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Every town has the same two malls: the one white people go to and the one white people used to go to. - Chris Rock translation without rhetoric: every town has 2 malls a good one and a junk one I know this sounds strange, but as a kid, I was really shy. Painfully shy. The turning point was freshman year, when I was the biggest geek alive. No one, I mean no one, even talked to me. -Jim Carrey translation without rhetoric: as a kid i was shy, but when I became a freshman no one talked to me because I was a geek

"Few students are as lucky as Chris Bail [...] When I was about 11 or so, a group of kids threw stones at me, and that stuck in my head. That was just a big, big experience for me, and I guess I'm really lucky to have that because I know kids that are writing about, like, concerts they went to and stuff like that.'' I am disturbed greatly. What does not kill us will only make us stronger... Scary thought: Students trying to get into college will take extremes for more interesting topics to write about. What if it happens? Pressure. It exists. But don't let it RULE or RUIN your life.

I find it quite sad that students will go to the extremes and seek something that they think admissions officers will find intriguing rather than it coming from their gut and what is important to them. In my opinion the best advice I could give to someone writing their college essay is, be yourself. Don't try to be someone you're not.

"And though they seem to have more collaborators than ever before, from cooperative English teachers to new Web sites that offer successful essays for sale, the competition seems tougher than ever, now that so many early applicants have whittled the number of available slots." To me the college application is sounding more and more deceptive. By the time you take that raw essay written by purely yourself and it goes through multiple English teachers and websites, and other peers, it goes from your writing to like your teacher's writing. I feel that after all of the processes it goes through, all the people who review it, the finished product really doesn't show the college who YOU are.

The Spelling Society speculates that English may just be the world's most irregularly spelled language. Masha Bell, the vice chair of the English Spelling Society and author of the book Understanding English Spelling, analyzed the 7,000 most common English words and found that 60 percent of them had one or more unpredictably used letters. As there's no systematic way to learn to read or write modern English-people have to memorize the spelling of thousands of individual words, file them away in their mental databases, and retrieve them when needed--English-speaking children typically needed about three years to master the basics of reading and writing, whereas their counterparts in most European countries needed a year or less. Moreover, English-speaking children then spend years progressing through different reading levels and mastering the spelling of more and more words. That means it typically takes English-speaking children at least 10 years to become moderately proficient spellers-memorizing about 400 new words per year-and because they forget and have to revise many of the spellings they've previously learned, "learning to spell is a never-ending chore."

"My husband's family couldn't believe he spoke French as if he were living in France," Raphael's mother, Raquel Jegouzo, said. At home, Raquel speaks to Raphael in English and French. His father, Erwan Jegouzo, a native French speaker, speaks to Raphael exclusively in French. The Jegouzos might be doing something right.

According to this article, bilingualism in children is correlated with tissue density in part of the brain responsible for language, memory and attention. This article confronts concerns that teaching a child two languages causes confusion, stating that such barriers are untrue and that bilingualism actually improves linguistic learning.

Natalie Brito, a New York University Professor of Applied Psychology, created an app to help the challenges of Hispanic parents when they want to teach their kids Spanish in an English speaking country like the US. She goes over "language racism" when Hispanic nannies/caregivers are told to speak English instead of their native Spanish language.

Strong language is often looked down upon. In this article, it explains that while swear words are often used for derogatory means, it actually serves as a "gateway drug of the emotions." Swear words are bad, but in this article it's not as bad as people think because it has no meaning. We hear these swear words all the time, and it's thrown around without any meaning, such as saying homework is "retarded" even though that's actually not possible.

This article talks about the different ages kids detect sarcasm.

According to two new World Health Organization reports, about 1.7 million children under the age of 5 die each year because of environmental hazards. It's the first such estimate of the child death toll from environmental causes.

Born between 1995 and 2012, teens are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet. There is compelling evidence that the devices we've placed in young people's hands are having profound effects on their lives-and making them seriously unhappy.. Some interesting (and disturbing) findings: 1. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone. 2. While teens are physically safer than they've ever been, they're also more isolated and more subject to psychological harm. Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. In addition, the number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It's not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out. 3. Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy. 4. Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today's teens. Boys' depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls' increased by 50 percent-more than twice as much. The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. While boys tend to bully one another physically, girls are more likely to do so by undermining a victim's social status or relationships. Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform to ostracize and exclude other girls 24/7. 5. Sleep deprivation: nearly all teens sleep with their phones in close proximity, and the devices are interfering with sleep: Many teens now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is signific

This article explains the reason why we call our parents mom and dad. The article gives examples of different ways to say mom and dad in different languages in a table, to show how similar the sounds of mom and dad are across those languages. The article then explained how social constructs and culture keeps us from calling our mom or dad their legal name.

This article discusses why children call their parents 'Mom' and 'Dad', and why not other names. It talks about how the role sounds play, and the role that cultural rules play in why most people refer their parents in this way.

