Taking a look at education

I believe that taking full advantage of technology, although with careful precautions of course, in the classroom will benefit the students because technology in the classroom provides opportunities for creativity and curiosity to grow. A child’s mind is eager to learn and built to absorb the world around it. There is so much information out there to help mold children’s minds while they are young. Also technology could provide different teaching and learning techniques to help all students have a better learning experience.

·         15^th century during the beginning of the Renaissance the printing press was invented creating an information revolution. Books, pamphlets and other items were published and made available to many more people.

o   Today we are in a technological revolution with a surplus of information at our finger tips.

·         During the Enlightenment, around the 1750s, many great minds revolutionized education. Men such as Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Locke recognized and gave emphasis to the idea of “shaping young minds early.”

o   This revolutionized education but unfortunately 300 years later we are still applying the same standards that they set up. How can we learn from their school system but better adapt it to our ever changing technological society?

·         Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology performed an experiment which he called “hole-in-the-wall” back in 1999. One thing that led to this experiment was his discovery that in certain areas where good teachers won’t go, like an area where their personal safety might be an issue is where they are needed the most. It is from these areas where kids are not being educated that trouble tends to arise. So for his experiment Mitra put a computer in wall outside in New Dehli. He put about 3 feet off the ground and left it there. As time went on kids began to explore the computer and the internet. After a short amount of time they found games that they could download and play. Games that taught them how to build things and to use math. Technology is there to help us. Let’s use it to tap into the creativity of children and to enhance their learning experience with the help of technology.

Live Free or Die

The years preceding Camille Desmoulins were filled with increasing levels of public angst.  France had just gone through a financial crisis and their congress was convened to try and procure emergency funds.  The people were represented with the great exception of the third estate which represented the most populous lower class.  Their representatives were actually locked out of the meeting.  This was gasoline on the already smoldering rage against the centuries old class system.  Later pamphlets came out trying to unify the third estate and they began to identify themselves as the ‘real France.’  It was in this setting that Desmoulins wrote his treatise “live free or die.”

Small Piece of Paper: Big Problems

This video wraps up some of my thoughts on the perception that future actuaries need to go through the same process that the preceding generations went through to become certified.  Although this is a very specific topic to my field of study I hope that you can't take away some of the highlights to some of the more general dogmas with regards to credentialing. (Some of the other students in our class have done their videos/blog posts about this topic.)

(Hopefully this video updates soon so that it doesn't look as raw as it currently does. Either way, Enjoy!)

I should put this video on my resume.

• Now that I've done the video, all I can think about is what I could've done better.

• The point is: I realized (through the help of your comments) that credentialism stands on a deeper, less-seen dogma about how people define "success." 
• I also realized that it springs from our desire for easy, orderly, list-like lives that can be checked and checked off.

Millennials of all lands, Vote!

There are many issues with our current system of voting, but one of the primary ones is that there is a restriction on who can vote. People who do not have the time to stand around in seemingly endless lines aren't allowed to vote. The idea that people should vote because they have the ability to vote is a priceless enlightenment ideal, but it needs to be updated to the modern age.

Don't Tell An Actuary He's "Too Smart"

            I never back down from a challenge. As expected I have received a lot of pushback to my new ideas surrounding the certification of actuaries from a couple of actuaries who have been around the block a few times. As I previously discussed in my last post, I feel that actuaries in general have a mentality about them that is almost unavoidable in feeling “smarter” than others. I have felt this in myself from time to time as I tirelessly work and sacrifice my time to pass actuarial exams. When I do pass them. I too can sometimes become “big-headed”. It is a vicious cycle that needs to be stopped.

            This semester I have had the opportunity to take a class from a visiting Actuary. His class is amazing and his insights are great, as there aren't any fellowship actuaries currently teaching at BYU. I asked him what he thought about the exams, and if this dogma of being “smarter” than others existed, and was leading to the difficulty of the exams. He quickly shot me down, and stated that the exams are not a product of a better-than-the-world mentality, and that they have to be difficult to ensure actuaries know what they are doing. A response I expected as Joe’s comment suggested.

            I also messaged an actuary on LinkedIn who is in a group with me titled, The Entry Level Actuary. He responded almost identically to my teacher, saying that no such dogma existed among professional actuaries, and that the exams should be harder if anything else.

