Category — General

Delivering a memorable graduation speech is one of education’s most difficult challenges. Somehow the orator must deliver some words of inspiration that add to the festiveness of the occasion all the while recognizing that the ceremony is about the graduates and not the speaker.
All too often, the presenter instead interferes with the ceremony, serving [...]

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While it is fashionable today to dump on American education, two recent competitions highlight the fact that many youngsters in our country demonstrate extraordinary levels of knowledge.
Each year, two competitions, the National Geographic Bee and the Scripps Spelling Bee, feature some of the very best young minds. For those adults who think our future is [...]

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In April, Professor Walter Bender resigned from the highly publicized One Laptop Per Child project. While his departure has caused a lot of speculation as well as commotion within the open source community, the former One Laptop Per Child president of software and content has simply moved forward. Bender has turned his attention towards the [...]

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For a very interesting take on the teenage years, head on over to PyschologyToday.com for a question and answer session with Psychologist Robert Epstein called Trashing Teens.

Hara Estroff Marano sets down the questions for Epstein, the author of the book, “

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A short time ago we took a brief look at Finland, the highest scoring country on the 2006 PISA Exams (Programme for International Student Assessment). The tiny country demonstrated extraordinary results taking the top spot in science, the number two slot in Reading (only trailing Korea), and the number two slot in Mathematics (trailing [...]

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This past week, a Boston Globe article revealed the development of an alarming educational trend within the State of Massachusetts. Hidden beneath the surface was yet another subtle demonstration as to why the No Child Left Behind Act may actually be acting as a deterrent to improved educational outcomes.
The issue? It seems that many Massachusetts [...]

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A paper released at the thirty-eighth Hawaii International Conference on System Science in 2005 challenges some of the conventional thoughts about the level of risk acceptable in our society today. The paper, Understanding the Effect of Risk Aversion on Risk, suggests that “the attempt to eliminate all thinkable risks in our society may be setting [...]

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Why do kids lie? Could it be that they are just copying their parents? That’s seems to be the latest thinking. A clear argument as to how the entire process works can be found in a NY Times Magazine Article called “Learning to Lie.”
There are the traditional mainstay sort of beliefs: “Kids lie early, [...]

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NY City’s Rubber Room
A snippet worth taking a peek at is the web page “The Rubber Room”. It represents the home site for a group of independent film makers creating a documentary on the place known as New York City’s teacher purgatory.
According to the page, “Each year in New York City hundreds of schoolteachers [...]

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A new web site is changing the meaning of being published. SciVee Televisionis a new site designed by scientists for scientists. The concept is simple, SciVee allows scientists to make their research available on the net by combining a published scientific article with a video to create an online presentation. Once posted, other scientists can [...]

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