Guiding questions:
Can you use the 3-2-1 strategy to help provide a focus while reading?
Can you utilize blogging to help gain a deeper understanding of the text?
Directions:
1. Read "The Untouchables" from Friedman's The World is Flat. Feel free to underline, highlight, or mark up the text.
2. Plese type in MS Word:
*3 Find 3 interesting facts from the article.
*2 Make 2 connections to your life, current events, literature, etc...
*1 Develop 1 question that you would like to discuss with your classmates.
2. Once you have typed these items into MS Word, click on comment and copy, paste, and "post comment."
3. Comment on at least one of the questions your classmates have raised.
Three points that I found important were:
ReplyDelete*America will have to work to nurture a labor force that is special, specialized, or constantly adapting in order to “grab its slice of that growing pie.”
*Being adaptable in a flat world, knowing how to ‘learn how to learn’ will be one of the most important assets any worker can have…”
“We reward risk taking. Our university system is competitive and experimental….it is a chaotic system, but it is a great engine of innovation in the world.”
I think that it is interesting to
*use the ice cream sundae metaphor to discuss how we need to have a work force trained to constantly want to create value-something more than just the vanilla ice cream.
*allude to Death of a Salesman as we should aspire to have jobs that are not worth a “dime a dozen.”
Question for Discussion:
How do we prepare our students to be skillfully and socially adaptable? What kinds of activities teach students how to “learn to learn”? How can we award appropriate risk-taking in class?
Mindy B.
Interesting:
ReplyDelete1. "You want to learn how to make the latest chocolate sauce, the whipped cream, or the cherries on top, or to deliver it as a belly dancer"( 239).
2. "The more educated you are, the more options you will have in a flat world" (244).
3. "The Core secrets of America's sauce...One is the sheer openess of American society...quality of American intellectual property protections...and the world's largest domestic sonsumer market" (246).
Interesting:
1. See above
2. There are only 14 countries in the world that have more than that number (130 colleges and universities).
Question:
1. What can we do to invest in our future and more importantly, prepare our children the way we need to for the race that is ahead?
3. Workers in today’s marketplace need specialized skills and adaptability in order to compete in a more globalized, flatter, world.
ReplyDeleteYou need to keep up with emerging trends in order to keep your current position, let alone achieve a new and more lucrative one.
America is leading in the university and patent race, but other countries are closing the gap.
2. Everyone today could be a marginal graphic designer with a small computer software investment.
Yale University is outsourcing its research projects to China.
1. How does this connect to Death of a Salesman?
“Pop!, I'm a dime a dozen, and so are you!” This statement relates to the concept that Willy is completely “touchable” as in constantly holding onto outdated skills and not gaining (in denial of) the new knowledge and ideas to seize the good jobs in the flat world. Willy would have resisted Zappos.
ReplyDeleteBest Quote:
From Tom Freidman's parents: “Tom, finish your dinner-- people in India are starving”
Tom's updated comment in a flat world for his daughters: “ Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs.”
Categories of Untouchables:
Special
Specialized
Anchored
Really adaptable
compromise for really adaptable vs specialized: lab partners in China & Yale. Win/win situation.
one question: next chapter
What can a person do to make sure that the infrastructure for economic creativity and incentives for creativity remains intact ?
@Grehls - I think that we are starting to but our school technology baseline needs to catch up with our 14 year olds baseline.
ReplyDelete@Baker - I feel like my job is a "dime-a-dozen" and I am "fungible"
Friedman says, “There will be plenty of good jobs out there in the flat world for people with knowledge and the ideas to seize them.” He adds that although it may have been possible in the past for a person who is “mediocre” in his job to earn a “decent” living, it will no longer be so in the future, flatter world. He finishes his opening statements by recalling Biff Loman’s anguished cry to his father, “I’m a dime a dozen and so are you!”
ReplyDeleteAnyone who follows Mike Rowe’s television show, Dirty Jobs, knows that Rowe – himself a well-educated man – does not look upon the people or their work – often in dangerous and even unhealthy situations – as “mediocre.” Far from it; Rowe is a champion of those who do the hard jobs that need to be done to ensure that the roads get built, the bridges repaired, the industries flourish, and the nation enriched by the labor of, essentially, the Common Man.