            So was I completely wrong? Perhaps. But I think it is also fair to suggest that those I talked with about this issue have a skewed frame of reference in which they would be unlikely to respond in any other manner than in which the one they already have. These were two men who had sacrificed many hours to take 8-10 actuarial exams, sacrificing time from family, friends, work, and school work to accomplish professional goals. They aren't about to say that the exams they sacrificed over are too hard, and especially that they are hard because of some kind of poor mentality among actuaries.

            The world is changing, and because of this there are more people out there that could be actuaries but can't because of an outdated thought about the requirements. Actuaries of the future need to change their frame of reference and see that more can be done to allow those who are able to be actuaries to become certified. 

Down The Rabbit Hole

In the search for how to make voting easier so that we will get a government that more fully represents the people, I looked into many ideas, including the good, the bad, and the outright radical.

In the search, I stumbled upon a journalist working in Detroit. When describing his feelings about voting on the internet, he expressed worry about what it could lead to, “#DownTheRabbitHole” has he put it. Opening voting up to the internet could easily lead to politicians taking control of the voting process. This is a valid concern, but is it all that different from the idea that there are politicians today tinkering with the voting process?

In communicating with an analyst in Denver, I discovered a much more radical solution. Dissolve the legislative branch of the government, and draw a random sample of citizens each year to fill those seats. Statisticians would love the idea, for this “sample” would be the best estimation of the “population” that is possible. If your name is drawn out of a randomization process, you go work for the government in deciding legislation.

This would lead to a government that, statistically speaking at least, would be a better representation of the people—which is exactly what we would be trying to do with enabling voting online. Its feasibility, however, remains an issue. What will the future hold? I suppose it is up to us, but we need to vote to make it happen.

Challenging Dogmas, Not Policies

Some kinds of change are different than others. The same is true of calls for change. It's one thing to want something (in particular) to change, and another to want things (generally) to change. The latter type was the sort characteristic of the European Enlightenment. People were after a deeper, broader kind of change, change that involved radical shifts in thinking about the world, not just different decisions in managing their world. They sought changes that required overhauling or overthrowing the political, intellectual, or cultural authorities of their day. Enlightenment thinkers were challenging dogmas, not policies.

In asking my students to re-create the Enlightenment, to a degree, by challenging the status quo, I'm asking them to take on a dogma that's operative in our present day, and not just argue for a shift in policy. A dogma is a set of received beliefs that are part of the belief system of a given group. It's the party line. It's the set of principles that organize and constrain that group. Dogma is ideology: a set of ideas, and a logic that flows from them. Dogmas and ideologies provide a rationale for policies, but they are bigger value systems that underly policy.

The Snowpocalypse

I am from Georgia. About as South as you can get in the United States, before hitting Florida (which we don't count as the South, anyways.) As you can imagine, it rarely snows where I'm from. (You can imagine my shock when I first moved to Utah.) And when it does snow, due to the lack of of snowplows, salt machines, and any other gadget that would help clear up the roads, the entire city, nay, the entire state, shuts down - even for just a small flake or two. Georgia has still had its experiences with a few bad snow storms - the city shuts down, grocery stores are ravaged, and the greater Atlanta area looks mostly like a ghost town. In these instances, Southerners, who don't know what to do about snow that actually sticks to the ground, tend to freak out about where their next meal is going to come from. If the roads are blocked and the stores are empty, how are they going to get food? (Shameless plug for food storage.)

Last year in 2014, Georgia experienced one of the worst snow storms in the state's history. "Tuesday's storm, the beginning of mass hysteria," "Ordinary commutes turned into chaos and confusion," were only a few of the headlines that graced the papers that week, and the storm quickly gained the name of the "Snowpocalypse." Atlanta's few major highways were all closed due to dangerous and icy conditions, and after being stuck on the roads for more than 24 hours, people abandoned their cars and literally started walking along the side of the highway to seek shelter. The city was compared to a scene from the hit TV show, "Walking Dead."

I was at home visiting and happened to be with my mother in a local grocery store, where we saw two women start to catfight over what was left of the milk in the dairy isle. When the first slap was thrown, my own fearful mother quickly grabbed my hand and we left. A store worker ended up breaking the two women up, but no one else said anything because everyone was in the same boat. They were all desperate for milk.

Though the weather conditions in Georgia were bad at that time and everyone had to stay in due to the major traffic jam on the roads, I knew eventually it would clear up. It scared me to think how crazy some people could get over minor things when they thought the world was going to end, or more specifically, their world. This mob mentality seems to be prevalent even in some of the nicest, hospitable, small Southern towns like Dacula, Georgia.