This Amazing Map Reveals Every Country's Ultimate Personality Traits

https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/amazing-map-reveals-every-countrys-ultimate-personality-traits/

Finnish schools teach languages earlier than ever, but struggle to move beyond English (+ audio)

https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finnish_schools_teach_languages_earlier_than_ever_but_struggle_to_move_beyond_english/11492669

"Children starting their basic primary schooling this week are guaranteed the opportunity to learn a foreign language in first grade, but most will have to make do with English.

That's not an ideal situation for those who already have a high level of English (are native English speakers), such as Sanna Boow's eight-year-old daughter who only moved to Finland two years ago from New Zealand.

She started school last year in Kirkkonummi, but had to join the English-as-a-second language class with everyone else.

"She's just said that she's really bored, as she's just sitting there listening," says Boow. "It's her least favourite class."

The problem, according to Boow, is the way language choices are made. Many schools don't offer a choice at all: only English is on offer. In those that do have alternatives, there are often minimum number requirements and that relies on enough other parents choosing the right options.

"They had a vote among the parents about what language the parents would want, Swedish or English," adds Boow. "If there's not more than 12 who choose Swedish, then English would be the other language. There was not enough interest so she had to have English classes like everyone else."

English not the best option

This is a common story. According to data from the National Agency for Education, some 83 percent of children learn English as their first foreign language.

While this might be annoying for children who already know the language, neuroscientist Minna Huotilainen of the University of Helsinki says it's also not great for those without a background in English.

Most Finnish kids, says Huotilainen, would be better served by first learning some other language instead.

"If you think about a seven-year-old in the first grade, there are so many strengths in language learning at that age," says Huotilainen, citing pronunciation, word separation, getting to grips with new phonemes as examples.

Learning lots of vocabulary at a young age is much more challenging than learning the sounds, so it pays to learn languages where pronunciation and listening skills are difficult and avoiding those where learning masses of vocabulary is key and investing in vocabulary at a later age.

For native Finnish speakers, Huotilainen says French and Portuguese have different phonemes — that is, the different sounds that make up words — that are harder to pick up in adulthood.

Tonal languages like Mandarin, Thai and Taiwanese Hokkien are also a good option as tones are tricky to master for grownups.

Back of the queue, for optimal language development in kids with normal language acquisition skills, is English. If a child has difficulties in learning languages, it might make sense to start English early.

"But for every other child I would not, because they will learn English anyway," said Huotilainen.

A tale of two cities

In Helsinki, schools have offered foreign languages from first grade since 2018. The capital was a trailblazer in that regard, with schools nationwide adopting that policy in 2019.

Even so, the city is working to encourage more families to learn other languages.

"We started working with pre-primary teachers and groups to introduce languages in those groups. So we tried to raise awareness about languages in these groups. The awareness about language learning has been increasing since then,” said the city's language coordinator Satu Koistinen.

The strategy seems to have paid off. In 2018 just ten percent of students starting their first foreign language chose English. In 2019 that jumped to 15 percent.

The acknowledged leader in language diversity in Finland is Tampere, and the woman responsible is Outi Verkama. She says that the key is consistent work across the city, at preschool level and in schools.

"Our principle is to support the families so that the kids can start with the language they want to; all areas in the city offer equal possibilities for each family," says Verkama.

All kids in Tampere's daycare centres get 'language showers' between the ages of three and five. These are short taster sessions in languages they will get the chance to learn in local schools (as opposed to 'language baths', which offer language immersion in a specific foreign language for children in certain daycare groups).

Then in preschool, children do eight weeks of tuition in each of four language options at their local schools, taught by the same teachers that would teach the classes in school.

Only then do parents choose, and it seems to be working. In 2020 some 35.8 percent of children entering first grade in Tampere chose to learn a language other than English.

Children outside of Tampere have a less extensive choice of languages, and those native English speakers stuck in English classes have to push for more challenging work.

Take the plunge

Sanna Boow says the teachers have been understanding, but she's hoping her daughter gets a bit more help with more advanced aspects of language learning.

"It'd be nice to have more tuition in writing skills, for example," says Boow.

Minna Huotilainen says that parents should be brave and take the plunge if their kids have the chance to learn a different language.

There is plenty of time to develop fluency in English, which is almost ubiquitous in Finland anyway.

