A People's History for the Classroom [pdf] is a high school history lesson plan/workbook based on Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. The entire 124-page workbook available for free as a downloadable PDF, as part of the Zinn Education Project, supported by Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change. You must enter an email and agree to take a later survey to download.
posted on Aug 20, 2008 - View this thread

All of you have been given a harsh gift. It’s the same gift the graduating class of 1917, and 1938, and 1968 and now you guys got – the chance to enter adulthood when the world teeters on the rim of the sphincter of oblivion. You’re jumping into the deep end. You have no choice but to be exceptional. Patton Oswalt addresses the class of 2008 at his old high school.
posted on Jul 10, 2008 - View this thread

Renegade high school English teacher Connie Heermann was suspended without pay for 18 months for using the book The Freedom Writers Diary in her class.
posted on Jul 9, 2008 - View this thread

Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble! A "board game" where you gather a gang of girls in the roaring 20s and taunt, fib, & flirt your way to high school domination!
posted on Jun 19, 2008 - View this thread

Crystal Meth: Friend or Foe High school science project alchemy: dumb shit into comedy gold.
posted on Feb 20, 2008 - View this thread

Bikes: Steel? Aluminum? Carbon Fiber? Wood, and nothing but wood.
posted on Jan 25, 2008 - View this thread

Fiddler on the prairie. The story of a 1970s high school production of Fiddler on the Roof. The school was in Billings, Montana.
posted on Oct 11, 2007 - View this thread

"Some legal experts said the charge against Allen Lee is troubling because it was over an essay that even police admit contained no direct threats against anyone at the school." Newsfilter: A high school senior is arrested for a "disturbing" essay in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting.
posted on Apr 26, 2007 - View this thread

The FIRST ("For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology") robotics competition has recently begun it's 2007 competition season. The competition, which began and still enjoys it's greatest popularity in the United States, challenges high-school students and mentors to design and build a (teleoperated) robot to play a game in six weeks. Founded by Dean Kamen, of segway, IBOT, the first home dialysis machine, and clean drinking water fame founded the competition in 1988 to inspire students to enter the engineering profession. Every year a new challenge is put forth, and this year's game involves placing inner-tubes on a cylindrical rack in addition to lifting other team's robots. A sizeable community has sprung up around FIRST, with much attention paid to Dean Kamen's ideal of gracious professionalism which is like sportsmanship without the sports. The 2007 regional competitions provide teams an opportunity to show off their work. If you're interested in getting involved, or just watching the events, FIRST provides a handy Event Locator.
posted on Mar 8, 2007 - View this thread

[T]his pattern, grade for the sake of a grade, work for the sake of work, can be found everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen, the spirit of intellectual thought is lost. I speak today not to rant, complain or cause trouble, and certainly not to draw attention to myself. I have accomplished nothing and I am nothing. I know that. Rather, I was moved by the countless hours wasted in those halls. Today, you should focus on your child or loved one. This is meant to be a day of celebration, and if I’ve taken away from that, I’m sorry. But I know how highly this community values learning, and I urge you all to re-evaluate what it means to be educated.

- from a graduation speech by the valedictorian of Mainland Regional High School, Kareem Elnahal, critiquing his school's education process.

The principal's reaction? “My hope was they did not hear or understand what he was saying. ... He was belittling the diplomas of every one of those kids.”.
posted on Jul 5, 2006 - View this thread

Gulfport High School class of '61 a facinating collection of life stories. check out the Our Classmates page. David sailed across the atlantic. Babs died when katrina hit the gulf coast. jane has 17 grand-children. C. H. Locklin was a chaplin working at the pentagon on 911.
posted on Jun 23, 2006 - View this thread

Is this guy an awesome teacher or just crazy? Or maybe it goes hand in hand. Think back to the days of high school and college science classes. For most people, it probably wasn't chalkboards full of endless physics equations that got them interested in the sciences, but rather the crazy, cooky and awe-inspiring professors who do dramatic and unique demonstrations to get students interested. What makes a good teacher or professor? Is this teacher really reckless or is it a legit demonstration that benefits students?
posted on May 25, 2006 - View this thread

Mascots helping Mascots High schools across America have witnessed the devastation brought about by several recent natural disasters, such as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. An outpouring of sympathy and concern, and a desire to help, have come forth from high schools wanting to assist those in need. To enable schools to help other schools, the National Federation of State High School Associations has initiated a fundraising program called the Mascot Adoption Program.
posted on Mar 13, 2006 - View this thread

"We can't do anything about it. We just have to obey." Fulton (Mo.) High School drama students learn that resistance is futile.
posted on Feb 11, 2006 - View this thread

DJ Shadow likes high school bands.
High school bands like DJ Shadow. (2nd link requires Windows Media Player, via Soul Sides)
posted on Sep 15, 2005 - View this thread

