churchill directed his officials to read it.  Fowler's is even longer than The King's English.  Fowler's is 899 pages.  That is right, it is almost a thousand pages long.  Thank heavens for William Strunk! You can download a PDF of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (3rd revised edition) here:  http://alexandriaesl.pbworks.com/f/The+New+Fowler's+Modern+English+Usage.pdf

I love writing so I think I will enjoy perusing these older style guides.  If you love writing you too might enjoy exploring them.  As free PDF files, the price is certainly right!

In closing I will mention that Strunk & White is a great book for basic writing, but it is not the ultimate book on writing style.  This masterpiece is not the end of the road, but the beginning of the road to great writing.

Our Culture, Our Poetry

While talking with some programmers this week I exclaimed, "Excelsior!"  It dawned on me that my own son might not know the meaning of this expression.  I used it in the fashion described in the Urban dictionary:  a phrase often shouted after successfully completing a mission.  According to Your Dictionary, it means higher; always upward: used as a motto (as on the New York State seal).  The word comes from a Latin root that means "higher."

Common expressions are part of the social infrastructure we call American culture.  I learned the term from a poem that I had read in my youth:  Excelsior by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  You can read it here at the Poetry Foundation.  I actually got a copy of a book of poetry for my son, A Treasury of Golden Memories by Kenneth Giniger.  This book has a lot of classic poems, like Excelsior, that were taught to me when I grew up, but which have been abandoned by today's teachers.  It is important to pass along our heritage, our culture, to our children.  If you are like me, we are busy.  It is so hard to juggle all our responsibilities and then find time to oversee our children's education.  But it is important to pass on down to our children those poems that are part of our culture.

Years ago I read  Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know by E.D. Hirsch Jr.  The author recounted how his father would only need to say, "There is a tide!" to convey the need to act.  The quote is Brutus speaking to Cassius in the play Julius Caesar (Act 4, scene 3) by William Shakespeare.

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

American culture is part of what has made America great.  If we lose our culture, we will lose our greatness.  Bombers and armies project power, but greatness lies within the heart!


Robert

Dad, They Towed My Car!

One day I got a phone call at work:  "Dad, they towed my car!"  My son parked in teacher parking at his high school and thought he would get a warning if he got caught.  It does not work that way.  The student handbook specifically says that no warnings are issued.  Put yourself in my shoes.  How do I get the car back?  Where is it?  I call the Plano Police department and learn that the tow company working my son's school is Signature Towing, 1204 Municipal Ave, Plano, with a phone number of 972-423-4010. So I call and confirm his car is in their possession.  I had to ask my son what the license plate number was because that is how they track the towed cars.  He knew the license plate number, fortunately, because I did not.

Getting a car back from the towing company is tricky.  Image you have given your child a card with the name, address, and phone number of the tow company.  Your child's car is towed and he goes there with cash to get the car back.  Well, that won't work.  The car title is in your name, not your child's name and they do not take cash.  The owner of the car needs to show up with proof of ID and pay with a credit card.  Perhaps the tow company will release the car if your child has a car insurance card that has his name on the card along with the VIN for the vehicle, but your child still needs a credit card to pay the tow company.  Be prepared to drive to the towing company to retrieve your child's car, and be warned that towing is not cheap!

I do not know if Signature Towing works all the high schools or just my son's.  It seems to me a good idea to coach your child  on how towing works in the schools if your child drives.  The lessons are (1) there is no warning ticket, (2) you or your child must know the license plate number, (3) it is not the teachers who call the tow company, (4) the police prowl the school parking lots and call the tow company if they find a car that can be towed, and (5) the tow truck will be there very quickly.  Perhaps the tow truck is even following the police!  One of my daughter's friends told me she parked in teacher parking, dashed into the office to drop off paperwork, and dashed back out to find her car already towed.

Forewarned is forearmed!

Robert

PS:  The staff at Signature Towing were courteous and professional.  I have no complaint against the towing company.

Understanding Consequences

It dawned on me one day that prisoners in jail and college students with excessive debt share something in common:  they both failed to think through the consequences of their actions.  A prisoner sitting in jail serving a long sentence for selling crack cocaine found no deterrence in that long sentence because he did not think about the consequences of this actions.  A college graduate burdened with a horribly large college loan did not think about the consequences of borrowing so much money.

Our society is suffering because too many of our children cannot figure out the consequences of their actions.   We can protect our children from serious mistakes if we can teach them to think about the consequences of their actions.  We parents have to teach our children how to think through the consequences of their actions.

