84 posts tagged with education and school. (View popular tags)
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On a recent Monday night, a gaggle of 20-somethings crammed into a former Curves fitness center along the industrial edge of Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn. The storefront gym had been carved into two classrooms... It was just another school night at [Metafilter's* own] Brooklyn Brainery, a hipster schoolhouse started by a pair of underemployed polymaths, where students can learn abstruse subjects like the secret lives of bacteria, taught by teachers with few teaching credentials. Tuition is $5 to $30, enrollment takes place online and PayPal is accepted. [more inside]
posted by dersins on Apr 5, 2012 - 57 comments

'A Test You Need to Fail': A Teacher's Open Letter to Her 8th Grade Students
posted by Foci for Analysis on Mar 24, 2012 - 81 comments

Touted as the cure for what ails public education, charter schools have historical roots that are rarely discussed. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb on Mar 15, 2012 - 38 comments

A Didactic Tale to Illustrate Just How Much the (new NYC) Teacher Rating System Pisses Me Off.
posted by roomthreeseventeen on Mar 12, 2012 - 69 comments

One teacher's approach to preventing gender bullying in a classroom.
posted by desjardins on Dec 21, 2011 - 88 comments

The Failure of Corporate School Reform: schools and school systems desperate for funding often turn to businesses for help. According to some critics, the U.S. educational system has also adopted a corporate philosophy that is at odds with the historical notion of the "common school." Next up: "virtual education reform." A critic's claim: "controlled, rigid, anti-critical teaching results not in subjects with a greater capacity for economic productivity, but the opposite."
posted by mrgrimm on Dec 5, 2011 - 46 comments

A radical new idea is turning schools upside down. 'Flip the Classroom' is based on a simple concept: kids watch podcast video presentations of lecture material on their own time - at home. They then do the 'homework' at school, in an environment where the teachers can guide and support them, instructing on specific points as required. Colorado teachers Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams have been pioneering the technique, and their Learning4Mastery website is a fount of information on it. [more inside]
posted by woodblock100 on Nov 28, 2011 - 65 comments

Science! (autoplaying video) The 42nd season of "Sesame Street," which premiered today, will be including a few new educational categories for preschoolers in its usual mix of lessons and parodies: STEM skills — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. In addition to more scientifically accurate slapstick, characters will try experiments, build bridges and boats, launch rockets and think through problems that require trial and error, observation and data -- all problem areas for America's students. [more inside]
posted by zarq on Sep 27, 2011 - 34 comments

Move Your Kids to Russia and Toss Them Into School Clifford Levy and Julie Dressner moved their 3 kids from Park Slope to Russia. Instead of putting their kids in an international school, they decided to let the kids learn Russian in a Russian school. [more inside]
posted by k8t on Sep 17, 2011 - 42 comments

The Challenge of Teaching 9/11 "The events of September 11th are being discussed, taught, and commemorated in high school classrooms throughout the nation this week. And in many of those classrooms, the students are increasingly too young to have many actual memories of their own of that day’s events. I visited two high school classes in the San Francisco Bay Area to see how teachers are approaching the topic, what the students know and don’t know, and how they feel about the events surrounding that day."

‘Who’s Osama bin Laden?’: Teaching 9/11 to Muslim youth "In the ten years since Sept. 11, many Muslim Americans feel they’ve had to deal with rising discrimination. Those who remember 9/11 at least understand how this started. But there’s a new generation of Muslim Americans who don’t. They were too young in 2001, or they weren’t yet born. But these children aren’t too young to perceive discrimination. At least one local Islamic school is still working through how, exactly, to teach its young students about 9/11."
posted by nooneyouknow on Sep 9, 2011 - 84 comments

Kelly Williams-Bolar, an Akron, Ohio mother convicted of felonies after forging records in 2006-2007 so that her children could attend a better school, was recently denied a pardon recommendation by an eight member parole board, by a vote of 8 to zero. Today Republican Governor John Kasich overruled the board, using executive clemency powers to lessen the conviction from two felonies to two first-degree misdemeanors. "No one should interpret this as a pass -- it's a second chance," Kasich said in a press release. [more inside]
posted by cashman on Sep 7, 2011 - 31 comments

An anonymous, tenured, mid-career faculty member at a Tier One law school shares his/her observations on the state of contemporary American legal education.
posted by joe lisboa on Aug 12, 2011 - 82 comments

144 sites for online education. Categories include science and health, business and money, history and culture, law, computer science, mathematics, and languages. [more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul on Jul 18, 2011 - 19 comments

A Miss USA delegate from each state (and D.C.) was asked whether or not they felt evolution should be taught in schools.
posted by gman on Jun 21, 2011 - 230 comments

In the wake of ever deeper budget cuts, public schools have begun charging students for basics, such as registering for honors or elective classes.
posted by reenum on May 26, 2011 - 100 comments

The reality of For Profit Educatation in Infographic form. [more inside]
posted by The Whelk on Apr 11, 2011 - 60 comments