Remember how you wrote when you were in high school? Would you have been secure enough to post one of your essays online? [.doc files] Essay.org has compiled a collection of essays (in various languages), in order to "provide free essays for entertainment, education, and publishing." (My favorites are definitely the persuasive essays.)
posted on Aug 25, 2005 - View this thread

Steuard Jensen for Prom King! Three nerds get the resident high school science geek on the ballot for Prom King, and...well, you'll have to read the story to get the answer. Like in fiction, sometimes in real life the protagonist/hero comes from the most unexpected position.
posted on Jul 22, 2005 - View this thread

Stuck to their prom dates. Since 2001, Duck brand duct tape has sponsored a scholarship contest, open to any high school students willing to go to prom in outfits made of duct tape. This year's fashions range from the classic silver to wilder colors and patterns, and occasionally veer into the just plain strange. Dip into the archives for more.
posted on Jun 16, 2005 - View this thread

Beware the Kancho! The ongoing adventures and cultural insights of an American English teacher in Japan.
posted on Jun 12, 2005 - View this thread

Beyond the science fair. Behind a veneer of shoddy web-design lies a brilliant idea: getting grade- and high-school students to do actual scientific work. For example, "10 students from New York, Texas and Virginia joined three World War II veterans and a retired railroader from Virginia" and discovered a way to make walls self-sterilize. The guy behind it is Carl Vermeulen.
posted on Jun 7, 2005 - View this thread

A high school senior has been denied valedictorian status because she wasn't enrolled in the high school on the 20th day of her junior year. Why? Because she was in a treatment center receiving help for anorexia. Only in Texas...
posted on May 17, 2005 - View this thread

Governors Work to Improve H.S. Education The nation's governors offered an alarming account of the American high school Saturday, saying only drastic change will keep millions of students from falling short. "We can't keep explaining to our nation's parents or business leaders or college faculties why these kids can't do the work," said Virginia Democratic Gov. Mark Warner, as the state leaders convened for the first National Education Summit aimed at rallying governors around high school reform.
posted on Feb 27, 2005 - View this thread

More than a third of students surveyed think the First Amendment to the Constitution goes "too far in the rights it guarantees." Reported here.
posted on Jan 31, 2005 - View this thread

Book publisher soliciting proposals on a high school marching band memoir. It could have an “American High” structure, in which a reporter follows a number of members of a band for a year, but the tone should be “Freaks & Geeks.” It could be something along the lines of “Drumline.” Or, and this is preferable, it could be a person’s wry memoir of his or her life as a band geek: weirdness on the bus, band sluts, the freshmen who steal your place, rivalries, loathing, the football team, what personality type goes with each instrument, etc. Knowledge of band camp and competitions would be a plus. BONUS: Maud's post includes the email address of a senior editor at Wiley to whom you may send your book proposals.
posted on Oct 8, 2004 - View this thread

Prom Story In a series of essays at Slate (1, 2, 3) a journalist in his mid-20s lightheartedly recounts the experience of escorting a 17-year-old girl to her high-school prom (purely for journalistic purposes, it's worth noting). Posters at Slate's reader discussion forum, in spite of its supremely cumbersome interface, express their strong (and not always coherent) disapproval, based mostly on the age difference between the author and his prom date. The author of the essays responds: "As the film critic Richard Roeper (who is much older, and much more influential than myself) pointed out in Esquire recently, this is indeed a strange cultural moment, one made all the stranger by the fact that we're not supposed to admit [it] actually exists." I'm not the biggest fan of journalists who engage in seemingly socially taboo behavior for the sole purpose of writing an article, but this made for interesting reading nonetheless.
posted on Jun 17, 2004 - View this thread

Poetry isn't free speech for these students. Bill Nevins, a New Mexico high school teacher was fired last year and classes in poetry and the poetry club at Rio Rancho High School were permanently terminated because he refused to censor a student's poetry that was "un-American."
posted on May 20, 2004 - View this thread

Prosser High School teacher sees 15 year old student's war artwork depicting President Bush as a devil and another decapitated. Captions include calling an end to the war, and support for Ralph Nadar. Teacher hands artwork over to school administrators, who in turn bring in the Secret Service. Because that's what you do when you've handed out an assignment to kids "to keep a notebook of drawings depicting the war in Iraq".
posted on Apr 26, 2004 - View this thread

Bellevue school bans hats, hoods... In order to curtail unproven gang activity, Interlake High School has banned baseball caps, and the wearing of hoods, stemming from alleged gang involvement on the part of a few students. The faculty "believes" there to be gang actvity, and we all know that gangs require hooded-sweatshirt / ballcap uniforms, or you're out... Gang members can usually be singled out due to their poor fashion taste, but it has nothing to do with how they joined. This must be more of that freedom we North Americans seems to endorse so much...
posted on Mar 8, 2004 - View this thread

