the real reason why I prefer mindperformance

Of all fears, I think fear of success is the most difficult to tackle in adult life. Simply because it doesn't happen everyday that I get applause in front of an audience, or even worse a crowd, and it doesn't happen often that I get recognition for something extraordinary. I've survived school avoiding applause well. Everything is safe, so long as I stay in the shadows and don't have a drive to perform. But that's my problem: I have a drive to perform.

The sweat and heartbeat and memory failure in front of an audience, the trembling, the sudden case of muteness will not stop me of getting myself into situations where I will get invited to come on television or talk to important people.

On television, it's impossible to have poetic lines come out of my mouth or witty links tagged to my comments. I should avoid television at all times, but I cannot help it, after dropping a few lines I got another invite.

Is there any book or movie with this theme?

I 'm lucky oracle google doesn't dread.

house image

My house is different than other houses in this village and would it have been in the middle of a city instead of in a peasant village, it would have been very easy to sell. The house has the double of space that a regular house has in the Netherlands, a garden at three sides and a basement. It has a history that goes back nearly hundred years and schoolheadmasters lived in it. We did improve a number of items in and around the house, e.g. a solar pannel for water heating, an extra room in the attick.
So how can I convince the town people that they should buy our house? I guess our house has a image problem. How to fix the image problem of a house?
Anyone?

school gives space to work

Within one week my son started behaving less well and feeling worse very rapidly at home. I picked up the phone and talked to his teacher. This appeared to be the same at school. My son has been complaining about school for years. We have been talking to schools and trying to fix all problems one at the time. This time I was alarmed and I picked up the phone and called another school. Further away, but the teacher made an appointment for the next day. My son heard it and wanted to come with me. He did and the next day we were looking at the school. The day after my son asked me when he could go there. After the week-end, I agreed with the teacher. Since he is there he feels much better. He started working again. This all happened within one week. It is striking how he is independent in going to school. The teacher says they give space to the children. I experienced this when I was in the building. The children had work lying around in progress everywhere around. I felt at home.

the mean group

There are different concepts in education. One is the so called classical method that has the teacher facing the classroom. Here (in the Netherlands) this method is very common and might be used in classrooms with small groups of tables too. There is an increasing demand for more levels within one classroom. The norm is the mean of the results of the students of the same group. There is little variation in age, and variation is not seen as positive but rather as a problem. The problem is then solved by creating subgroups and again the same system of mean is used for the subgroup. There is a problem. There are quite a few children that fall out. Partly they fall out because they cannot cope with adapting to the difficulty of the tasks, partly they fall out because the tasks are too easy.

about the necessity to understand scaffolding

Two of my children are possibly ill or possibly demotivated to go to school or both.

I have not been reading about underachievement for nothing.

Many teachers don't know that underachievement can be caused by too easy learning materials and lessons. They don't know about the mechanism nor do they know how much it affects children and their families. At the primary school I could see which teachers understand it just by looking at the grades of my children. You might argue that the grades only reflect the ability to teach and not how the teacher handles underachievement. True. In my opinion both are true. The successful teacher handles the underachievement better and gives better answers to difficult questions in the learning material. It is about scaffolding again.
citation of an article
"The first task during mediation is to discourage surface or superficial learning. Children are likely to engage in surface strategies as a matter of pragmatics; as a means of self preservation."
Now back to my reality. I hope it is the flue... but I'm pretty sure it is not. This is why we are thinking of moving to a region with better scaffolding, after five years of trying to manage.

standard versus brightness

I've been thinking about how to solve the problem that some children start with more comprehension than others but still need to learn how to read and write. How can schools give each child the material that fits it when there are huge differences between children, to start with on text comprehension. There is differentiation on the level of technical reading, but not on the level of comprehension. This would mean the necessity for a complete new line of schoolbooks that are high on comprehension and low on technical reading.
Standard levels may be useful for schools, they may be useless for society. There are complaints at Universities and colleges about the levels dropping. What I observe is that the brightest children drop out and the level at the end of the secondary school is too low in the eyes of the Universities.

multilingual expression and dementia

Are you multilingual? congratulations, you delayed the unset of dementia. Now it will be interesting to check if what I said about being a musician equalling being multilingual is true. In which case being deaf might at least delay dementia. What does this mean for schools? It might mean that the policy of starting to learn languages (and maybe mathematical language) at an early age might have a positive health result.
Now what was I saying?

mediation

Did you learn more at school or at home? I happen to have learned many things at school that I still enjoy knowing. I had a very practical father who teached me how to do practical things at home. I have learned much from him too. Feuerstein tells me a very important part of how we learn is through mediation. That is learning through someone else. He teaches this in practice mostly.
I have in my cupboard a good practical book about mediation. I should read it more often, because I sometimes get lost when I try to raise my children. I am not talking about peer mediation, this is something else, namely skills that allow students to intervene in conflict situations.