Category Archives: School and Education

Perfect pitch

Last night, this MetaFilter posting sent me down a rabbit hole: What makes this song great? with links to videos by Rick Beato. I listened to 2. The Police – Every Little Thing She Does is Magic and then found my way over to videos about perfect pitch:

Perfect Pitch: How Theory and Ear Training Work Together, in which Rick Beato explained how the taught his eight-year-old son Dylan, who has perfect pitch, music theory. Dylan has perfect pitch and can sing pitch perfect as well. (I won’t even mention his skills on the piano, which you can see in other videos.)

Rick Beato also has videos on what perfect pitch is and why you cannot develop it as an adult: Why Adults Can’t Develop Perfect Pitch and Perfect Pitch vs Relative Pitch: Which Is More Important?

It turns out you can lose your perfect pitch, though, as happened to vibraphonist Gary Burton after being “without a heartbeat for half an hour” and having been reanimated: Retiring The Mallets (NPR).

For good measure, here’s another little kid with perfect pitch, who probably doesn’t know the names of the notes yet, but can tell if someone is singing a song too high or too low: Claire and the Crosbys: Perfect Pitch Test! (5-year-old Claire vs Dad). Of course, you probably all know her from singing You’ve got a friend in me and from being on the Ellen Show multiple times.

“We have a right to a safe education.”

The Washington Post: Thousands of students walk out of school in nationwide gun violence protest.

Some quotes from the students – and one senator – that stroke me:

Fatima Younis, a student organizer with Women’s March Youth Empower, one of the lead coordinators of Wednesday’s walkouts:

“We want our Congress to know that some of us will be old enough to vote in the midterm elections, and the rest of us are going to be able to vote in 2020 or 2022, and they’re going to lose their job if they don’t do what we want to keep us safe”.

Dominic Barry, 16, a junior at Minnetonka High School southwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul:

“We’re tired of sitting around and listening to politicians tell us what they are going to do without ever actually doing anything. And we’re also just kind of tired of adults not making it happen — adults saying what they are going to do and then just entirely blowing us off”.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.):

“We need to make sure that every member of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, people of all political stripes, are more afraid of the next school massacre, more afraid of the next death on our streets, more afraid of that, than they are of the NRA. Let’s go get them.”

Gabe Ozaki, a 16-year-old junior:

[He] addressed his schoolmates first, saying, “Every person who has ever died in a school shooting started their day like we did today.” He went on to say that he thinks America is being robbed of its youth, but that he and others are energized by a wave of activism.

Larnee Satchell, 17, a senior at Hartford Magnet:

“We will not allow our elected officials to just tweet their thoughts and condolences without any gun reform. We need Congress to enact a resolution declaring gun violence a public health crisis. We need Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. We need Congress to expand background checks to all gun sales.”

Freshman MaKayla Woodard:

“I’m walking out because they weren’t safe and we aren’t, either” […] The teen, whose father hunts, said she wants to see stricter background checks and mental health screenings for those seeking to buy guns. And she opposes President Trump’s proposal to arm teachers, saying she worries that a police officer will mistake an armed black teacher for an aggressor. “If a cop sees a black teacher with a gun, that teacher will get shot,” she said.

Bonus article:

The Toronto Star: U.S. teacher accidentally fires his gun in the classroom. He was trained in gun use. “The incident comes amid a national debate on how to protect students from mass shootings. A male student was reported to have sustained non-life-threatening injuries.”

Arming teachers to protect children at school instead of changing gun laws sounds like a daft and downright dangerous idea to this foreigner who is not American, but is a teacher at a highschool (grades 5 through 13 here in Germany).

“Zu wenig Zeit für zu viele Aufgaben und zu viel Bürokratie”

Die Zeit: Schulleiter beklagen zunehmende Verwaltungsaufgaben. “Jeder dritte Rektor hat mit unbesetzten Stellen zu kämpfen. Bürokratie, Inklusion und Integration von Flüchtlingen belasten laut einer Studie die Schulen zusätzlich.”

“Im Mittel bewerteten die Schulleiter die Schulpolitik ihres eigenen Bundeslandes mit der Note 3,8. Jeder fünfte Schulleiter in Deutschland beurteilt die Schulpolitik als mangelhaft oder sogar mit der Note 6.
Etwa 36 Prozent der deutschen Schulleiter gaben an, an der eigenen Schule akut mit Lehrermangel und unbesetzten Stellen zu kämpfen – an Gymnasien allerdings nur 25 Prozent.”

“Die Erde. Endliche Weiten. Das sind die Abenteuer der Menschen im 21. Jahrhundert.”

ZDF “Die Anstalt” vom 27.02.2018: Zukunftszenario Klimawandel – Zurück im Jahr 2100. (52min, auch als Download)

Hintergrundinformationen: Faktencheck (PDF, 564kB)

“Das Abschmelzen der Polkappen und das Verschwinden von Florida wird noch ein bisschen dauern, aber durch den Anstieg des Meeresspiegels sind weite Teile von Norddeutschland, den Niederlanden und Dänemark bereits überflutet. Hamburg und Amsterdam haben große Probleme und können nicht gehalten werden. 13 Millionen Menschen in Europa haben ihre Heimat verloren und in Indonesien 200 Millionen. Durch den Temperaturanstieg ist ein Drittel der Erdoberfläche unbewohnbar, und die Hitze zusammen mit der hohen Luftfeuchtigkeit hat dazu geführt, dass die Tropen, also von Brasilien über Afrika bis nach Thailand, Indonesien und Vietnam zu einer Todeszone geworden sind. – Moment, über welches Jahr reden wir hier? – 2100.”

[P]eople on online forums worked aggressively to undermine news reports about a troubled teen accused of killing 17 people

The Washington Post: We studied thousands of anonymous posts about the Parkland attack — and found a conspiracy in the making.

“Forty-seven minutes after news broke of a high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., the posters on the anonymous chat board 8chan had devised a plan to bend the public narrative to their own designs: “Start looking for [Jewish] numerology and crisis actors.“
The voices from this dark corner of the Internet quickly coalesced around a plan of attack: Use details gleaned from news reports and other sources to push false information about one of America’s deadliest school shootings.
[…]
The success of this effort would soon illustrate how lies that thrive on raucous online platforms increasingly shape public understanding of major events. As much of the nation mourned, the story concocted on anonymous chat rooms soon burst onto YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, where the theories surged in popularity.”

Link via Garret.