Monday, December 11, 2006

How to Build a Student for the 21st Century ... Emotional Intelligence



EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE IN THE NEWS...
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE U. S. EDUCATION SYSTEM? It doesn't teach Emotional Intelligence says Times cover story (12.10.06) summarized on CNN HERE.
Developing good people skills, EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today's workplace. "Most innovations today involve large teams of people," says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. "We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures."

The article is not about "the national conversation on education [that] has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the 'achievement gap' between social classes [for the past give years]. . . [It] is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get 'left behin' but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can't think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English."

To read the complete article, go HERE.

READ AND HEED: THE SON OF SCROOGE, the review in The Observer calls this new book about Andrew Mellon.

"David Cannadine's account of this 'hollow man', a 'dried-up dollar bill that the wind might whisk away', is, paradoxically, mesmerising," says the review.

The book tells how he lived with his ageing parents into his forties, eating mush for dinner, and then catapulted into a predicatbly disastrous marriage to a beautiful 19 year old.

"Frustrated by flesh-and-blood relationship," it continues, "[Mellon] also began to collect the paintings that would fill his bequest to the nation: the National Gallery. . . [His] favourties were the 18th century portraits of women he described as his 'English beauties.' 'I am surrounded by nice people here,' he told a visitor to his portrait-lined Washington apartment."

"...with its brilliantly-drawn catalogue of moral flaws, missed opportunities, snarled relationships and ruined lives ... it is an American tragedy.

Read the complete book review here. Order the book

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