African-American == Black? Several high-school students at a predominantly white (well, predominantly NOT black) Nebraska high school were disciplined for a campaign to get 16-year-old student Trevor Richards awarded the school's annual "Distinguished African-American Student" award. Richards is from South Africa, now lives in America (not sure if he's a citizen, the CNN story isn't clear), but here's the catch: he's white.
posted on Jan 23, 2004 - View this thread

El Niño is Spanish. Like all things spanish, it is dangerous.
posted on Jan 15, 2004 - View this thread

Teaching the Test
As a student at Jefferson Davis High here, Rosa Arevelo seemed the "Texas miracle" in motion. After years of classroom drills, she passed the high school exam required for graduation on her first try. A program of college prep courses earned her the designation "Texas scholar." At the University of Houston, though, Ms. Arevelo discovered the distance between what Texas public schools called success and what she needed to know. Trained to write five-paragraph "persuasive essays" for the state exam, she was stumped by her first writing assignment. She failed the college entrance exam in math twice, even with a year of remedial algebra. At 19, she gave up and went to trade school.

This doesn't look good for our new, unfunded, "Leave No Child Behind" education bill. Smells like another bait and switch to me.
posted on Dec 3, 2003 - View this thread

The best high school in America? WaPo's Michael Dirda reviews Edward Humes' School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School.

Gretchen Whitney High is an incredible success ("People move to the Cerritos area so that their children can attend this school... And by move I don't mean from Los Angeles: They relocate from India, from Korea") story academically, especially considering its origins But there's always a price, typically exacted by the parents, who display the same good sense and no-pressure behaviors they've displayed at Little League and Pop Warner games. But no one's killed anybody over Whitney admission, at least that we know of. The story of Cecilia's art portfolio, though, will break your heart. Humes offers larger lessons, too, about how to improve our schools. I am buying this book today.
posted on Sep 8, 2003 - View this thread

Writing a story is a felony violation in Oklahoma. High school student who wrote a story about armed invasion of his school faces jail time. Prosectors admit the law is Orwellian, but need a test-case. The story itself is derived from sample text included with an Adobe Pagemaker tutorial, describing hurrican evacuation instructions.
posted on Aug 22, 2003 - View this thread

First Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender public high school to open in New York City. "I think everybody feels that it's a good idea because some of the kids who are gays and lesbians have been constantly harassed and beaten in other schools." says NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but couldn't the same argument have been used against the racial integration of schools in the 1950s?
posted on Jul 28, 2003 - View this thread

Remember Blair Hornstine? Her $2.5 million lawsuit against her high school for not naming her valedictorian resulted in an injunction and the sole possession of the title. Now it gets worse: she has a Jayson Blair problem. Several of her contributions to local papers were lifted from presidential speeches, Supreme Court opinions, and editorials.
posted on Jun 5, 2003 - View this thread

Georgia high school has white only prom. ...dunno what else to say about that.
posted on May 2, 2003 - View this thread

As one, the students shouted, "Strength through discipline!" - "The Third Wave", A Dangerous Experiment. More disturbing even than the "Milgram Experiment": "When Ron Jones started teaching at Cubberley High School in the fall of 1968, it was considered the most innovative of Palo Alto's high schools. ....His methods were experimental and his goal was to bring social studies to life.....Jones turned his class into an efficient youth organization, which he called the Third Wave. Some students were informers, and some were told they couldn't go certain places on campus. He insisted on rigid posture and that questions be answered formally and quickly....."It was strange how quickly the students took to a uniform code of behavior. I began to wonder just how far they cold be pushed," Jones wrote....But soon the experiment began spinning out of control.... five days into the experiment, Jones announced, "We can bring (the nation) a new sense of order, community, pride, and action. Everything rests on you and your willingness to take a stand." As one, the students shouted, "Strength through discipline!" ". Ron Jones wrote about it in No substitute for Madness, which is out of print in English but required reading in German public schools. As Umberto Eco notes in "Eternal Fascism", this is a timeless tale of human nature.
posted on Mar 22, 2003 - View this thread

"Why Nerds are Unpopular" is an essay by Paul Graham that looks at how being smarter than the average bear -- usually an advantage in "the real world" -- is a liability in the Lord of the Flies world of adolescence. It's a long read, but an engaging writeup of the high school pecking order, how the school structure encourages this behaviour, the freak/geek alliance and gives some hope to the current crop of high school nerds (my fellow dweebs, it does get better). Even though high school is something like twenty years in my past, I still winced when I read the essay. Were you one of the high school geeks? Are you one now?
posted on Feb 17, 2003 - View this thread

