Ok, maybe not hell per se, but Silent Hill is pretty darn close. Anyway, I sure wouldn’t want to learn anything from Pyramid Head. Who knows what he would do when you get a wrong answer?

Link Via Kotaku

A growing body of research over three decades shows that easy, unearned praise does not help students but instead interferes with significant learning opportunities. As schools ratchet up academic standards for all students, new buzzwords are “persistence,” “risk-taking” and “resilience” — each implying more sweat and strain than fuzzy, warm feelings.

“We used to think we could hand children self-esteem on a platter,” Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck said. “That has backfired.”

Dweck’s studies, embraced in Montgomery schools and elsewhere, have found that praising children for intelligence — “You’re so clever!” — also backfires. In study after study, children rewarded for being smart become more likely to shy away from hard assignments that might tarnish their star reputations.

But children praised for trying hard or taking risks tend to enjoy challenges and find greater success. Children also perform better in the long term when they believe that their intellect is not a birthright but something that grows and develops as they learn new things.

Link -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Caught cheating? In my days, that's an automatic fail.

But not anymore, at least not in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada! Teachers there are forbidden to fail a student caught cheating:

The school board had defended the policy change, on grounds that cheating students could still be disciplined — including a suspension from school — and that a failing grade did not resolve whether the student had actually learned an assignment.

But critics said the policy helped coddle students, and gave a signal that cheating does not have serious consequences.

Link

Columbus Discovered The World Was Round

We’ve all heard the story about how Christopher Columbus was the first person to realize the Earth was round. But despite the fact that many of us were told this story in elementary school, this is about as far from historical truth as you can get.

The Columbus story was actually started by Washington Irving, who, despite calling himself a historian, was much more of a historical fiction writer. As a matter of fact, you may recall his name from his most famous work, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

While Irving’s Columbus novel did feature a lot of historical fact and the author spent hours researching the navigator’s life, he also added a lot of his own fictional plot twists to make the story more interesting. Even so, certain fictional aspects from his story did work their way into the public consciousness and eventually, into the history books.

In actuality, the idea of a round Earth dates all the way back to Grecian times in 600 B.C. By the time Columbus was born, it had been proven mathematically and someone who argued the world was flat would be considered just as crazy then as someone who believed the same thing today.

As a matter of fact, Columbus was the one who was completely wrong in his calculations, not the general public. That’s because navigators of the time completely (and correctly) disagreed with how big Columbus thought the world was and thus, how long it would take to get to India.

Columbus was so stubborn that even after he located a new continent, he refused to admit that his calculations were wrong and that he was anywhere except India -hence his insistence on calling the natives “Indios,” Spanish for “Indians.” In fact, because Columbus refused to admit he didn’t sail to the Indies, it wasn’t until a year after he died that America was identified as a new continent by Amerigo Vespucci (the continent was eventually named in his honor).

Washington Could Not Tell A Lie

This is the old story that says that even as a youngster, George Washington was so honest that he could not tell a lie to his father no matter how angry good ol’ dad was that someone would cut down his favorite cherry tree.

For some reason, this seems to be a story that teachers like to tell young children as though it was fact, only to tell children that it isn’t true once they grow older. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like teaching kids history might be a little easier if we don’t treat the first president of the USA like Santa Claus.

Part of the reason for the many myths surrounding Mr. Washington was a “biography” by Mason Locke Weems titled The Life of George Washington, with Curious Anecdotes Laudable to Himself and Exemplary to his Countrymen.  Aside from a ridiculously long title, the book featured a number of tales about Washington’s bravery and honesty –most of which, like the cherry tree story, are completely fabricated.

While we’re on the subject, Washington also did not have wooden teeth. While the president did wear dentures, they actually featured teeth made of a variety of substances, including gold, ivory, lead, human teeth and animal teeth, but no wood.

Sir Walter Raleigh Introduced Europe to New World Treats

Most of the stories told about this famed explorer are exaggerations, if not outright lies. He was hardly handsome and although he was a charming gentleman, he certainly never laid his cloak over a puddle so Queen Elizabeth could walk by without dirtying her shoes.

