Today in Toastmasters, I gave a speech telling a moral of a story. It is about how a grumpy old man drive away children playing outside his house.

Mr. Smith is successful businessman. He is the boss of a small but profitable company in town. He has one strange habit. He couldn’t stand noise. He wants the place nice and quiet all the time. He is the boss of the company, so his employee has to lower their voice all the time. Everything is fine until the day he retire. In the first day of his retirement, he woke up by noise outside of his house. He looked through the window. He saw children form the neighborhood are playing outside his house. The children are riding bicycling, chasing each other around, yelling and screaming and making lots of noise. The noise is driving Mr. Smith crazy. He wants to go outside and tell the kids to shut up and leave him alone. As a business man, he knew it won’t work. The kids will simply ignore him and label him the grumpy old man in the block, and he will being a laugh stocks among the neighbors. So he came up with an idea.

He go outside of his house and gathering the children around. He says to them, “I love having children play outside of my house, your laughters really cheers up my day. Here is 25 cents for each of you to show my gratitudes. Please come and play for me more.” Receiving the money, the children are cheer in joy and continue their play. The next day, Mr Smith gather the children outside his house again and says, “Thank you so much for play for me. However, I am a retired old man, I cannot afford much money. Here is 15 cents for each of you showing my sincerity.” The children are a little dismay about the cut in the reward, but 15 cents is still go money, so they disband in joy and continue their play. On the third day, Mr. Smith gather the children again and says, “I am really broke today and I can only afford 5 cents to have you kids playing for me.” At the point, the children are really upset for receiving so little money and they tell Mr. Smith, “What! Only 5 cents. What a mean old man. We are not going to play for you anymore. Let move out play in the end of the street.” Finally, Mr. Smith can enjoy his relaxing, nice and quiet day.

The moral of this story: Sometimes the withdraw of positive reinforcement is as effective as negative reinforcement.  Another moral of this story: Don’t get conditioned for doing something that you like.  Remember why you do it in the first place, you do it for the fun of doing it, not other rewards.  The rewards are just bonus, don’t let it bother you.

When I was driving home today, I listened to the phone-in radio program.  It was talking about the provincial government is planning to introduce standardized test to grade 4 and grade 7 school children.  The teacher union oppose this idea, saying that will increase their work load and more test will give pressure to the children which is not good for their development.  They worry that in order to get good grades, the children have to work on drills for the test instead of learning real stuff.  Some audience phoned in supporting the teachers and say practicing for exam is a waste of time.  I think that audience is either out of school for too long or he is fairly uneducated, otherwise whom would believe the BS of the teacher.  I understand the teachers may be overworked by the new tests, which it is fair to request more resource to cope with the extra teaching requirements.  However, please don’t trash talk the new tests system just because you want to have less work.  Exam techniques is one of the most valuable skill I have learned in school.  You may have studied very hard and learned all the stuff in the textbooks, but you don’t do well in the exam, who knows you knows the syllabus well?  Exam techniques helps you to boost your grade and make yourself more representable.  In fact, you are tested not only when you  apply for university, you will be tested if you want to enter grad school, become a professional, or get any kind of license or certificate.  Therefore, learning exam technique in early age is a good investment that will pay back handsomely in one’s lifetime.

I just renew my pledge of monthly donation to Project Advance of the Archdiocese of Vancouver. I rarely give money to church or religious institutes.  Project Advance is an exemption, which I keep donating money every year.

I refuse to pay for the Sunday donation that usually go to the operating cost of the church. One would say it is fair to donate since you use the church and you should share the cost of running the church. However, I don’t go church out of my free will. Going to church every week just a sentence prescribe to all Christians in the Bible. I would prefer not going to church and help cut down the cost. It is unfair to ask a prisoner pay for his expenses in the prison, so it is unfair ask me to donate to the church’s expense. I will let those who enjoy going to church pay for the bills in exchange for the happiness they get from the church. In fact if happiness and donation is proportional, I think the church should reimburse me.

On the other hand, money goes to the Project Advance is used meaningfully. It helps finance the youth program, catechism class for special need people, running various Catholic charity, schools and building new churches. In short, Project Advance is a brand building project for the Catholic Church. I belongs to the Catholic Church and I choose to be a Catholic, or least I choose to still being one. The image of the Church is directly related to the satisfaction I gain from my Catholic identity. Therefore, I feel obligated to share my duty in growing the Church.

I have many friends have joined the children sponsorship program of the World Vision to help poor children in third world countries. You just have to donate $35 a month, World Vision will pool together donation from many donors to provide food, shelter and education to the poor children. In return, you will get a photo of the child you are sponsoring and once a while the child will write thank you letters to you. Indisputably, donation to World Vision is charitable act that will gives you a good feeling and makes you think that you are a good person. World Vision’s intention is good, it make difference to the life of those children they help, but I always question is it the best way to solve the world’s poverty problem. The poor children grow up, give birth to more children that they can support, leave them in the hand of World Vision, and turn into a vicious circle.

The poor children the World Vision helping are extra population in the earth that we don’t want and we don’t need. They should not be born in the first place. If the parents cannot raise the children, then they have no right to bring them to this world. We already have too many people in the third world countries and the number is raising. If we want to fix the problem, we have to fix the root cause, not just treating the symptoms. Instead of running World Vision like charity, we should support charity that carry out birth control in third world countries. The goal is to minimize the number of children suffering in poor countries. It would be much more cost effective to prevent those suffering children come to this world in the first place.

Just imagine if we spend that $35 on birth control up front, we can prevent how many potential suffering children draining World Vision’s resources. If World Vision can spend the same amount of donation on a smaller number of poor children, each of them can get better education and service. They can learn skills to earn a proper living to support their next generation and left the vicious circle. Just like treating diseases, finding the prevention is always better than finding the cure, stop the poor children coming is better than raising poor children. The only problem is that I haven’t come across a charity origination focus on birth control in third world countries yet.