On the Willy Loman issue, Arthur Miller himself would not agree that Willy is a mediocre nobody, and neither would the first audiences of businessmen – some perhaps dragged to the theater by their wives – who wept at the conclusion. They cried for themselves as much as for Willy Loman. For Willy was not mediocre; he was old; he could no longer depend upon the humanity of his business contacts to throw him a little sale in the Depression years when nobody could make a sale; the world had, in the post WWII era, certainly shifted into a new mode of operation (much as ours has) and the old were discarded as we will be discarding our share of people when Friedman’s “flat world” of rampant globalization and commercial greed run roughshod over the working people of America in the 21st century.
Friedman writes, “If you can’t be special. . . be specialized. . . . If you cannot be [either], you want to be anchored.” It turns out that the “anchored jobs are many and varied and cannot be outsourced: doctors, some lawyers (italics mine), entertainers (how many of us can aspire to this?), electricians, barbers and cleaning ladies! Now there’s job security for you! Go clean somebody’s house! Scrub floors on your hands and knees (the old fashioned way) for little money, no benefits, no sick days. Barbara Ehrenreich does this in her investigative work, Nickel and Dimed. What, pray tell, would Friedman suggest the cleaning lady do to secure better wages – take courses in “Sanitizing the Toilet” or “Why Vacuums Suck?”
His ice cream sundae metaphor really makes me mad! I actually have nothing against being adaptable; in fact, I think it is a valuable life skill. But to liken the acquisition of additional skills to moving beyond plain vanilla (the boring stuff that we are to start with) to making the “latest” chocolate sauce, and moving beyond that to becoming the whipped cream and the cherry on top gets icky. We all have a pretty accurate conception of the extent to which business is eating us up; do we need the added implication that they will also take our cherry??
The discussion about the artist who sold out is depressing. Sadly, most people can’t tell the difference between good and mediocre art anymore anyhow! As Greer says, “it (the art he conceptualizes) is not like I would do it, but it is good enough.” I hope he is paid enough to compensate for having had to lower his standard of artistic achievement!
ReplyDeleteThere is something frenetic about the use of juggling as a metaphor, too, despite the fact that I remember fondly the story of the little juggler of Notre Dame. When what you do is juggle, be the best juggler (or little drummer boy, I suppose) that you can be. But keeping many balls I n the air at once is no way to live. It’s the same rat race we were all cautioned to avoid!
Friedman writes, “There are so many things about the American system that are ideally suited for nurturing individuals who can compete and thrive in a flat world (italics mine). What about those who cannot?? They don’t just disappear; they have children, they get sick, they get tired of living on the fringes, they are unemployed or underemployed, they live in poverty, they become part of the great underclass that we refuse to believe even exists in this country. Can you picture what will happen – is happening – to some of the kids we face every day in the classroom, the ones who can never hope to compete on this level for the jobs that are draining away or disappearing?
I absolutely do not believe that “the more educated you are, the more options you will have in a flat world.” When did we do away with nepotism? When did “the best candidate gets the job” become a law? Tell this to the former student (a brilliant computer programmer) who lost his job after twenty-five years because his company found it could simply hire two people to do his job and save money!
ReplyDeleteAnd I’m so happy that American universities “reaped $1.3 billion from patents” in 2003. I wonder how much of this is profit for developing drugs that poor sick people cannot afford to buy.
And at the same time that we shake our heads over the loss of American jobs overseas – especially when government grants often fund R&D projects that then move production off shore – we are supposed to be happy about “the quality of American intellectual property protection.” Yeah! Like how Monsanto sues farmers whose seed grain has been tainted by wind-borne pollen from the “intellectual property” growing in the next field! What louses!!
And it sure is easy to fire someone in a “dying” industry – especially when the plan is to kill that industry outright!
How many of us are right now struggling as the “business model” for education begins to take hold? Excessive testing? Failing schools? NCLB anyone? It’s all about making money for someone.
Finally, please spare me the part about the Yale-China connection! Yale’s investigators get “substantially enhanced productivity” because 150 Chinese lab technicians are working for a fraction of what the job would (and probably should) pay right here in New Haven. I loved the line, “The living conditions of the lab animals are right up to US standards. These are not mouse sweatshops.” I’m glad the mice are ok; How about the people?? Maybe what we should do to enhance our ability to be hired is to learn Mandarin Chinese! Then we can all emigrate and work in China.