With the institution of No Child Left Behind, educational testing in the US boomed. Now, some of the low paid temp workers hired to score these tests are speaking out about the behind the scenes manipulation that goes on to ensure test scores are in line with "customer expectations".
posted by reenum on Mar 7, 2011 - 142 comments

When her son refused to do his school work, his mom had him stand out on a busy street corner with a sandwich board trumpeting his 1.22 GPA. [more inside]
posted by reenum on Feb 18, 2011 - 128 comments

Kelly Williams-Bolar has been sentenced to ten days in prison in a school residency case. The African-American mother of two lives in public housing in Akron, Ohio, and forged court records so that her children could attend a better school in nearby Copley Township. Judge Patricia Cosgrove sentenced her to 10 days in prison, 80 hours of community service, and two years of probation. Ms. Williams-Bolar works as a special education classroom aide, and was working towards a teaching degree. Because of the felony conviction she may no longer be eligible to teach in the state of Ohio.
posted by mmmbacon on Jan 25, 2011 - 190 comments

On MLK Day, Some Thoughts on Segregated Schools, Arne Duncan, and President Obama "American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white."
posted by Fizz on Jan 17, 2011 - 55 comments

openculture.com is offering hundreds of links to free online courses from the top universities in the United States (and Oxford).
posted by gman on Jan 12, 2011 - 16 comments

Vimeo Video School is a fun place for anyone to learn how to make better videos. Start by browsing the Vimeo Lessons, or find specific video tutorials created by other members.
posted by netbros on Dec 20, 2010 - 4 comments

There is a firestorm in Bedford, New Hampshire, because a parent wants the school board to take the book "Nickel and Dimed: Not Getting By In America" off the reading list for a high school personal finance class. [more inside]
posted by reenum on Dec 14, 2010 - 131 comments

At the Bartos Theater, in conversation with Henry Jenkins, these speakers [Yochai Benkler and Cass Sunstein] don’t so much square off as share their hopes and fears for the emergence of online democracy. [more inside]
posted by infinite intimation on Dec 6, 2010 - 7 comments

The Adam Ezra Group teaches kids how to write a pop song.
posted by shoesfullofdust on May 1, 2010 - 4 comments

Suspension: It Grows on You Is "Suspension" ever corrective?
posted by emhutchinson on Mar 19, 2010 - 47 comments

"The suicidal dietary choices of so many poor people are the result of a problem, not the problem itself. The solution lies in an education that will propel students into a higher economic class, where they will live better and therefore eat better." So argues Caitlin Flanagan in the pages of The Atlantic against Alice Waters' idea that school curricula ought to teach children where food comes from and how to grow it (see The Edible Schoolyard).
posted by shivohum on Jan 12, 2010 - 124 comments

Revisionaries: How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids’ textbooks.
posted by defenestration on Jan 4, 2010 - 258 comments

The autodidact course catalog. Twenty-two professors at Johns Hopkins propose reading lists for courses of self-study, from "Society Can Be Dangerous To Your Health" to "Higher Mathematics in Nouns and Verbs" to "Biochemistry and Human Evolution (with Rather a Lot about Mitochondria.)" If you're not going back to school this week, why not take on one of these syllabi instead?
posted by escabeche on Sep 4, 2009 - 42 comments

School Lunch From Around The World
posted by Joe Beese on May 31, 2009 - 86 comments

The Case Against Homework. Does assigning fifty math problems accomplish any more than assigning five? Is memorizing word lists the best way to increase vocabulary—especially when it takes away from reading time? And what is the real purpose behind those devilish dioramas? Sara Bennett wants to stop homework. Here she explains why (pdf).
posted by lunit on Apr 9, 2009 - 180 comments

John Taylor Gatto's newest book, Weapons of Mass Instruction, is out today. Gatto, a former New York State "Teacher of the Year" (1991), is a critic of state education and compulsory schooling in general: "When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling." [more inside]
posted by symbollocks on Dec 10, 2008 - 129 comments

Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth. How children learn (or: don't learn) math today. [more inside]
posted by davar on Sep 6, 2008 - 130 comments

EducationFilter: California becomes the first state to mandate all 8th graders take Algebra; in part because U.S. students constantly trail their peers from other nations in mathematics. At least one person thinks it's a bad idea ("If only 25 percent of this nation ever earns a college degree, why insist that all children take algebra in eighth grade?"). Here's the algebra curriculum 8th graders will have to learn. [more inside]
posted by jabberjaw on Jul 10, 2008 - 124 comments

Pregnancy Boom at Gloucester High As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there's been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town.
posted by swift on Jun 19, 2008 - 209 comments

Meet Joules the climate change-sceptic robot. Joules is employed to teach 8-14 year-old school children in the UK about energy use. Joules says: "oil and gas could be in short supply in about 50 years time. The earth is believed to be getting warmer and sea levels apper to be rising. Energy Chest is funded in part by the world's biggest oil company: ExxonMobil. [more inside]
posted by MrMerlot on May 27, 2008 - 45 comments

