Any time you're looking for it, you can find sexual assaults in the media, though most of them are simply a single mention in a local newspaper or TV about a teacher accused of "inappropriate behavior" with a student, or an "alleged" assault at a party or on a jogging trail...small notices that quickly fall off the radar, until in a few days ( Read more... )

The One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC for short) has been giving tablet notebooks with solar chargers to various schools in Africa and testing the results.

They tried a new experiment in two remote Ethiopian villages where no one--adult or child--had ever seen a written word.  Delivered boxes--taped up boxes--to the villages and left them.  What ( Read more... )

When young people commit suicide, many people wonder why, what drove them to it.  No one has all the answers.  But one common denominator is the crushing hopelessness, the sense that things have gone completely wrong and can't ever improve.  In the case of young college students, their Plan A...the way they thought that first or second year at ( Read more... )

Between the Science article on science literacy and education, and a program item I saw on Nightline last night about a family doing "unschooling" in Massachusetts, my head is about to burst.

First, some personal history.   I did well in a very limited public school system (south Texas, 1951-1963)--underfunded, overcrowded (40 in many elementary ( Read more... )

None of us are born knowing how to make good choices.   We don't get to choose our parents, to start with, and so as babies we come into the world already subject to someone else's choices (good or bad); for years after that, we are legally constrained by the choices others make for us.   Those choices open to us (if we have parents who allow ( Read more... )

Not only did he navigate the very complex day last Thursday with accuracy and competence...including the bus breakdown...but we found out that he'd had a class quiz in his math class that day...and made 100.

Wow.

Husband and son headed off in the predawn dimness to catch the bus to catch the other bus to get to campus in time for son's first class.   Yesterday husband got son set up on husband's computer (because son doesn't have broadband and ACC requires broadband for access to some course requirements, like online homework and quiz assignments.   Son did ( Read more... )