"The learning methods have developed so much and they are such fast learners, and they are surrounded by English all the time so they learn English so easily," says Huotilainen.

This week's All Points North podcast covered first foreign language choices in schools, among other topics. You can listen to the full podcast via the embedded player here, Yle Areena, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your usual podcast player using the RSS feed. Be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for the APN newsletter.

Story continues after "

FB We need to redesign the gardening and farming system is because the standard Western approach just does NOT WORK to meet real people’s real needs in the real world

https://www.facebook.com/groups/permacultureglobal/permalink/3341113852606642/?__tn__=K-R

FB We need to redesign the gardening and farming system is because the standard Western approach just does NOT WORK to meet real people’s real needs in the real world

"I’M TIRED of arguing about RACE AND COLONIALISM AND POLITICS that have NOTHING to do with Permaculture! Let’s ARGUE about GARDENING TECHNIQUES for a change instead!

The reason we need to redesign the gardening and farming system is because the standard Western approach just does NOT WORK to meet real people’s real needs in the real world! Using the standard approach you spend $1000/season, and hundreds of labor hours to grow $300 of produce!

And in a way that uses more materials and is worse for nature than shopping at a grocery store, which doesn’t make sense!

That’s because this system historically evolved out of colonial agriculture that relied on slave labor, so the extra “input” work was “free.” Traditional home and community gardens around the world followed the “law of diminishing returns” (80/20 principle) and people stopped doing extra work after that extra work no longer made sense! In most horticultural societies people grow most of their own food on a few hours of labor per week. These gardens met human needs sustainably while actually increasing biodiversity.

20% of weeding work, for example gets you 80% of the crop yield benefit, but completely weed free “clean” fields were conspicuous consumption that showed a land owner was so wealthy he could put his slaves to work doing useless aesthetic labor. This reduction in biodiversity has no benefit to humans. In fact, now we realize that because it has a huge negative impact on ecosystem health, it may even be a case of where it goes beyond diminished returns and causes “negative returns.”

But the basic aesthetic of this system is the “dominance of nature,” utterly destroying an ecosystem and converting it to exclusive human use. The main benefit is that it allows farming and farm land to be centralized under hierarchical control so the yields of a worker can be distributed upwards to a ruling elite. This is no secret, it’s a well-known corner stone of the colonial “divide and conquer” strategy, to confiscate sustainable productive family and community farm land and centralize it under a ruling elite, which then has an incentive to maintain an oppressive social hierarchy. This was done around the world in the colonial era.

But look of the slave labor approach was seen as “culturally superior” and exported around the world with colonialism, replacing highly efficient in human labor and ecologically beneficial farms, on the grounds that our “clean” looking agriculture in tidy rows was “superior.” This was used as justification to remove indigenous people off their land. Because even though many of these highly sustainable indigenous systems were documented to be many times more productive than dramatically unsustainable European systems of the time, the indigenous farms were claimed to be “undeveloped.” Thus, colonizers spread across America, claiming “undeveloped land” and destroying highly diverse, sustainable and highly productive agroecologies with low-production, unsustainable deserts. Healthy native landscapes were replaced by the already colonized models of Europe.

Later, the same aesthetic judgement was used to confiscate land from African American farmers. After being freed from slavery, many black families were given access to land to farm. Others acquired land in other places around the country. Period reports from white policy makers were quite clear that the black families had used the land to set up highly efficient food forest systems that met their needs on a few hours of labor, which was seen as unacceptable because it did not utilize black labor to produce an excess for white society. So the land was confiscated and given to white land owners to force the black farmers to farm in the colonial manor at low or no wages.

The rise of “green revolution” techniques using fossil fuels and plastics allowed a whole new level of centralization, and many statist colonial theorists like Henry Kissinger well-recognized the divide and conquer potential. Armies of “agriculture” students were sent as apostles for the new methods around the globe, selling the new techniques to dictators and warlords. Indigenous peoples were pushed to even more marginal land with thin soils, and the rich soils and ecologies their families had created over generations of investment were burned off to demonstrate the “high yield” potential of the “superior” western techniques. Meanwhile, the poor productivity of indigenous farms on their new desert landscapes were used to show how “poor” indigenous productivity was, and to justify Westernization as “defeating hunger!”

Meanwhile old growth food forests burn, people grow fat while malnourished, ocean dead zones grow, and a mass extinction continues on.