KnowHow2Go wants you to take on the tough classes - such as Biology, Foreign Languages, and Algebra II - to prepare yourself for college.
posted by divabat on May 26, 2008 - 31 comments

16% of US science teachers believe human beings have been created by God within the last 10,000 years. 25% of science teachers spend some time teaching about creationism or intelligent design. 12.5% teach it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species". 2% say they do not cover evolution at all. Teachers who have taken more science courses themselves devote more time to evolution - "This may be because better-prepared teachers are more confident in dealing with students' questions about a sensitive subject."
posted by Artw on May 19, 2008 - 205 comments

An associate professor and former librarian is collecting education copyright infringement cases in a database. [more inside]
posted by starman on Mar 27, 2008 - 15 comments

Open Culture's "10 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube" features "intellectually redeemable" channels from UC Berkeley, @GoogleTalks, TheNobelPrize, TED Talks, FORA.tv, the European Graduate School, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, BBC Worldwide, National Geographic, PBS, UChannel, MIT, Vanderbilt, and USC.
posted by Soup on Dec 27, 2007 - 21 comments

PISA results are in. Finland and Canada high five and make awkward polite bows and gestures towards The Far East. For education policy Programme for International Student Assessment is the research about how 15-year old students are being educated. Briefings for UK and US. Results escape easy answers, but you might test your theory against interactive data tool. [more inside]
posted by Free word order! on Dec 4, 2007 - 47 comments

The KaosPilots, deemed "the world's most adventurous alternative business school", teaches social entrepreneurship and leadership through real-life situations. [more inside]
posted by divabat on Oct 7, 2007 - 4 comments

In 1996, Al Pope from the National Coalition for Advanced Manufacturers announced "Our goal is to change the way schooling is done." And, with the School-to-Work program, corporate and educational interests became further intwined, a trend that now reaches every level and comes in many guises. The ever-present crisis of American education continues, but few ask: does it have to be this way, and just who benefits? [mostly via]
posted by absalom on Jul 31, 2007 - 45 comments

Boy's Hug Lands Him in Trouble At School With "No Touching" Policy. 7th grader Hal Beaulieu "hopped up from his lunch table one day a few months ago, sat next to his girlfriend and slipped his arm around her shoulder. That landed him a trip to the school office." Handshakes could be gang signs, and officials note, "in a culturally diverse school...families might have different views of what is appropriate." The PTA President remarks: ""Even high-fives can get out of hand ... someone can get bonked in the head." (CNN News Video)
posted by shivohum on Jun 24, 2007 - 108 comments

The Blurter. The Complainer. The Know-It-All. The Spoiled Darling. You can handle them all.
posted by mediareport on May 8, 2007 - 33 comments

Unschooling is an educational philosophy which abandons tests, curricula, and textbooks in favor of self-directed learning. Practiced by an enthusiastic community of homeschoolers, unschooling has recently attracted some media attention (MSNBC, NYT). Of course, unschooling raises some concerns: "If they are not made to do arbitrary and tedious schoolwork, children might not learn how to do difficult, uninteresting, and unpleasant work."
posted by myeviltwin on Nov 25, 2006 - 149 comments

"you belong in Hell" --that's the message being taught in Kearny, NJ, History teacher David Paszkiewicz's classes. ... At first Paszkiewicz denied he mixed in religion with his history lesson and the adults in the room appeared to be buying it, LaClair said. But then LaClair reached into his backpack and produced the CDs. At that point Paszkiewicz remarked, according to LaClair, "Maybe you're an atheist. ... (more here, including a link to some audio of it all)
posted by amberglow on Nov 15, 2006 - 84 comments

"I hate grades.... [But] I am obliged to follow the rules set forth by my employer and the larger education industry in general. Consequently, I assign grades."
posted by grumblebee on Sep 28, 2006 - 97 comments

Science sites of all kinds for kids. Archeology. Entomology. Natural Symphony. Baseball in Space. Philosophy. Process or Content. Science songs. Physics songs, relativity. String theory. Science and Art.
posted by nickyskye on Jun 26, 2006 - 9 comments

From Baltimore to the Bush. Until 2003, the Baraka School in Kenya was home to 20-40 underachieving teenagers from inner-city Baltimore. As Time Magazine reported in 2000, the experiment was not without complications, ranging from curriculum deficiencies to disciplinary issues. PBS also did a short piece on Baraka the same year.

By 2002, though, things were shaping up. The Baltimore City Public School System found that students at Baraka improved markedly in their academics. One alumnus is an up-and-coming hip-hop star.

Baraka was closed indefinitely in 2003 due to terrorism-related security threats. But a new documentary, The Boys of Baraka, recaptures the essence of the place, its successes and its failures alike.
posted by greatgefilte on Oct 5, 2005 - 8 comments

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