Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Food for Thought.

"For most of life, nothing wonderful happens. If you don't enjoy getting up and working and finishing your work and sitting down to a meal with family or friends, then the chances are that you're not going to be very happy. If someone bases his [or her] happiness or unhappiness on major events like a great new job, huge amounts of money, a flawlessly happy marriage or a trip to Paris, that person isn't going to be happy much of the time."
(Andy Rooney)

Some people dream of being rich and famous, believing that all their heart’s desire will come to fruition. But does great wealth bring true happiness and contentment? One only has to scan the latest headlines here in Australia to find that great wealth and fame do not bring happiness -far from it - families can be torn apart by disputes about who should ‘have what’ in controversial and hotly contested wills and family trusts.

History’s pages reveal a litany of woes that have descended upon families of great wealth – everything from depression, suicide, murder and loss of fortune by careless or misguided spending or investments. It seems that having great wealth does not necessarily bring happiness like the fairytale life we dream about. While many of you may concede this point, I’m sure that one or two of you are thinking that ‘money can’t buy happiness, but it sure makes misery easier to live with’.

Most of us are lucky enough to have enough money to live comfortably without wanting for too much in our lives. Our happiness stems from our family and friends, our work and our leisure time and while we may still dream of winning that elusive Gold Lotto, or inheriting some fortune from a very distant relative, the reality is that we are happy enough with what we have.

Unfortunately, not everyone is in this fortunate position. It may surprise you to know that there are some people who live not far from us on the Sunshine Coast who are disadvantaged in very real terms. These people may be disadvantaged by one or more of the following factors: low income, no car, no family, physical disability, limited access to transport or health services or educational opportunities.

Of the 300,000 or so people living on the Sunshine Coast, there are according to the 2010 report from Uniting Care, Centre for Social Justice, around 20 percent of householders on the Sunshine Coast receiving less than $500 per week. One parent explained in her own words what this is like:

“We can’t support ourselves. Where I live cost $250 a fortnight. I only get $420 in unemployment benefit. How am I suppose to support myself and my kids in a house with that amount of money? I struggle to eat.”

On the Sunshine Coast, approximately 15 percent of families suffer unemployment. Children are often caught in desperate situations because of their parents’ circumstances and often these children live in single parent families. One person explained how they coped growing up as a child in poverty:

“I hid my poverty by never telling anyone where I lived and by never inviting anyone home.”

The elderly living on a pension are often caught in poverty. They worry about money constantly and coping is very stressful for them. They wonder whether they will have enough to get by each week. As one elderly man put it:

“I can afford ‘basics’ but I can’t afford new clothing. I don’t have enough money to go out. I worry about how I’m going to cope in the future.”

The really sad part of growing old, one man said, was that you become invisible.

“You are no longer worth anything when you are old. People don’t even see you anymore. When I walk down the street, no-one ever says ‘hello’. Some days I wait out the front of my flat, until the postman comes to the letterbox, so I can talk to him. He may be the only person I talk to some weeks.”

The people who are most disadvantaged are the elderly, the disabled, those on a pension, the unemployed, single parents and the very young born into families who are disadvantaged. Some of these families live in rented houses, but many others live in temporary accommodation – moving from one flat to another, or live in caravans, or cars, homeless shelters or at worse, on the streets and in parks.

On the Sunshine Coast, according to a specially commissioned Sunshine Coast Regional Council 2006 report, about 1700 people or more are homeless. About 1000 of these homeless people, live in caravan parks.

Disadvantaged people can live in desperate circumstances – some of their own making - but often in many other cases, it’s a result of loss of income, mental illness, or physical disabilities which makes it difficult to find or keep work and in some very sad cases, a combination of many of these factors. Despair, depression, worry, anxiety, hopelessness, hunger and stress are the emotional struggles of the disadvantaged.

There are certain times of the year, when poverty and disadvantage are more painful and stressful. Christmas and Easter are particularly difficult for disadvantaged families, where children are the ones who feel it more deeply. Many parents may try and protect children from their dire financial circumstances. One parent wrote:

“At Christmas, we came home with $14 in our pocket. We sat around and made a game of cutting out decorations to put on the Christmas tree. We always tried to hide our poverty from the kids.”

No matter what your faith or religion, Easter is a time when families have holidays but not everyone can celebrate Easter with family celebrations – not everyone can afford it. As a community we are very fortunate by every measure, and it’s important that our young people understand how lucky they are in comparison to many other children and families here on the Sunshine Coast as well as in other parts of the world.


Easter is a time when we can do something to help others less fortunate. As John Templeton once said:

"Happiness comes from spiritual wealth, not material wealth... Happiness comes from giving, not getting. If we try hard to bring happiness to others, we cannot stop it from coming to us also. To get joy, we must give it, and to keep joy, we must scatter it."