And the same is true in the developed world, where the same agribusinesses, created as tools of colonial warfare, are exploiting people’s desires for self-sufficiency and connection with nature, to sell their corporate products of oil, plastic and concrete, and an HGTV aesthetic of clean tidy gardens that leaves no room for nature. Nature must be dominated with their handy and affordable products! People’s good intentions are used to make money for the wealthy at the expense of their own health and nature, and the idea of white, western supremacy is reinforced relative to the “dirty, uncivilized” look of traditional societies around the world who live in cooperation with nature.

When we begin to embrace working with nature instead of against it, we’re unwriting one of the most basic ways we’ve been indoctrinated into the mindset of “modern” Western supremacy and superiority, as well as the idea of dominating nature, which has been used to perpetuate some very violent and destructive systems.

So, anyway food forest gardens are way better than HGTV style veggie beds, amiright?"

Formation of Nations 《 sciencedirect.com

Formation of Nations 《 sciencedirect.com

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/formation-of-nations

Brad Pitt's Unconventional Hygiene Habit Is Also Totally Relatable

https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/brad-pitts-unconventional-hygiene-habit-is-also-totally-relatable.html/


Brad Pitt's Unconventional Hygiene Habit Is Also Totally Relatable
Robin Cortez | MORE ARTICLES
August 3, 2020

Brad Pitt is one of the most well-known names in the entertainment industry. Since he first began acting, the talented star has since taken up the roles of producer and director as well. His fame and success have skyrocketed. But in some ways, Pitt is just like everyone else. See where it all began for Pitt, and find out what unconventional hygiene habit everyone is talking about. 

Brad Pitt | Michael Tran/Getty Images

A look back at Brad Pitt’s journey in the spotlight

Pitt was born in 1963, and some of his fans and followers may be surprised to learn that his first name is actually “William,” according to IMDb. Over the years the professional actor has come such a long way. The star is known for his striking good looks and compelling performances while on-screen. He first began acting in 1987 on the soap opera Another World. However, with time he ended up landing a tremendous amount of major roles and characters. Fight Club, Moneyball, and Ocean’s Eleven are a few of the legendary films Pitt has been successfully cast in.

Aside from his career, the star is often in the headlines for his romances. For years the world followed the love saga involving Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and Jennifer Aniston. Though there is no arguing his skills and talents, his fans and followers have been discussing him for a different more eccentric reason. 

 

What unconventional hygiene habit does Brad Pitt have that is also totally relatable? 

Thanks to social media and the paparazzi, fans are able to indulge in all the exclusive and inside information when it comes to their favorite celebrities. That is how the world learned of Pitt’s unusual sanitation habit.
U
Everyone can probably relate to the struggles and obstacles that come with a busy day or schedule, but Pitt has found a way to oddly, yet efficiently, navigate them.

While filming Inglorious Basterds, Pitt shared with his co-worker that when he doesn’t have time to shower he just uses baby wipes, according to Ranker. It might seem strange at first, but it definitely seems to help Pitt and his pits. Parents can find this all too relatable since baby wipes are essential when it comes to chaos, children, and everything in between. 

What other celebrities have reputations for their unusual hygiene habits and reputations? 

Pitt was not alone when it came to bizarre and strange quirks and habits, and to be honest, his habits appeared to be on the less extreme side. In the case of Megan Fox, she shared that she almost never flushes the toilet.

Robert Pattinson revealed how much he doesn’t wash his hair. Apparently, Pattinson has gone up to six weeks before giving in.

In the case of Julia Roberts, she has indicated that her decisions to cut back on showering and using deodorants are environment-based. Orlando Bloom also limits washing but when it comes to his clothes.

The most surprising piece of information may have been that Jessica Simpson doesn’t enjoy brushing her teeth and actually chooses to brush them about three times a week. 

In reflection, Pitt’s baby wipe habit doesn’t seem too strange in this eclectic and surprising lineup. Though it may not be the most commonly used practice, Pitt confidently believes in the power of baby wipes. Hopefully, Pitt and all of Hollywood’s celebrities will continue to share their unusual and insider information.

[Correction: An earlier version incorrectly said Brad Pitt started acting in 1964.]

 

Reference:

Rebecca Shortall (Updated August 2, 20191.5M views) 16 Celebrities With Disgusting Hygiene Habits, https://m.ranker.com/list/celebrities-with-gross-hygiene-habits/rebecca-shortall