I look for teaching moments in life.  They can be simple events.  Driving down the road one day while my son was in elementary school I asked him to figure out the cost of our road trip.  I walked him through the calculations with miles-per-gallon for the car, price of gas per gallon, and the miles driven.  We did rounding for the numbers and he did the calculations in his head.  He could do that because he had learned is math facts.  Another day I pointed out to my son how another boy he knew was pushing a baby carriage down the street.  The consequences for that boy of making a baby too early in life was being forced to quit college to work for child support.  Our actions have consequences and we parents need to impress that lesson onto our children.

The most important lessons our children need will come from us parents, not from teachers in their schools.  Thinking through the consequences of actions is a vital lesson for our children.

Robert

Understanding Contracts

Our kids must understand the importance of comprehending contracts.  Failure can be baked into the contract to such a degree that all your best efforts might be doomed to failure.  Great success might lie more in the details of your contract than in your efforts after the contract.  First, let's review one of the most famous corporate bankruptcies due to a contract.  Rolls Royce signed a contract with Lockheed to deliver jet engines with price and performance goals that bankrupted Rolls Royce.  I remember reading that Rolls Royce asked Lockheed for relief from their contract and Lockheed refused, which drove Rolls Royce into bankruptcy.  Important lesson:  if you make a mistake in your contract do not ever believe that that the other guy will cut you some slack.

I remember reading of a medical doctor who signed a contract he did not fully understand.  The doctor trusted that the insurance company would not offer him a bad contract.  He was wrong.  They paid him less than it cost to treat those patients so the contract drove him into bankruptcy.  Important lesson: do not trust the counterparty to offer a fair or reasonable contract.  The best way to rob someone is through a contract; this makes the theft legal.

I remember the final walk-through on my first house.  As I was signing the paperwork listing the fixes I required to close on the house, I mentioned to the construction superintendent that I was sure they would fix things I missed on the list.  The superintendent choked when I said that.  I suppose I was surprisingly naive.  Important lesson:  do not expect anything beyond what is promised in the contract.

Next, let us consider Warren Buffett's success.  Think to yourself, if Buffett was the employee of his investors, then how did he become richer than them?  They had the money, and he ended up with more money than any one of them. How did he do this?  Is was not just good investments because his partners shared his success.  His superior wealth must be due to his contract. When I first thought this through it seemed like a revelation:  great wealth can depend more on a smart contract than on smart investments.

I will walk you through how Buffett got rich, but I will do that in some other post.  It requires math modeling.

Robert

Suicide

As I was growing up I saw kids as young as elementary school damaging themselves with drugs.  In middle school my classmates started dying in car accidents.  Then in high school alcohol and cars led to more deaths.  When I was a high school teacher a kid that worried me died in a car accident.  This has not changed.  But I did not hear of suicides among my classmates while growing up.  Maybe there was a veil of silence around the suicides and I was unaware of them while I was growing up.

Now I do hear about young people committing suicide. I have to say that depression is real and needs to be addressed.  I read of a successful financier, a friend of Sandy Weill of Citigroup, who suffered from depression, had the best mental care possible, had a supportive family, and still committed suicide.  His wife, looking for him, found his Italian shoes placed by the door to the apartment rooftop, went up and discovered her husband had jumped to his death.

Depression is dangerous.  Patrick Kennedy recently wrote a book to address the problem:  A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction.  It took courage to talk about his family's problems.  Depression cuts across all social classes.

It is difficult sometimes to get your teenagers to talk to you, but when they do talk, we have to listen to them.  And I mean really listen, not lay down the law or argue with them.  Our kids are stressed in college and after graduation.  We cannot relax once they have left high school or college.  I cannot say what anyone should do if they are worried for their child, but it might be wise to look for help.

You have seen the increase in mass shootings in America.  We have always had guns in this country.  We would not be a country if our founding fathers were unarmed; we would still be a British colony.  What has changed has been an increase in the pressure we feel in our lives.  We are under pressure and some of us have better ways of coping with the pressure.  Because the anti-gun lobby has hijacked this issue, we are not discussing the sources of the pressure we feel and how some can cope while others crumble under the pressure.

Perhaps there are more young people killing themselves.  The veil of silence might be hiding an increase in suicides. Or the liberal news media might be so focused on our guns that they are ignoring an increase in suicides because that does not fit their anti-gun agenda.

I worry for our kids.

Robert