According to the authors of the recently published statistical study “No More Excuses-Personality Traits and Academic Dishonesty in Online Courses” (Journal of Statistical Science and Application, V2 (2014) 111-118) cheaters now run rampant across most college campuses.  With the number of undergrads taking classes online—4.3 million and growing fast, opportunities for academic dishonesty are expanding.  Surprisingly, this experiment showed less cheating in the virtual than in the traditional classroom settings; indicative, perhaps, of those going online being more motivated to learn, rather than just achieving credits.  This is good to see.  Also, I was happy to learn that this and other similar studies found Americans being less accepting of cheaters and applying higher standards for honesty than most other nationalities.  Along those lines, US News and World Reports in this June posting advises students to “Think Twice Before Cheating in Online Courses,” particularly when being proctored by webcam.  The lady pictured with a cheat-sheet written on her arm might never get the chance to roll up a sleeve.  That’s just too bad.

Read this New York Times essay on why Parental Involvement Is Overrated and weep for all the time you spent helping your child become well-educated.  It doesn’t help that

“most parents appear to be ineffective at helping their children at homework.”

Many a time my kids asked me to help them do math, which I really dreaded—not because I could not come up with the answer, but due to the constantly-changing way schools taught it.  After being told many times that I got the right answer the wrong way and thus provided absolutely no help, I began bearing down on studying the latest-and-greatest math book first before working out the problem.

By the way, I made the student go through the materials with me—that made this an effective approach for parental mentoring, or so I thought.  Now I wonder if I should’ve even bothered.

However, one time one of my daughters did say that my way of explaining a puzzling math problem made a lot more sense the either the teacher or the book.  That’s one time out of hundred other times that my good deeds did not go unpunished, but like the single outstanding golf shot out of hundred bad ones in any-given round, I remember this fondly. 🙂

Buried in my file of fodder for blogs I re-discovered a heads-up from the New York Times on 1/21/11 that giving yourself a quick quiz after studying something once works better than going over and over it.  The test-triggered active retrieval promoted meaningful learning by half in terms of how much students remembered a week later.

If you know something, or if you have stored information about an event from the distant past, and never use that information, never think of it, your brain is functionally equivalent to that of an otherwise identical brain that does not “contain” that information.

— Cognitive neuroscientist Endel Tulving quoted in this publication in Current Directions in Psychological Science of research on active retrieval by Jeffrey D. Karpicke of Purdue University

Coincidentally I just read this passage in “Brenner and God” by Wolf Haas, three time winner of the German Thriller Prize, which struck a chord about how the mind works in mysterious ways: “…just like a light that’s too bright can be bad for the eyes, so, too, can a mind that’s too awake be not at all good for thoughts…a half-asleep person can always outmatch an awake person by a long shot, no discussion.”

This happens with me when I am really wrapped up in a writing project or dealing with a very tough problem.  Then I cannot sleep well as thoughts keep winding through my head.  Often as I am nearly into a dream an answer comes to me.  Then the only thing is to get up and write it down in the hopes that next morning it still makes sense.  In any case, if I do not make a note, I then cannot sleep for fear of forgetting it.  But surprisingly these ideas do usually hold up to the light of day, albeit not always terribly brilliant.

Does this happen to you too?