MetaFilter posts tagged with school

Censorship will be enforced - There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

fearfulsymmetry — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:36:58 -0800

The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted, it is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lock-picking or forging shooting permits in countries not favouring their projects. In short: it is for those who have a sense for poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four-year-old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream. Learn film with Werner Herzog.

Technology for helicopter parents

desjardins — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:51:56 -0800

Your mother has eyes in the back of her head. Chicago Public Schools sends parents a text message when their child is not in class or the kid's grades slip. Mayor Daley attends a demonstration. Chicago is not the only school district to use this technology. It's used in Calloway County, Kentucky. Memphis, Tennessee, and Saratoga Springs, New York, to name a few. It's not just used for monitoring your kids' grades. In San Antonio, you can also monitor the presidential propaganda that's fed to your kids! But what if you want to monitor the text messages your kids receive? Radar alerts you when a "suspicious" person texts, calls, or emails your kid.

Back to self-school

escabeche — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:30:24 -0800

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?

Detroit schools urban exploration & reclamation.

Item — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 03:49:39 -0800

Urban exploration has been featured here once or twice before, but Jim Griffioen's site photo-documenting his discoveries in and around Detroit deserves a look. Griffioen was recently interviewed [direct mp3 link] on the American Public Media radio program The Story. Jim is most interested in schools. He's taken photos of trees growing through books and other things left behind. Recently Jim has gone beyond documenting what he sees and is reclaiming what he finds. He collects abandoned library books and other school supplies and gives them to community centers. Previously - blog post by Griffioen on Detroit's abandoned Belle Isle Zoo

What do you want, an armed guard to follow your kid around?

bitmage — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:24:13 -0800

Why I won't be at my high school reunion. A math geek reminisces about the joys of high school. As another who has much-less-than-pleasant memories of those years, this struck a nerve.

School Lunch From Around The World

Joe Beese — Sun, 31 May 2009 20:16:59 -0800

School Lunch From Around The World

Art Project Slags Art School!

njohnson23 — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:30:15 -0800

An art student project slags the art school administration. (SLYT) An art student at the San Francisco Art Institute snuck a short film into the MFA show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that raised cheers from the packed audience. A black and white film, hand processed in Coca Cola, that portrayed the Art Institute as a ghost town and shamed the administration by name in calling attention to the fact that they are gutting the faculty and stealing valuable resources from students.

"Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence."

Artw — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:19:48 -0800

Long before becoming a national treasure and celebrity Twitter addict the 16 year old Stephen Fry sent a letter to his future self, to which he has now responded, in a letter first published in the 25th birthday edition of Gay Times.

The Case Against Homework.

lunit — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 07:50:16 -0800

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).

It was gladiator-style entertainment for the staff

CheshireCat — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:12:36 -0800

Thunderdome Filter: In two separate incidents Texas schools have gotten a jump on any sort of dystopic future scenarios by staging illegal forced fights between those in their care. Corpus Christi State School night-staff made disabled residents get out of bed and then taped them fighting each other in over 20 incidents during 2008. South Oak Cliff High School had a policy between 2003 and 2005 of settling disputes between troubled students by having them fight it out in a steel cage in the boy's locker room while students and faculty looked on. Several arrests have been made in the Corpus Christi case and the South Oak Cliff one is just coming to public attention.

Suit filed over school shooting

Bango Skank — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 03:21:14 -0800

One year ago this week Lawrence King an openly gay middle-schooler in Oxnard, CA was murdered by a fellow student. In the midst of discussion of the legacy of this tragedy and remembrances of Larry his parents have filed a wrongful death suit. The lawsuit names several defendants including, Casa Pacifica, a youth shelter Larry where lived at the time of his death, the Ventura Rainbow Coalition, and the school in which the shooting occurred. The lawsuit's main contention is that each of these groups are responsible for Larry's death because they "failed to urge the effeminate teen to tone down flamboyant behavior."

tlhIngan ram ghoj

oonh — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:18:13 -0800

Even Klingons can benefit from the old wise ones. [SLAF]

Let's Talk about Sex (Ed).

lunit — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:19:53 -0800

Let's Talk About Sex. Challenging the convention that Americans are reluctant to have sexual health issues taught in school, the surveys show that most parents, along with educators and students themselves, would expand sexual education courses and curriculum. In the meantime, some churches are offering their own curriculum, based on guidelines developed by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.

Skateboarding in Afghanistan.

gman — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 06:07:59 -0800

Skateistan is Afghanistan's first dedicated co-educational skateboarding school.

