Teaching vs. Indoctrinating Your Children

What is the difference between teaching and indoctrinating? It’s a question that we don’t often think too deeply about, because the answer feels pretty obvious. It’s something bad that other people do to teach children falsehood before they know any better. Teaching is concerned with truth, and indoctrination is concerned with ridiculous dogma. But from an objective perspective, it’s hard to tell who is doing the indoctrinating and who isn’t.

What Poker Can Teach You About Life

I know a lot of people shun gambling and card playing, but there are some valuable lessons that can be learned from poker. I find that playing a few rounds can be rather educational. Of course, I’m not suggesting that people take their mortgage payments to Vegas in hopes of coming back rich. This is just a list of a few life lessons that poker (specifically No Limit Texas Hold’em) can teach to those who are paying attention.

Disaster By Design

Much research of human beings tends to focus on aggregates and averages. But humans come in various shapes and sizes; they have various skills and weaknesses; they do not all travel the same road at the same pace at the same age. One would not issue the same size of clothing to every first-grader; it could come up short on some, and sag on others. Why, then, must they read from the same page of the same primers? Why do the same single-digit addition, from the same page of the same textbook?