How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses
A class of students attending José Urbina López Primary School in Matamoros, Mexico had little access to the internet, broken classroom equipment, and difficult living situations. Their teacher, Sergio Juárez Correa, helped them succeed in extraordinary ways using a radical teaching method:
“In Finland, teachers underwent years of training to learn how to orchestrate this new style of learning; he was winging it. He began experimenting with different ways of posing open-ended questions on subjects ranging from the volume of cubes to multiplying fractions. ‘The volume of a square-based prism is the area of the base times the height. The volume of a square-based pyramid is that formula divided by three,’ he said one morning. ‘Why do you think that is?’
“He walked around the room, saying little. It was fascinating to watch the kids approach the answer. They were working in teams and had models of various shapes to look at and play with. The team led by Usiel Lemus Aquino, a short boy with an ever-present hopeful expression, hit on the idea of drawing the different shapes—prisms and pyramids. By layering the drawings on top of each other, they began to divine the answer. Juárez Correa let the kids talk freely. It was a noisy, slightly chaotic environment—exactly the opposite of the sort of factory-friendly discipline that teachers were expected to impose. But within 20 minutes, they had come up with the answer.
“‘Three pyramids fit in one prism,’ Usiel observed, speaking for the group. ‘So the volume of a pyramid must be the volume of a prism divided by three.'”
Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share
A man decides to divide himself into 100,000 shares and sell himself on the open market, allowing investors to decide what he should do with his life:
“Then, on August 10, 2008, Merrill asked the shareholders to decide whether he should get a vasectomy. He didn’t tell McCormick that he was going to bring them in on it. As the CEO of himself, he simply wrote a note to his shareholders explaining his position on the subject. ‘Children are a financial drain,’ Merrill wrote. ‘The time investment of raising a child is immense. The responsibility is epic. The impact on future projects would be drastic. In light of these factors, it makes sense to reduce the chances to nearly zero and have a vasectomy performed.'”
“McCormick was furious and embarrassed. ‘He made our personal life public without consulting me,’ she says. It got worse when the ballots came in. Schroeder voted yes. Josh Berezin, a grade-school friend and political consultant, voted yes. To McCormick, it wasn’t just a referendum on the vasectomy. It was also a referendum on whether Merrill’s friends thought he should have kids with her. It was, she says, ‘a judgment on me.'”
Face Blind
For most of his childhood, Bill Choisser thought he was normal. He just assumed that nobody saw faces. But slowly, it dawned on him that he was different. Other people recognized their mothers on the street. He did not. During the 1970s, as a small-town lawyer in the Illinois Ozarks, he struggled to convince clients that he was competent even though he couldn’t find them in court. He never greeted the judges when he passed them on the street – everyone looked similarly blank to him – and he developed a reputation for arrogance. His father, also a lawyer, told him to pay more attention. His mother grew distant from him. He felt like he lived in a ghost world. Not being able to see his own face left him feeling hollow.
How Elon Musk Turned Tesla Into the Car Company of the Future
Just three years ago, Tesla Motors was in big trouble. The company’s inaugural product—the $109,000 Tesla Roadster—was a money-loser before a single unit had been delivered.