So what can you do to make the life of someone less fortunate than you a little better at Easter?

• Donate food items to the Salvation Army for distribution






• Volunteer to help some charities and your local church distribute food or simply offer some help to someone who might need it






• Get involved in the work of Rotary, Lions, Zonta or some other organisation that commits to helping others in need

There are many ways that we can get involved and make a difference to someone else's life. A little kindness and a little time can go a long way to helping others in need. What will you do to make a difference? It doesn't need to be a big or grand gesture, it could be a simple act of random kindness. Whether it's big or small donation, all of us can make a difference if we set our minds and hearts to it.

Karon Graham

The New Science of Learning - latest research

Don’t you love a challenge? When we are engaged in the pursuit of some ‘Holy Grail’ (like swashbuckling, archaeologist, Indiana Jones), our whole body and mind is absorbed by the best way to meet that challenge. Sir Ken Robinson talks about us being in the zone –or the ‘state of creative flow’.


For many creative people, sportsmen or women this is perhaps the greatest challenge, finding that single impetus or stimulus that drives us to exhaustion in perfecting our singing, or our golf swing, or perfecting the best mix of musical notes or songs, or our dance moves, or our drawing ability or our photographic skills to take that perfect shot. Our best learning and greatest creativity is sparked by being in “the zone”. Does practice make perfect? Well not necessarily, according to the latest research.


We have all heard the adage; we learn by doing. Yes it’s true but surprisingly, new research into the science of learning now reveals that we learn by watching too. According to Dr Anne Murphy Paul, who has just written a book about the subject, whether it’s a salsa teacher running through a dance sequence, or a tennis coach demonstrating the perfect backhand, or a science teacher conducting a dissection in front of a class, observing an expert at work is an opportunity to hone our own skills.


Paul maintains that this is particularly true for motor movements, and research in neuroscience is beginning to show why. She states that when we watch someone else’s motions, the parts of the brain that direct our own physical movements are activated. Observation accelerates the learning process because our brains are able to map others’ actions onto our own mental representations, making them more detailed and more accurate. Now I’m sure many of you may be thinking that all of the money paid to the golf professional has not resulted in a Greg Norman swing just yet, but despite this, the research is showing a clear correlation between the observations and the brain’s ability to absorb and direct our actions.

‘Couch potatoes’ beware, it’s not as easy as it sounds. While on the surface it appears that we can learn from observing experts, there is a catch. Research conducted by Professor of psychology, Scott Grafton, at the University of California also shows that we learn best when we engage a circuit in the brain whenever we observe movement, imagine performing it or actually engage in it ourselves. Scott Frey of the University of Oregon found through brain scans, that those people who had observed a person pulling apart a toy and putting it back together and told that they had to to do the task themselves, had greater brain activity in the region of the brain involved in motor learning, than the group that simply observed.


Similarly those people who don’t just play a piece of music for hours on end but instead undertake deliberate, painstaking practice, which involves a process of constant self-evaluation, of focusing on one’s weaknesses, results in better outcomes (superior playing skills), because the practice is about improving on and correcting one’s weaknesses.


There has been other groundbreaking research into the benefits of increased spatial learning and how it benefits a child’s learning and understanding of mathematics, science, technology and engineering. Nora Newcombe’s work on how children learn best in the early years highlighted that we best enhance the spatial learning in children by using hand gestures, use analogies and by using spatial language. The researchers found that when playing with blocks under interactive conditions, children hear the kind of language that helps them think about space, such as "over," "around" and "through."


"When parents use spatial language, they draw attention to spatial concepts," said Nora Newcombe, co-director of Temple's Infant Lab. "The development of a spatial vocabulary is critical for developing spatial ability and awareness."


She stresses the importance of play, particularly with puzzles, paper folding (origami for example) and block play but under specific guided play rather than ‘free’ play. "This study gives parents news they can use. It shows that, rather than leaving kids alone with a preassembled activity, interactive play that draws out conversation is best at facilitating spatial development," Newcombe said.


A recent “Time” magazine’s article: “Ten Ideas that are changing your life”, had at number three on the list, (and surprisingly not at number one), the change in the brain and the way we learn, as a result of mass consumption of knowledge from the internet and the almost total dependency on Google to answer all of life’s big and little questions. Are our heads, now, really in the clouds?


According to Betsy Sparrow, professor of psychology at Columbia University, skills like critical thinking and analysis must develop in the context of facts, because the evidence to date is showing some decline in our skills to memorise and to recall information from our long term memory. Sparrow points out that we need something to think and reason about and these facts can’t be Googled as we go; they need to be stored in the original hard-drive, our long term memory. Especially in the case of children, ‘factual knowledge must precede skill."


