Betrayal

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini: Amir betrays his friend and servant two times. Once he fails to save Hassan from Assef's brutal assault, and then he frames Hassan by placing a watch and money under Hassan's mattress in the servants' shack where Hassan lives with his father Ali. Explain why one of the betrayals is a greater betrayal of Hassan.

Self Regulation

Self Regulation is the latest buzzword being bandied about in educational seminars. Self regulation is best understood through a study that began over 30 years ago. Children (age 4)were given a marshmallow and told that if they could wait 20 minutes without eating the marshmallow they would be given a second marshmallow. Apparently 30 % of the children were able to withstand the urge to munch the tasty treat and were rewarded with a second marshmallow. What did thirty years of tracking these students provide the researchers? They discovered that the students who showed self regulation (or did not like marshmallows) had better grades, higher academic achievement, greater job satisfaction and lower rates of obesity. Self regulation, impulse control, deferred gratification, call it what you will, is a uniquely human behavior that apparently only some humans possess. The study, conducted by Walther Mischel in 1972 at Stanford University, determined that those who self regulate will fare better academically later in life. Self regulation, when appropriately measured, can predict, with a degree of certainty, future successes. The challenge for teachers now is to attempt to teach self regulation. It is apparently a learned rather than a natural trait. See a clip of a recent rendition of the Marshmallow Test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EjJsPylEOY

Write a response to the "self Regulation" experiment after reading some reviews of the experiment.

A Billion Wicked Thoughts

A Billion Wicked Thoughts is a book based on the world's largest social experiment ever conducted - the internet and the searches that people make have provided the authors, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, with a wealth of information for studying human sexual desire. Now, any well read student of sociology or psychology will find familiar territory in their writing, but gems are found throughout the book. The idea that men desire women (mostly) but women desire being desired by men comes as a bit of a surprise. It tells us fellows why it's been so hard to pick up women by merely presenting a witty line or a flash of muscle. Women are not impressed, like men are, by simple visual cues. We men now have some ammunition for more successful date making! Let the woman know that she is desired and you're well on your way to successfully impressing her. Much of the writing is devoted to understanding the differences in male and female desires and how those differences explain the divergence in the things that we all search for in the world of internet titillation. Men, obviously, look for images. Women search for something more intellectually stimulating - erotic literature. The authors also do a fine job of explaining how gay men are still men. Their sexual preferences may be for men, but everything else about the way they think is identical to how all men think - simply and largely visually. The differences between what men write and what women write is barely distinguishable, until the writing of pornography is considered. Again, women focus on relationships and romance, men, on the physical attributes and the actions that accompany them. Brutes. Read the book. You will be pleasantly surprised by how the internet has enabled the authors to reveal stark differences in male and female sexual desire.