Despite being plenty bright and intelligent, she’s long struggled in school. In fact, kindergarten was the last time she had excelled. She had a wonderful kindergarten teacher who encouraged her to explore as a learner, and that was an environment in which she thrived. Once she encountered the more rigid expectations of grade school, her interest faded and a seemingly endless struggle ensued, until she finally graduated from high school (by the skin of her teeth).

After a year away from school in which she realized how much money it actually takes to live the way she’s used to, she started in a community college degree program in Veterinary Technology. And everything changed because she was excited about what she was learning. She studied hard, went to professors for extra help, became part of a study group with experienced students, and found herself getting good grades.

But it’s not the good grades that I’m most proud of, I now realize. It’s all the possibilities that she’s opened up for herself by learning how to learn. People who learn well can do just about anything. They can respond to economic adversity by acquiring new skills. They can pursue their dreams by learning to do what’s needed to achieve them. In short, their lives become an expanding web of possibilities. And that’s the exciting kind of life I’d wish for anyone to have.

So, becoming a good student isn’t about the GPA. It’s about opening the door to amazing opportunities. That’s why I’m such a proud father today!

So, this title caught my attention — Your Brain: The Missing Manual. Very clever. I didn’t buy my brain, but it sure is a complex tool that I wish I knew how to use better, and there’s no user’s guide, either. I haven’t read this book, so I can’t comment on it, but I am curious about it and will look into it.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo will speak Thursday afternoon at the TED conference about parallels between his infamous 1971 “prison experiment” at Stanford and prisoner abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq more than 30 years later. Wired.com has an exclusive video from Zimbardo’s talk, featuring Abu Ghraib photos he says are previously unseen.

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It’s easiest to change the mind by changing behavior, and that’s probably as true in the office as on the pitching mound.

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Brown University is eliminating tuition for students whose parents earn less than $60,000, after decisions by fellow Ivy League universities to bolster financial aid as their endowments grow.

In addition:

The university, in Providence, R.I., said on Saturday that it also planned to substitute grants for student loans in the financial aid packages of students whose families earned less than $100,000 a year. The new program cuts reliance on loans for all students regardless of family income, the university said in a statement posted on its Web site.

Of course, there’s always some bad news, too: Brown’s tuition is rising 3.9%, bringing total costs, including room and board to nearly $50,000 per year. Just astounding . . .

In a kind of educational gold rush, American universities are competing to set up outposts in countries with limited higher education opportunities. American universities — not to mention Australian and British ones, which also offer instruction in English, the lingua franca of academia — are starting, or expanding, hundreds of programs and partnerships in booming markets like China, India and Singapore.

It’s not going to be a simple matter to accomplish. But I like the idea of exporting US higher education. We’ve already made an indelible mark on so many other cultures through our commercial influence — not to mention military presence — and our system of higher education offers what I’d like to think of as the best view of our culture. It’s a side of of “us” that we can all be proud of, and the effects of spreading “American” education around the world could turn out to be far more positive and meaningful in the long run than anything else we’ve done.

I know I’m biased, as a former teacher, but I believe learning is almost always a good thing.

I would love to know more about how other call centers are structured as I am writing a master’s thesis on the topic of call center leadership. — Karen, L.L. Bean, Inc.

Pretty cool! Do you know how many of your frontline supervisors are writing a thesis on some aspect of call center management? How much are you doing to encourage this kind of professional development in your management team?
call center management

In his victory speech after winning the South Carolina primary Saturday night, John McCain acknowledged the economic challenges we face, and then said: “But nothing is inevitable in our country. We are the captains of our fate.” McCain comes from a generation that, in its youth, was made to memorize poetry… one of the poems he had memorized in school was William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” (1875)….One can see why “Invictus” might have appealed to the young McCain. One can see why snatches of it might have stuck in his mind while a prisoner of war, and after. But his allusion to its coda reminds us of what’s so distinctive about McCain as a contemporary political figure: He’s not thoroughly modern….

Maybe a dose of this type of neo-Victorianism is what the 21st century needs. A fair number of Republican and independent voters seem to think so, if one can infer as much from their support of McCain at the polls. But, amazingly, a neo-Victorian straightforwardness might also turn out to be strategically smart.

I can’t say I agree that John McCain is what we need, but it’s a fair point to make that he’s distinctly different in more ways than are commonly acknowledged. He is doing it his way, and that’s worth admiring.

The pitch — “a YouTube for ideas” — appealed to Mr. Summers. “Larry, to his credit, is open to new ideas,” Mr. Hopkins recalled recently. “He grilled me for two hours.” In the age of user-generated content, Mr. Summers did have one worry: “Let’s say someone puts up a porn video next to my macroeconomic speech?”

The NYT article, “Ex-Harvard President Meets a Former Student, and Intellectual Sparks Fly,” is good reading in and of itself, providing an inside look at the launch of a new concept and company, but what’s most interesting to me is the new website itself, Big Think. I’m looking forward to indulging my inner intellectual by checking it out.

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Do you think the humanities have a use in today’s society? Here is a great public discussion on the issue.

Now, I’ll save you some time: don’t bother reading the article unless you are truly an intellectual in search of some mind-bending reasoning about quite an obscure subject. However, in the next breath I have to say that I am astonished at how many people have commented on the article already! So, there are a heckuva lot of intellectuals out there reading Stanley Fish’s argument, and that kind of impresses me.

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