The Bowling for Columbine Teachers’ Guide is chock full of ways to use Michael Moore’s movie to “help students develop critical thinking skills, historical analysis, and open their minds on many universal issues.” Or so it says. Brenda of Isomorphisms spotlights a few howlers:
7. Michael Moore asks the Lockheed manager if kids think, […]
Archive for May, 2008
Kimberly at Number 2 Pencil scoffs at a breathless story about a seventh grader “discovering” a new way to solve math problems using negative numbers. It ain’t new to people who know anything about math, which apparently excludes the girl’s teacher and the reporter.
Brenda of Isomorphisms mocks a similar story about a 16-year-old […]
Good heavens! Julie Burchill, on her way to a job at the Times (of London) says goodbye — and good riddance to her Guardian readers, “all-round, top-drawer, plaster saints.” Burchill devotes her farewell to an analysis of anti-Semitism as the personal pretending to be political.
I can’t help noticing that, over the years, a disproportionate […]
Is it real or is it from a paper mill? Turnitin.com helps professors — and now high school teachers — spot plagiarism. The Washington Post reports:
The software compares a student’s essay to all the text on the publicly available Internet, a vast library of books and academic journals and the 10 million essays […]
In Wisconsin, school districts are offering home study programs using online curricula. It’s a money-maker.
WIVA, a partnership between the small, rural Northern Ozaukee School District and K12, a for-profit education company headed by former national education czar Bill Bennett, opened for business this fall. It is one of at least six Wisconsin cyber schools […]
If students don’t learn manners in school, they may not learn it at all.
“The dramatic shift is parents’ expectations for their kids,” said Ed Harris, principal at Cahokia High. “It used to be that the parent and the school were in cahoots to make sure the student was doing the right thing. Now, the parent […]
To desensitize students to frequent f— word use in Catcher in the Rye, a Virginia teacher assigned unusual homework.
“My teacher decided that it would be best to have the students go home and say in private the phrase ‘F-U,’ 10,000 times in different dialogues and different ways and tones and stuff, so that we’d become […]
In honor of Thanksgiving, here’s Benjamin Franklin on the all-American virtues of the turkey.
Boys and girls use playgrounds differently, researchers say. Girls use the swings and like to climb to the top of play structures and yell down at friends. Boys like to run around. This doesn’t seem to be a problem to me but the researchers are troubled.
The study, Children’s Use of Public Space: […]
Sales of children’s bikes are way up, reports the Washington Post. Bike riding is way down.
When kids do ride their bikes, it is often a pale version of that childhood tradition. They ride endlessly around a single block or cul-de-sac, up and down the same street or, in busier neighborhoods, up and down the […]
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