Part 1: Answer Questions Found In Blog
What is the population of India?
1.21 billion
What is the population of China?
1.35 billion
What is the population of the United States?
309 million
In the Did You Know? video one slide read that if you took the top 25% of Indian people with the highest IQ's they would outnumbers the ENTIRE population of the United States. This means that of the 1.21 billion people in India there are 302.5 million who have the highest IQ's. Another slide estimated that there are 18 million Chinese who now speak English and 300 million who are currently learning to speak English. It goes on to state that if the 300 million Chinese who are learning English accomplish this goal they and those who have already learned will outnumber the ENTIRE 309 million population of the United States. Of China's population only about 23.56% will speak English. In the final slide it stated an "If-Then" scenario about India and the United States: IF the best 25% of K-12 students are designated to be Honor Students THEN they would outnumber all of the K-12 students, both Honor and non, in the United States. This is a simple concept to state since India is at least four times the population of the United States. Before we begin to panic, question where we are in the world or become angry that other counties are learning English at a fast rate we need to look at all of the data. What is the point in stating your opinion when you do not have all the pieces?
I believe that the objective of the Did You Know? videos is to get us thinking that the world is changing at a much faster rate than it ever has in the past. In recent history one could go weeks, months or even years before news from other lands or even within their own nation could reach them. No one knew why some people got sick and died while others seemed to be protected from the disease. We now live in a time in history that allows us to access more data on our smart phone that someone 100 years ago could have had access in a lifetime. We have information and technology literally at our fingertips. One could study all their life and only grasp a fraction of what the world today is offering. Now that we have been shown this we need to stand up and give our students the tools and skills they will need in order to weather what is to come because as distant as our parents' time seems to us that gap will continue to increase as the days pass. Did You Know? was meant to inform us of our world, get us thinking about it on a new scale and show us that the world we know will soon be a distant memory but most importantly it ask this one question: are you prepared?
Part 2:
I believe that Wolfram Alpha will be a great asset to my classroom because first it allows you to compare two similar or different items together to see their relation and, just like with Did You Know?, it will make my students think. As stated in the blog I did two different types of searches one about animals and humans and the other about life and death. The first search I looked to compared the number of known animal species at 1.396 million to the number of humans 28.894 million in the world. At first glace one might think that we are the dominating part of the world but then you missed an important piece. Read that again: the number of SPECIES, not the individual animals but the different types of species there are in the world, to the number of individual humans. That means that even if there were only twenty-one animals in each species that they would still outnumber humans and many have hundreds or thousands in their species. I would use this to show that while we may be able to walk, talk and build that we are not our numbers are some of the lowest on the planet. I would ask them how it made them feel to know that a simple ant on the sidewalk could outnumber their own family tree. I wonder what they would say and what would change in them.
In the second search I compared the average death rate of 154,995 per day to the average birth rate of 371,124 per day in the world. While there is only 0.0093 minutes between deaths it is even less for births at 0.0039 minutes. With these numbers there at least two babies being born before someone dies. If these numbers are true, the world population is growing twice as fast. Think of the world as a computer with a limited capacity that allows it to hold X amount and people are the files. Everyday we are born we make a new file and when we die that file is deleted but when there are more files being created then deleted then the system is in trouble. If I was a high school teacher I would challenge my students to think of ways to fix this before the computer, or world, crashes. Trips to Mars? One child laws for all? No children until you are 35? I wonder what they would tell me and, if they found an idea that would help, would I have given them the skills needed to follow such a change at a new world?
Gary Hayes Social Media Count
What Gary Hayes has done is at the very least extraordinary because he has gathered a wide number of everyday actions in Social, Mobile, Games and Heritage and tallied them by the second for any length of time. Before the count was created to tell someone that "lots of people" clicked likes and placed comments on Facebook you are simply stating an opinion that, while many will say it is true base on their family or friends' time spent on Facebook, at the end it is still seen as an opinion. Why? You could not prove exactly the number but now Gary Hayes has changed that and more. Now not only can you know the number of videos uploaded to YouTube versus ones watched on Netflicks but you know...you KNOW their numbers. No matter what you have been told in the past it is numbers that hold the most power in the world because they decide on what is selling, what is not, what people do the most on-line or how much money is made in virtual games. They decide who sinks or floats in the business world but that is only half of what we are seeing when we look at the "Count". It shows that while we now can do whatever we want now we can see how many times people around the world do it too. We know and that, while scary, is the second half for teachers.
Think back when books were rare, treasured more than jewels or coin, and how the very thought of seeing one was the greatest high point in many lives. Move forward to when the printing press was invented and more people, even the common folk, could be given the written word. While many might have thought that its value would go down the world was given a taste at what was out there and they wanted more. Now come back to today where literature is seen in every form possible everyday whither we like it or not and books, a once sought for treasure, many see as a forced class assignment. It is too easy today to buy the short version, cliff-notes or other types of cheat sheets for any book so that one dose not have to read it and it saddens me. As a child I loved looking through the library for some new adventure to join in my dreams and that joy has never left but now many hate the thought of reading and if an adult does not like how can their student? I am very worried that the world I am heading for values books less than it does today. I can only hope that I can crack that media shell long enough to show them that learning must come in all forms, both old and new, or we will miss everything.
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