Adults too, according to Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, need to recruit a supply of stored knowledge in order to situate and evaluate new information we encounter. As he quips:


“You can’t Google context.”


According to Andrew Meltzoff, co director of the University of Washington’s Institute of Learning and Brain Sciences in Seattle, the ‘new science of learning’ reveals that :
· Learning is computational and that infants and toddlers posses innate capabilities to see and hear patterns. By reinforcing these capabilities in the very young we can shape and aid learning in the child.
· Learning is social and people learn better through social cues. According to Meltzoff: social factors play an important role in life-long learning.
· Learning is driven by brain circuitry and brain cells are fired up during both perception and action overlap in people, which allows students to identify with their teachers and speeds learning.


It seems that scientists are now quietly tackling education issues, offering up new tools, new approaches and even new disciplines, like the new science of learning which is a convergence of the thinking and research of psychologists, neuroscientists, roboticists and teachers. In time more research will reveal the wonders of learning and the practical applications of this research will be absorbed into the teaching and learning programs.


Melttzoff, when asked in an interview about the age old question of whether learning is primarily nature or nurture, had this to say:


“There is no real conflict between nature and nurture, no conflict between biology and culture. What is unique about human biology is that we depend on other people for learning. We are influenced deeply by our teachers, parents and peers. I like to say that we humans are born to learn.”
How true!


Karon Graham

Did You Know? Facts about Reading.

A single moment of understanding can flood a whole life with meaning. (Anon)

Did you know, that across the world, children who read the most read the best regardless of social levels, income levels or where they live?

Did you know that reading is one of the most important skills a child can learn because it will be difficult for a child to master any subject without knowing how to read?

Did you know that fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores (in PISA 2009) than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all.

Did you know that listening comprehension comes before reading comprehension and that you must hear a word before you can say it or read and write it? According to Jim Trelease, author of New York Times bestseller, “The Read Aloud Handbook”, (from which many of the facts in this article come), there’s a “word reservoir” in a child’s brain and one thing that parents can do, is to pour as many words into that brain so that it overflows into speech, then reading and writing.

Did you know that by age four, high-income children have heard 45 million words from their families and low-income children have heard just 13 million? That’s a 32 million word difference according to Hart and Risley’s “Meaningful Differences”.

Did you know that children learn an average of 4,000 to 12,000 new words each year as a result of book reading?

Did you know that children read on one level and listen on a higher level and it’s not until Year 8 that the reading level catches up to the listening level?

Did you know that children who grow up in homes where books are plentiful go further in school than those who don't and have the highest reading scores? Children with low-education families can do as well as children with high-education families if they have access to books at home.

Did you know that research shows that those children who watch the most television, know the least. The average child spends 1460 hours a year watching television, DVDs and playing computer games, equal to watching “Gone With the Wind” 392 times a year.

Did you know that students who read widely and frequently are higher achievers than students who read rarely and narrowly?

Did you know that studies have proven that increased family engagement in educational programs is linked with increases in child reading achievement and other academic successes?

Did you know that parents are the key reading role models? High frequency reading parents are six times more likely to have high frequency reading children.

In the National Year of Reading, 2012, it’s rather appropriate that we focus on the benefits of reading. There are so many distractions that take our children away from reading books and magazines these days. Television, computer games, movies and a raft of outdoor activities results in many children spending less time reading books or magazines, for pleasure.

There are books which can change our perspective on life, open our eyes to new experiences and emotions, bring comfort when we are sad, bring hope when we are down, bring joy and excitement at new possibilities and allow us to escape to another world or country without even leaving home. As Edward P Morgan wrote:

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face . . . It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's [or woman’s] mind can get both provocation and privacy.

Reading books to our children, even more importantly, allows us to bond with our children and share experiences because of the opportunity to relate the story to our own life and day to day events, which in other circumstances, may never have been discussed with our child.

The process of reading and the joy of reading are inextricably interwoven. By developing a love of reading in young children we are allowing them to experience more of life than what otherwise may be possible. Understanding and empathising with the emotions and thinking of characters or real life people in books we read is but one way of developing a greater depth of understanding of oneself. As the wise Chang Ch’ao wrote:

Reading books in one's youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice;
reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one's courtyard;
and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace.
This is because the depth of benefits of reading varies in proportion to the
depth of one's own experience.

Over time, with greater experience, our understanding deepens and in the end, we become a better person and a wiser person for understanding the perspectives of others – lessons learned personally or vicariously through the books we read. Celebrate reading by reading in this, the Year of Reading.

Karon Graham