“There’s been some improvement, but in terms of academic achievement, improved only slightly, and in math, it appears to have gone down. What lesson is there from that?”

From the mouth of Melinda:

“It would be great to work in just new schools or new models of schools, but we’re realizing that you have to work at the district and the state level. You have to have policy changes that support these 1,800 schools that we’re working in.”

“It would be nice if the curriculum that was there really worked, but, as you start to look at it, we’re realizing that the gains we’re making are in reading and in English[...]But you’re absolutely right: Math and science, there needs to be a curriculum change, and sometimes even teacher training to make sure that we’re teaching the right things to students.”

Bill provides an interesting insight, linking the foundation’s dual causes of promoting global health and modernizing the education systems:

“The impact of improving health is that the population growth goes down, and so you can educate more kids, feed more kids. It’s paradoxical that, when you have better health, families choose to have less children, because they’ve been having enough children so that they can be sure that a few of them will survive and take care of them. So as health improves, then all the other problems are dramatically easier to tackle.”

Listen to or read the full transcript of the interview.

Some Thoughts
A sure-fire attention killer is learning math for math’s sake; this was true for me in most subjects. As for todays youth, I’d bet that things haven’t changed much. I was lucky enough to be shown the “light”…the practical application of this knowledge opened a new world of possibilities. My motivation came as the result of finding more effective strategies to get what I wanted.

What Motivates a 10 Year-Old
G.I. Joe and He-Man
Those blue and white ticker tapes run across the TV every night my father (a banker) gets home – I eventually had to ask him, “What could possibly be so interesting about this that you watch it like it’s your religion?” I was facinated by the idea that people were earning money not by “going to work,” but just putting the money they earned into pieces of paper (You mean there’s a way to get EVERY Star Wars action figure besides mowing lawns!). As time passed, this led to discussions of financial statements, the various ratios derived from them that investors use value companies and the function of interest rates.

More Recently
I’ve been facinated by the analytics used in search engine rankings (although I have yet to actually delve into the topic, the interest is there…now, if only the time was).

So, what’s motivated you to learn what would otherwise be a dull topic?

The New York Public Library

Archive.org

Wikipedia.org

About.com

Google.com

Ask.metafilter.com

This list is not definitive, and depending upon the topic you are researching, there are numerous other sites that will focus your efforts and deal with the topic more comprehensively. But this is a fine place to start.

IMPORTANT: Alumni status at your alma mater is also a long forgotten resource by many. Pay sites which cost hundreds of dollars per year are frequently made available to alumni through their university website for FREE. Check with your school and take advantage of the valuable status you hold. Those thousands of dollars spent on your education might just be valuable to you in more ways than one (I still had access to the pricey Lexis-Nexus site through the portal of a college at which I only took 1 course – Lexis-Nexus charges c. $3 per article using their “ala carte” service…not cheap; I hope this was not an error and is actually the operating standard).

Good Luck!

UPDATE [02.15.06]: Here’s a link to a useful article on Lifehacker.com. It’s called: Get the most of your local library — online