Do the schools really know how to teach?

Have good grades, get into a good school, successfully graduate, find a good-paid job right after college. Is this the way how to have a happy life in our society?

I have been raised in Prague, Czech Republic. The Czech education is in some ways different from the American one. In high school is the work much more intense. I remember having fourteen subjects per year. Our schedule was given to us and we could not really choose what classes to take till our junior and senior year. Most of the schoolwork was about tests. It was not really about expressing our own ideas. Not about enhancing our imagination or the skills we were good at. If you have studied properly you would get a good grade. That is still the measurement who is intelligent and who is not. Students with all A’s on their transcript = intelligent students. Is it, however, that easy to classify the intelligence? The simple answer is no. Grades do not say everything. Grades cannot show if the student is just lazy or if he really tried, or if it was just a bad day.

Most of the tests in Prague are just about memorizing things you will forget soon anyways. What is the point of learning information by heart without even thinking about the essence of the subject? The crucial ability we should learn students is how to connect the information they have already learned with the new ones. Only that way they will be successful in the real life. The life is not about writing tests to show your proficiency or being caught during cheating. The life is about the experience and we need to realize that.

The birth registrationnumber/rodné číslo

Have you ever heard of it? Probably not, if you are American. I was having lunch with my friends yesterday and we started talking about middle name and how come I don’t have one. My friend asked me, “so how do you distinguish people with the same name?“ “Well we have the birth number,“ I told her rather confused. All Czechs have one.

Governments around the world have introduced national identification number systems which are used to keep track of citizens as well as for taxation, social security and healthcare purposes. The systems vary from country to country, and in the Czech Republic there are two principle forms: the ID card( občanský průkaz) and the birth certification number, which is given to all Czech citizens at birth.

The first part of the number is the date of birth of the holder in YYMMDD format. The second part consists of four digits. Both are separated by a slash. For women the number 50 is added to the month part of the number, so for an example a birthday in April is shown as YY54DD/XXXX.

It is actually pretty cool. :D

                                                         our ID card

Is the end of our world close?

Moviemakers are obsessed with the ideas of catastrophic movies, where nature finally demostrates its power. I can name few of them – The day after tomorow, 2012, and so on. Is it because we enjoy watching our final end so much? And at the same we are terrified it may happen in our real world? I personally enjoy very much watching catastrophic movies, because they are thrilling and dramatic, but I always know that the main characters will survive somehow. Even if it would be impossible in the real life. However if the end of the world would happen for real, are we ready to face it? Is the US government already secretly preparing way out of it only for few selected and we, the ordinary people, have no clue about it? If it is true than we are basically screwed. 

But let me go back to the cause of all of this. Are we the ones resposible for the global warming and other climate changes? Or are they just common and natural ones? Should we get disturbed with everyday news from all around the world about floods, earthqueakes or hurricanes? I am not an expert on global changes, so it is hard to say. Some experts say it is normal and that is how the nature works from its beginning. But than there are also few contradictory views. Either way I must admit we definitely have some partial guilt. We stopped thinking about the nature as part of  ourselves. In contrast to our ancestors, we are unwilling to see the bigger picture – our connection to nature. We are the nature and it is a time realize that. We should cooperate with each other to help the nature to regain its power.