Evan O’Dorney, a home-schooled California boy, won the National Spelling Bee with “serrefine.” Evan is a music-math prodigy who’s not that excited about spelling. Too much memorization.
Evan studies spelling for about an hour a day, the San Franciso Chronicle reports.
His mom, Jennifer O’Dorney, quizzes him daily on words out of Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as he […]
Archive for May, 2008
Boston students who flunk ninth-grade English or math become “freshmores” or “sophmen.” They repeat the classes they failed while going on in other classes. Most will need five years to complete high school.
Clustered in tiny English classes, students who struggled with reading during their freshman year thoughtfully dissect Shakespeare and the autobiography of Frederick […]
Black and Hispanic college students earn significantly lower grades than their white and Asian-American classmates, according to an Education Department study. in 2003-04, 19.3 percent of whites, 12.7 percent of Hispanics and 9.6 percent of blacks earned mostly A’s; 24 percent of whites, 34.6 percent of Hispanics and 40.7 percent of blacks earned mostly C’s […]
Throwing Things is blogging the National Spelling Bee, which is now on Round 3.
Time profiles past bee winners, who tend to be — surprise — well-educated, successful and happy they participated.
This week’s Carnival of Education, hosted by The Education Wonks, includes Ms. Cornelius’ provocative post on creating a school community that encourages learning. In trying to be all things to all students — surrogate family, social club, sports center, health center, etc. — schools lose track of their academic mission, she writes.
For […]
In desperately poor Sierra Leone, Abdul Kargbo studied in a school that lacked books, electricity and running water. He competed with classmates for the prestige of ranking first in the class. Then, at the age of 16, he moved to the U.S. He writes on Education Sector:
With the exception of the American authors, my […]
Beverly Hernandez hosts this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling.
The Confidence Men are consultants who claim they know how to raise student achievement dramatically, writes Eric Hanushek in the summer issue of Education Next.
(Lawrence) Picus and (Allen) Odden . . . claim that a specific set of policies can shift average student performance upward by three to six standard deviations, an extraordinary gain. […]
Kindergarten is the new first grade, reports the Washington Post.
Kindergarten used to be mostly about play: singing songs, “housekeeping” in a Little Tikes kitchen and being read to. That is changing largely because of full-day kindergarten, which has swept the nation’s public schools in the past 20 years, stretching the instructional day from 2 […]
In Algeria, women are becoming better educated than men, and flooding into the professions, reports the New York Times.
Women make up 70 percent of Algeria’s lawyers and 60 percent of its judges. Women dominate medicine. Increasingly, women contribute more to household income than men. Sixty percent of university students are women, university researchers say.
Though, […]
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