LONDON — Paul Howard-Jones thinks he knows the answer to a question that has long puzzled both parents and professors: Why is it that the same teenagers who turn sullen and despondent when faced with a half hour of learning French verbs or organic compounds are happy to spend hours mastering the computer game Minecraft's physics engine or the counterfactual history in Call of Duty?
According to the report, that difference represents three and a half years of learning lost.
Half the job of learning to write is getting to know the sound of your own voice, and Auden is no help here at all, just spawning imitators.
But I relish the way that, elsewhere, he employs his own literary common sense, stating at one point: "Half the job of learning to write is getting to know the sound of your own voice".
Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half's worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.
William Butterfield's gothic confection, half seat of learning, half Black Forest gateau, has divided residents ever since its completion in 1870.
Each group was assigned half of the required plants to learn with VL-PI and half to learn with other methods, described in Additional Study Methods.
The study included only men with early-stage disease, about half of whom learned of their cancer as a result of the prostate specific antigen, or P.S.A., screening blood test.
They recruited 60 high school students for an initial experiment, half of whom learned to cultivate a "growth mindset".
Federal officials say the four points represent slightly less than half a school year's worth of learning.