Dr. Michael Rich is the director of the Center on Media and Child Health and the Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders. Rich notes some major takeaways: 1.Babies' brains are elastic: the first three years of life are critical for both language and overall brain development. Unlike other animals, humans are born with embryonic brains, rendering babies helpless and in need of caregivers while also providing a developmental advantage: allowing us to build our brains in response to the challenges and stimuli of the environment we're in," In the first three years of life, the brain triples in volume due to synaptic connections, therefore stimuli and challenges babies receive within that time frame help babies build creative, flexible and resilient brains. 2. Face to face interaction is valuable. 3. It's not just about screen time duration, but the type of content being consumed. For example, young children can interact meaningfully via Facetime, if they've previously interacted with that person. However, screens as a distraction for kids in lieu of human interaction= not good.

This article talks about how screen time affects babies language development. The first nine months of a baby's life are important for a child to understand sounds and how they should be used. They are able to understand language much earlier than they actually start talking. Many doctors and scientists encourage parents to communicate with their babies as soon as possible to develop language. Recent studies found that babies that spent more time in front of a screen than talking suffered in language development. I found it interesting that not all screen time is necessarily bad for a child's language development. For example, FaceTime can be beneficially for children because they are interacting in a meaningful way but using screens as a distraction for kids can be harmful.

This article reminded me of the Ted Talk we watched in class. It's interesting how a "language nest" works and how parents get paid to learn and speak Ojibwe with their children. I'm curious how language revitalization will evolve in the future.

Children can study music to boost their academic performance

This article talks about connections between kids with ADHD and communications impairments.

This month, the journal Pediatrics published a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity in 3-to 5-year-old children as they listened to age-appropriate stories. The researchers found differences in brain activation according to how much the children had been read to at home. Children whose parents reported more reading at home and more books in the home showed significantly greater activation of brain areas in a region of the left hemisphere called the parietal-temporal-occipital association cortex. This brain area is "a watershed region, all about multisensory integration, integrating sound and then visual stimulation," said the lead author, Dr. John S. Hutton, a clinical research fellow at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. This region of the brain is known to be very active when older children read to themselves, but Dr. Hutton notes that it also lights up when younger children are hearing stories. What was especially novel was that children who were exposed to more books and home reading showed significantly more activity in the areas of the brain that process visual association, even though the child was in the scanner just listening to a story and could not see any pictures. "When kids are hearing stories, they're imagining in their mind's eye when they hear the story," said Dr. Hutton. "For example, 'The frog jumped over the log.' I've seen a frog before, I've seen a log before, what does that look like?" The different levels of brain activation, he said, suggest that children who have more practice in developing those visual images, as they look at picture books and listen to stories, may develop skills that will help them make images and stories out of words later on. "It helps them understand what things look like, and may help them transition to books without pictures," he said. "It will help them later be better readers because they've developed that part of the brain

Researchers Tyler G. Okimoto, Michael Wenzel and Kyli Hedrick reported on what they've found happens in people's minds when they refuse to apologize. "We do find that apologies do make apologizers feel better, but the interesting thing is that refusals to apologize also make people feel better and, in fact, in some cases it makes them feel better than an apology would have," Okimoto said in an interview. He believes the research, in fact, may provide a clue on how best to get people to apologize. Our conventional approach, especially with kids, is to force people to apologize. But if people are reluctant to apologize because apologies make them feel threatened, coercion is unlikely to help - that is, if a sincere apology is hoped for.

We each absorb select scenes in our environment through which we interpret a situation, creating our own reality by that to which we give attention. Our brain naturally tries to process what could otherwise be overwhelming amounts of information, by reducing it to a simplified story. However, because that story is based on a small sliver of reality, our perception may be incorrect. Thought holes, or cognitive distortions, are skewed perceptions of reality. They are negative interpretations of a situation based on poor assumptions. Studies show self-defeating thoughts (i.e., "I'm a loser") can trigger self-defeating emotions (i.e., pain, anxiety, malaise) that, in turn, cause self-defeating actions (i.e., acting out, skipping school). Left unchecked, this tendency can also lead to more severe conditions, such as depression and anxiety. Accurate thinking--identifying and recognizing one's false assumptions--can help reduce negative thinking. Here are 8 common thought holes: 1. Jumping to conclusions: judging a situation based on assumptions as opposed to definitive facts 2. Mental filtering: paying attention to the negative details in a situation while ignoring the positive 3. Magnifying: magnifying negative aspects in a situation 4. Minimizing: minimizing positive aspects in a situation 5. Personalizing: assuming the blame for problems even when you are not primarily responsible 6. Externalizing: pushing the blame for problems onto others even when you are primarily responsible 7. Overgeneralizing: concluding that one bad incident will lead to a repeated pattern of defeat 8. Emotional reasoning: assuming your negative emotions translate into reality, or confusing feelings with facts