Category: Learning

Judge orders convicts to learn English

A judge in Pennsylvania has ordered 4 robbers who needed translators to learn English in one year or get put in jail for two years.

WILKES-BARRE – Learn English or go to jail.

That’s the succinct directive Luzerne County Judge Peter Paul Olszewski Jr. made as part of his sentence to four criminals on Tuesday.

The defendants – Luis Reyes, Ricardo Dominguez, Kelvin Reyes-Rosario and Rafael Guzman-Mateo – all needed translators when they appeared in court to plead guilty to criminal conspiracy to commit robbery. It led to Olszewski leveling the unusual condition.

He sentenced them each to four to 24 months in the county prison, but paroled three of them because they have already served at least four months.

But in order for them to avoid the 24 months in prison, Olszewski ordered the men to learn to read and write the English language, earn their GED, and, within 30 days of release, get a full-time job while on parole. The defendants, who range in age from 17 to 22, are to return to court in one year with their parole officers to take an English test, according to Olszewski’s order.

“If they don’t pass, they’re going in for the 24 (months),” Olszewski said.

This is from the local newspaper.

Geography game with Google Maps

A Google maps mashup was made into a very interesting research game, where you have to find out clues to get the location of some place in the world. You get the image and have to match it. It’s tough, but well worth the try. PlaceSpotting.

Education in America

My younger daughter may be going over to the US for high school. I am looking forward to seeing her older sister attend university in the US, but am wary about the prospects for the one going into 10th grade. This article in the Atlantic is one reason why I worry. It shows how local control is causing the US to fall behind. Here in Japan every teacher follows a very specific national curriculum so they are all teaching the same concept, the same equation, the same event in history in the same week. This may seem crazy to you, but it works here. There is a very high literacy rate with a writing system that is 100 times as hard as English. It works. Find out why the locally-run system in the US doesn’t.

A good quote from the article:

“In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once wrote. “This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.”

And kudos to The Atlantic for opening up their archives to all. I’m sure it will lead to increased revenue from increased traffic.

Brains work differently in US and Asia

That’s what a study done at MIT says. East Asians and Americans were asked to make both absolute and relative judgments about shapes and length of lines in a drawing. The Americans used more of their brain for relative judgments, and the East Asians used more of their brains for absolute judgments. Reported in PsyCentral online magazine.