School of Hard Knocks.

dersins — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 10:59:24 -0800

"This is the safest place these kids have," Mr. McMonigle explains. "No matter how crazy it gets here, no matter how bad the school is, it’s still better than what’s waiting for them out there when they leave. The irony is that after all the bitching and the moaning about how they don’t want to be here, at the end of the day you can’t get them to go home!" School of Hard Knocks is a heartbreaking 7-part series of articles about kids with behavioral problems in a Philadelpha high school. [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] [via mefi projects]

Sorry, We’re Booked, White House Tells Obamas

Quidam — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:35:13 -0800

NYT: "The White House has turned down a request from the family of President-elect Barack Obama to move into Blair House in early January so that his daughters can start school on Jan. 5." The Obamas were told that Blair House, where incoming presidents usually stay in the five days before Inauguration Day, is booked in early January, a spokesperson to the Obama transition said. “We explored the idea so that the girls could start school on schedule,’ the spokesperson said. “But, there were previously scheduled events and guests that couldn’t be displaced.” The Blair House, situated across the street from the White House, is the official state guest house for the President of the United States. Take a tour of the Blair House. Wikipedia. And where are the Obama girls going to school, anyway? To the Sidwell Friends School, apparently, which has also educated the children of Theodore Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, as well as the grandchildren of Joe Biden, albeit for as much as $29,442 a year.

Weapons of Mass Instruction

symbollocks — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:54:01 -0800

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." Gatto laid out his comprehensive critical analysis of the current education system in his previous book The Underground History of American Education (free online edition), [previously]. He contends that the current education system was set up from the start to serve business and government interests by isolating children from the real world. "Only then could the necessary training in boredom and bewilderment begin. Such training is necessary to produce dependable consumers and dependent citizens who would always look for a teacher to tell them what to do in later life, even if that teacher was an ad man or television anchor." In a recent interview he summarized how he got started as a teacher, why he left the profession, why the current education system is a failure, and offers solutions to the problem. Gatto is not alone in his crusade against compulsory schooling. A few, among the many worth mentioning, are: Grace Llewellyn author of The Teenage Liberation Handbook, sociology professor Stanley Aronowitz author of Against Schooling, environmentalist Derrick Jensen author of Walking on Water, Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich author of Deschooling Society, German philosopher Max Stirner author of The False Principle of our Education, and even Albert Einstein who wrote in his autobiographical notes: "It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly."

Polaroids are not dead!

krautland — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:18:23 -0800

Poladroid is a free app for your mac that lets you drag an image onto the polaroid camera in the corner of your screen. it then spits out a polaroid image that develops on your desktop. there's a flickr group for these shots already. it's beta "but really works."

Retina-Searing Portraiture

[NOT HERMITOSIS-IST] — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:16:33 -0800

We Have Lasers!!!!!! At one point in your childhood, maybe you did too?

The last resort

MrMerlot — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:33:32 -0800

Martin Parr is a celebrated English photographer who has a reputation for being both preoccupied and inspired with notions of consumerism, foreign travel and tourism. Now you can actually go on holiday with him. The School of Life, a maverick cultural institution in London, is offering a weekend away with the sardonic snapper in the Isle of Wight. Parr has described the Isle of Wight as like "a living theme park, like stepping back into an England of 20 or 30 years ago". For the princely sum of £500, you get to stay in Parr’s favourite seaside hotel, and join him for visits to the Brighstone holiday centre, the Needles, Ventnor beach and "other landmarks of the Isle of Wight tourism scene". According to the website, Parr will discuss his photography as well as his collections of souvenirs and postcards, and train your eye to see the "ugliness in beauty and the horror in leisure". Future holidays with cultural figures are planned by the School of Life, including a tour of the "overlooked delights of Heathrow airport" with philosopher Alain de Botton and an exploration of the M1 motorway. To my mind, this reminds of the sports tours where past greats are paid to guide you around famous stadiums and then sit with you at dinner trading old anecdotes. But does this cultural-history-as-holiday have other antecedents, I wonder?

Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth

davar — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 03:02:27 -0800

Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth. How children learn (or: don't learn) math today. The video explains the new ways children are taught division and multiplication and what is wrong with new new math (not to be confused with the new math that was taught in the sixties) or whole math. From the textbook in the video:The authors of Everyday Mathematics do not believe it is worth students’ time and effort to fully develop highly efficient paper-and-pencil algorithms for all possible whole-number, fraction, and decimal division problems. Mastery of the intricacies of such algorithms is a huge endeavor, one that experience tells us is doomed to failure for many students. It is simply counter-productive to invest many hours of precious class time on such algorithms. The mathematical payoff is not worth the cost, particularly because quotients can be found quickly and accurately with a calculator.

"We're not supposed to get more than one injury a day. I usually get three or four."

fantabulous timewaster — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:28:12 -0800

The Tinkering School. "A 'real project' is where you make a thing that isn't a pretend something else. If the kids want to make a boat, that's fine, but we're going to take it down to the harbor and put it in the ocean." [via NPR, no transcript yet] Compare (previously) and contrast.

Better to limbo under a stick than become one...

OhPuhLeez — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:36:43 -0800

See Nemo fetch. Want to train your comet to join the Comets? Your Shubunkin to do some dunkin'?

Goldfish training.

A school of fish or a school for fish? You be the judge.

Why Learn Algebra? I'm Never Likely to Go There.

jabberjaw — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:27:39 -0800

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. Here's a more in-depth story on it from the L.A. Times. This post's title is a paraphrased quote from comedian Billy Connolly: "I don't know why I should have to learn Algebra. I'm never likely to go there."

Blue Collar Babies

swift — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:59:28 -0800

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.