News 30/10

1. Why your kids should be playing right now.

- Case in point of the Raspa family: undertook a road trip to give their children free rein to play amidst the
pandemic.
- Mother former educator underscored the all-embracing merits of play, a shared trait among the animal
kingdom which fosters the transition from childhood to adulthood.
+ Reinforced agility, originality, and collaboration.
+ Bonding and communicative tendency in children.
+ Elevated brain health.
- Playing is being encumbered by the pandemic, which distances children and rids them of recess time.
- Playing as demonstrated in the animal kingdom:
+ Previous speculations:
 Training for predation (cheetah cubs fighting).
 Mobility (baby giraffe).
+ According to Isabel Behncke Izquierdo, a primatologist and ethnologist who studies animal behavior, the role
of play in animals depends on many variables like their environments.
- Playing in children:
+ Motor skills, brainpower, cognition, critical thinking skills, mental health.
+ Effective in the pandemic context when incorporated with learning.
2. What happens if you cut down all of a city’s trees?
- Cases in point of 2 cities and the trees that would decide their fates: 3,000 BC Uruk and 500 BC Anuradhapura
of Sri Lanka.
- Similarities:
+ densely populated.
+ reliant on an intricate irrigation network.
- Differences:
+ Uruk’s farmers resorted to tree cutting to compensate for crowded crop spots.
+ Anuradhapura with its religious connotations of trees portrayed in Buddhism made the conservation of the
fauna highly prioritized.
- Repercussions:
+ After initial headstarts, Uruk’s waterways were slowly adulterated for the lack of trees. Agriculture also
suffered with the salinization of the soil, while Anuradhapura’s irrigation routes flourish in accordance with its
growing forest.
=> A latent link between urban space and trees:
+ deter natural disasters and filter out toxins.
+ relate directly to our physical and mental health, as exemplified by the intensifying heat in disease-prone areas
as a result of tree shortage and by patients with different window views.
=> sentiment caught on to urban planners of the contemporary history in various cities like Copenhagen or
Savannah, Georgia. Today: Singapore
3. Most black British children report experiencing racism at school.
- Author of the study: YMCA.
- Subjects: young people of black and mixed ethnicity.
- Personal anecdotes:
+ Adele Tondu, a member of YMCA’s youth advisory group: black children upon schooling are forced to work
twice as hard.
+ School: white-dominated. Her bully got off with a mere detention.
- Findings:
In schools:
+ 7 out of 10 young black people felt cornered by the need for a different hairdo.
+ 9 out of 10 said to have witnessed the display of racist language at school.
+ Almost half attributed racism to the largest barrier to scholar achievements.
In the workplace:
+ Almost four out of five are victims of racist language.
+ More than half believed in racial preconceptions in the recruiting process.
- Implications:
+ Rigid school and workplace policies may result in “cultural erasure”.
+ Black youth often referred to as aggressive or unintelligent.
+ Institutions which are perpetuating a culture of discrimination and exclusivity.