Hookup vs. Dating Seems that the 'hook up' is gaining popularity with girls (it's always been popular with boys) in high school and college these days. More and more women are looking to expend their sexual energy in a manner that they perceive to be safe and committment-free. Why didn't this happen when I was in high school?
posted on Jan 19, 2003 - View this thread

What's wrong with this teacher's comments? A Pasadena HS teacher circulated a letter with his complaint that African American students at the school are the reason for bad behavior and low test scores. He's now suspended...rightly? More inside...hoping to keep this civil, too...(thanks to Jim Romenesko)
posted on Oct 23, 2002 - View this thread

Easly High, home of the Scarlet Letters. Students violating the dress code of the South Carolina high school will now be forced to change into t-shirts bearing the phrases "Dress for Success" on the front and "Today I did not meet the dress code policy for proper attire" on the back. Boy, it's a good thing they're putting them on teenagers, because they would never think of creative ways to violate this idea in... what, about thirty seconds? Discuss your ideas for the new fashion trend: custom punishment signs!
posted on Aug 26, 2002 - View this thread

Paralyzed H.S. senior works for two years to achieve dream of walking across commencement stage to take her diploma. At the last minute, principal makes her use her wheelchair, citing liability concerns. Lawyers have us all running scared, so sad. (via Romensko)
posted on May 29, 2002 - View this thread

Social Cruelty in Adults: Does High School Ever End? An upcoming ABCNews Special with John Stossel (airing Friday) explores peer pressure, being in the "in crowd", and the role that popularity plays not only during our years in the groves of academe but also in the professional workplace. We'll see John's report on Friday, but I wish to redirect this discussion to the mefi crowd: Were you in the "in crowd" during your high school/collegiate years or on the outside looking in? Did it even matter, and if it did, how and in what way? Has it played a distinct role in the person who you feel you've become?
posted on Feb 13, 2002 - View this thread

The Case of the Head-Butting Hoopster. High-school basketball players collide during a game; the guy from the visiting team allegedly head-butts the other but is called for only a personal foul. On the home team is the son of the local district attorney, who is sitting (or perhaps ranting) in the stands. He's just sure that a crime has been committed, so ... (more inside)
posted on Feb 9, 2002 - View this thread

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy will be launching a morals program designed to teach high school students about "fundamental values and universal moral precepts." This in response to his observation that high school students did not feel a sense of outrage after September 11. Kennedy warned against trying to rationalize the actions of the terrorists, saying that "an explanation becomes the excuse." Do you think the justice system should be in the business of telling people the correct moral response to these events?
posted on Jan 27, 2002 - View this thread

2 students shot in MLK Jr. HS yesterday. "A gunman sneaked into Martin Luther King Jr. HS yesterday through a side door - evading 14 safety agents, two cops and metal-detectors - and shot and seriously wounded two boys headed to class, officials said. "

"The fact that the shooting occurred on King’s birthday was a "cruel irony," said [Manhattan Board of Education member Irving ] Hamer. King and the school stand for non-violence, he said, and "instead, we get a shooting."
posted on Jan 16, 2002 - View this thread

Cool high-school science experiment: Mapping The Homunculus. The 15 year old in me wonders why nipples and other naughty bits aren't mentioned, though. Bet they'd be really big!!!
posted on Nov 27, 2001 - View this thread

Today's high school seniors a bunch of scientific know nothings? According to the most recent national test results, it would appear so. Is this a case that the money is thrown in areas that will make the SATs look good? If that's the case, has that been money well spent? Is it really just a case of money? Whatever the answer, it sort of makes you fear for the future.
posted on Nov 21, 2001 - View this thread

Jumping on the infamous Interschool Ho voting booth story Salon is currently running a 4 page article charting/attacking the rise of 'cyber-bullying', a phenomena defined by students (mostly?) slandered their peers online. In the opening page of the piece the author, all orifices throthing, offers several graphic examples of the trend and gives not only details of the full name and school of a female sophomore victim, an extensive barrage of quotes of what ugly, retarded, hurtful stuff was written about her by some severely mentally unstable individual, but also a relatively prominent, in-your-face link to the smalltime message board in question causing them to replace it with the whimpering redirect message 'Unfortunately, due to an article posted on salon.com, the LHStudents.com website traffic has exceeded maximum capacity and we have no other option but to create a new LHBoard on a different server'..
posted on Jul 9, 2001 - View this thread

You know it's true/I'm happy to be stuck with you - high school students vie for a $2500 scholarship by attending their proms dressed in outfits made from duct tape. Interesting idea, although I question the No purchase Necessary clause in the rules, and I'm pretty sure that they made more that $2500 from all the Duck brand duct tape sold to make the outfits.
posted on Jun 14, 2001 - View this thread