Today, Khalil was wearing a brand-new green Mario mushroom baseball cap, backwards, with the visor in the back. Georgia got down Bahiyyih's #2 baseball cap from its hook by the front door and put it on, just like Khalil. She ran down to the basement to show him, pointing out that she was wearing it just like he was.
Georgia: Now I'll put it on the wrong way. [turns the visor around to the front]
Me: Actually, that's the right way. This thing [pointing at visor] is supposed to protect your eyes from the sun.
Georgia: But there's no sun down here.
So which way is the right way?
Maya and Georgia ask a lot of questions. And Bahiyyih and I (and all of our friends in earshot) do our best to answer them. One that they like to ask often is, "what is your favorite color?"
So I would like to pause for a moment to appreciate the beauty of simple colors, so easy to demonstrate on such a white website.
Orangish Ruby
Dusky Green
Lavenderish
If you like colors, here's something you really have to look at: Colr Pickr, a page that lets you pick a color, and then pops up a bunch of photos that match the color, taken from Flickr. It's really beautiful and funny.
Bahá'í are to refrain from politics, in order to promote unity (and not encourage chaos, havoc, or fruitless intellectual meleé), but what are we supposed to do when we think of a great punchline for a political bumper sticker?
Not say it. Or certainly not post it on a publicly-readable website.
Which internal dialogue continues with "but I want to say it; how often do you get to actually use something like this?" What's option #2? How about try to neutralize it by removing the context?
Suppose that a government was, for whatever reasons, and I have to say that it happens pretty often, running a deficit, and, maybe, the things that the money was being spent on might or might not actually bear useful fruit for future generations who would probably have to pay off that deficit. Consider also that people hadn't yet forgotten the music of the Rolling Stones. You might make up a bumper sticker that looked kind of like this:
All he left me was a loan.
Fortunately, very few people will ever read this.
Someone is asking: Which is more important, IQ or self-discipline?. What's self-discipline? According to the article, it includes the ability to delay gratification:
Walter Mischel and colleagues found in the 1980s that 4-year-olds' ability to delay gratification (for example, to wait a few minutes for two cookies instead of taking one cookie right away) was predictive of academic achievement a decade later.
It makes sense, but self-discipline is very under-studied, compared to IQ (the article points out a more than 10-to-1 ratio of studies of IQ to studies of discipline).
Is this related somehow to Accustoming children to hardship?
That study sounds like a great idea. And it makes me think of so many other subjects to study. What other qualities are measurable? Compassion? Fair-mindedness? And what outcomes can be measured, beyond academic performance?
