A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.

Tag Archives: education

Oct 26 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Parents considering legal action over school yoga

Parents considering legal action over school yoga

AP report on the latest crisis gripping American schools: free yoga classes:

A group of parents is bent out of shape by free yoga classes at schools in this San Diego County beachside community, fearing they are indoctrinating youngsters in eastern religion.

“There’s a deep concern that the Encinitas Union School District is using taxpayer resources to promote Ashtanga yoga and Hinduism, a religion system of beliefs and practices,” the parents’ attorney, Dean Broyles, told the North County Times.

Ring the alarum-bell!

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May 03 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline

Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline

handbecomesclaw:

Weird, a school starts trying to actually help their children and finds it works. Life is strange.

I’ll say it once, and I’ll say it again: treat children and teens like people, and they’ll act like people.

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Mar 09 2012
Mark Twain, probably

California Teacher on Leave Over Porn Video Allegation

California Teacher on Leave Over Porn Video Allegation

Jeff Wilson, AP:

Student claims that a junior high teacher was moonlighting as a porn star were initially dismissed after school officials said they couldn’t find any images of her on the Internet.

The investigation was quickly restarted, however, when other teachers showed them downloads from smartphones, and the officials realized the school computer system blocked access to sex sites.

Oh dear.

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Mar 08 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Harvard group seeks degrees for expelled gays

Harvard group seeks degrees for expelled gays

Denise Lavoie, Associated Press:

Students and faculty at Harvard University are calling on the school to award posthumous degrees to seven students expelled nearly a century ago for being gay or perceived as gay, and they’re timing a rally for their cause to coincide with a visit by Lady Gaga.

But Harvard says it doesn’t award posthumous degrees, except in rare cases where students complete academic requirements but die before degrees have been conferred.

The university apologized a decade ago, after a student reporter found a file marked “secret court” in the university archives and wrote about the expulsions.

Wait, Harvard did what?

The group wants Harvard to formally abolish the secret court, a tribunal of administrators that investigated charges of homosexual activity among students at the Ivy League school in 1920. The tribunal remained a secret for decades and only became public in 2002 after the report in the Harvard Crimson magazine.

Mother of fuck.

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Jan 23 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Gwinnett teacher who resigned apologizes for writing slavery-themed questions

Gwinnett teacher who resigned apologizes for writing slavery-themed questions

D. Aileen Dodd, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

A Gwinnett schools investigation found former Beaver Ridge Elementary School teacher Luis Rivera was the author of a third-grade homework assignment that used slave beatings to teach math concepts.

In a statement to school officials obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday, Rivera, a teacher at the school since August 2008, apologized and said some of the questions he wrote were in “poor taste.”

Rivera’s 20-question homework assignment used slave beatings and picking cotton to link lessons about ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass to math computation. One of the problems read: “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?”

What the fuck.

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Dec 24 2011
Mark Twain, probably

School accused of putting autistic student in bag

School accused of putting autistic student in bag

Bruce Schreiner, AP:

A 9-year-old autistic boy who misbehaved at school was stuffed into a duffel bag and the drawstring pulled tight, according to his mother, who said she found him wiggling inside as a teacher’s aide stood by.

Why the hell would you do this. Like, what possible rationale could there be for

At a meeting with school district officials, the bag was described as a “therapy bag,” Baker said, though she wasn’t clear exactly what that meant. She said her son would sometimes be asked to roll over a bag filled with balls as a form of therapy, but she didn’t know her son was being placed in the bag. She said school officials told her it was not the first time they had put him in the bag.

Nominating “therapy bag” as euphemism of the year ‘011.

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Oct 17 2011
Mark Twain, probably

80 percent of US boys use condoms the first time

80 percent of US boys use condoms the first time

The AP:

A surprising 80 percent of teenage boys say they are using condoms the first time they have sex, a government survey found in a powerful sign that decades of efforts to change young people’s sexual behavior are taking hold.

But another promising trend — a drop since the 1980s in the number of teenagers having sex — has leveled off.

…

The study, released Wednesday, is based on interviews with about 4,700 teenagers, ages 15 to 19, conducted from 2006 through 2010. It shows the percentage of boys who said they used condoms the first time they had sex climbed from 71 percent in 2002 to 80 percent in the new survey. In 1988, 55 percent of boys said they used a condom during their first sexual intercourse.

So it turns out that sex ed may in fact be effective when it actually involves education. Who knew?

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Jul 20 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Compton hoop star’s act of generosity

Compton hoop star’s act of generosity

Feel-good story as reported by the Los Angeles Wave:

The event — a foul-shooting contest for top academic students at Compton High School — was created with a simple premise: Organizers wanted to show the kids at Compton how to create community spirit with college scholarship money as the incentive.

Allan Geui won in front of a packed house.

…

Three months after winning the $40,000 top prize, Allan Guei donated all of his winnings to the seven other finalists.

Guei, a star player on the basketball team who is headed to Cal State Northridge on a full scholarship, said he felt the others could use the college cash more than he could. He wanted to give his classmates a chance to make their academic dreams come true, too.

“I’ve already been blessed so much and I know we’re living with a bad economy, so I know this money can really help my classmates,” he said in a release from the school. “It was the right decision.”

Education is the most important and most noble thing we can do as a society. This warms my heart.

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Jul 13 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Tippie College of Business uses social media in application process

Tippie College of Business uses social media in application process

Brittany Trevick for The Daily Iowan:

The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business has garnered plenty of attention recently for a new web-based initiative, but leaders in other UI programs say the idea isn’t likely to catch on.

College officials recently announced that the most creative answer to the question “ What makes you an exceptional Tippie full-time M.B.A. candidate and future M.B.A. hiring?” submitted in 140 characters on Twitter will win a full-time financial award in the amount of $37,000.

…

“The essay’s been around for ages,” said Jodi Schafer, the director of full-time M.B.A. admissions and financial aid. “We wanted to do something unique and different.”

Stop that.

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May 20 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Kill Math

Kill Math

Speaking of alternative Math education:

Kill Math is my umbrella project for techniques that enable people to model and solve meaningful problems of quantity using concrete representations and intuition-guided exploration. In the long term, I hope to develop a widely-usable, insight-generating alternative to symbolic math.

My favorite bit:

I went on to college, and grad school, and an engineering career, and I must have solved, what, hundreds of differential equations? Thousands? Obviously I understood the formal relationship between differential equations and integration. But I don’t know that I ever felt it.

(via Christopher Bowns)

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