Downeast Schoolhouse » failure

“A miserable job…”

admin — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 10:00:02 +0000

Universal preschool is coming.

Checker Finn is worried as he looks at California:

Is this all part of a grand conspiracy to enlarge the public-education monopoly and employ more teachers? Don’t dismiss that thought. Don’t suppose that school systems that do a miserable job of educating 5- and 7- and 17-year-olds will do miraculously better [...]

BANG, BANG, BANG

admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:00:57 +0000

A little vignette from another place on this beautiful earth, North Korea:

Children learn a ditty called “Shoot the Yankee Bastards” in music class. One verse goes:

Our enemies are the American bastards Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland. With guns that I make with my own hands [...]

admin — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:10:12 +0000

Fast-food standards for meat top those for school lunches. Are you surprised? We always knew Mickey had high standards.

You read it here first: Devices to Take Textbooks Beyond Text “It’s wonderful not to have to lug those books around.”

At Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, they thought they could force students to lose weight. But [...]

It’s hard to fire a bad teacher…

admin — Mon, 04 May 2009 10:00:23 +0000

in California. Here in Maine it is too, though not as hard.

The LA Times did an investigation. Read the article; the stories are truly horrendous.

The eighth-grade boy held out his wrists for teacher Carlos Polanco to see.

He had just explained to Polanco and his history classmates at Virgil Middle School in Koreatown [...]

What is Success?

admin — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:00:22 +0000

Stephen J. Dubner, he of half the Freakonomics fame, tackles the question: Do Good Grades Predict Success?

1. The very definition of success is elusive.

…we usually just assume that somehow grades in school (at any level) are predictors of future success, or certainly of intelligence; but I highly doubt it. I tried to find [...]