Similarly, while he helped popularize tobacco in England, even encouraging the queen to light up, he was not the first person to bring the plant into the county. And he was far from the first person to light up a pipe in Europe. In fact, tobacco was first brought to Spain in 1518 and it had certainly spread north to London by 1578, when Raleigh first brought it back to England.

Same story with the potato, which was first brought to Spain in 1570 and quickly spread throughout Europe. As for who first brought them from America to England, it may have been Raleigh, but it just as likely could have been Sir Francis Drake.

So why is Raleigh credited with being so chivalrous to the queen and for bringing these New World specialties back to England? Largely thanks to American school teacher and writer James Baldwin who, like the other “historians” listed here, felt justified in making up falsehoods if they helped emphasize the importance of a historical figure. Baldwin completely made up the story about the Queen and Sir Raleigh and claimed that he was the first man to bring potatoes and tobacco not only to England, but to all of Europe.

Of course, if you’ve ever wanted a scapegoat for all the misinformation still being printed in school books, Baldwin might just be your favorite lying historian. While none of his books are still in print, the author wrote so many successful text books that it was estimated that around the early twentieth century, half of all American school books were written by the liberty-taking historian.

Paul Revere’s Ride to Concord

“Listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” There’s a reason this story always starts off so poetically –this line comes from a poem. The poem in question is “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and while it may be a great poem, it’s hardly a historical retelling of that fateful night. Longfellow’s story was only created to help stir up some much needed patriotism shortly before the Civil War started.

Paul Revere was only one of about forty men that were involved with the incident. Longfellow only chose to focus the story on Revere because his name made a perfect match in the first line of the poem. To be fair though, only a few of the men have ever been identified and Revere did play a big role in planning and executing the plan, but he never actually finished his ride, since he was caught in a roadblock on the way to Concord.

Humorously, the poem itself never mentions Revere screaming “the British are coming,” but that has since become one of the biggest parts of the story of his ride. This newer addition is unsurprisingly totally untrue. There’s a good reason the riders didn’t go around screaming at the top of their lungs –over 20% of the population was still loyal to the crown and would have happily reported this sort of information to the British if given a chance. Instead of screaming down the streets, the riders instead went directly to the homes and meeting halls of the patriots they knew.

Not all of Longfellow’s poem is completely bunk though. Revere really did suggest the “one if by land, two if by sea” lantern system and he really did stealthy row his ship across the Charles River sneaking next to the British warship HMS Somerset. Those details have to count for something, right?

Marco Polo Brought Pasta to Europe

Surely at some point you’ve heard someone claim that Asians were the first people to make pasta and that Marco Polo brought the creation back to Europe where it flourished, particularly in Italy. Like many of the other stories listed here, this one is completely fabricated. But while the rest of these fictionalized stories were at least created by well-meaning writers who were just trying to make history a little more interesting, this one was made by a marketing team in order to make their product seem more exciting and exotic.

Pasta as we know it has nothing to do with Marco Polo. In fact, the pasta that he describes in his Travels are actually what we call “dumpling skins” not “pasta.” While historians debate the official definition of pasta and then the official date that it was invented, they agree that at the latest, durum wheat pasta was brought to Sicily by the Libyans in the late 7^th century–about six centuries before Polo visited China.

So where did the Marco Polo pasta story come from? Actually, that “fact” was first printed in the Macaroni Journal, a 1920’s trade industry publication created by an association of food industry conglomerates who were trying to increase pasta consumption in the United States.

There are still plenty more historical untruths being taught to kids around the country, many of which came from the same imaginative writers that invented the myths in this article. Do you happen to know any other historical fictions that are still being taught to school children?

Sources: Wikipedia #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, Read Book Online, National Center, Write Spirit, Cracked #1, #2

How the KKK helped get children out of the factories and into the classroom.

Members of the Ku Klux Klan liked to think of themselves as white knights. And when it came to compulsory education for schoolchildren, believe  it or not, they actually were. To understand how this bizarre heroism came to pass, you have to go back to the 1820s, when about half the laborers in America’s cotton mils were children under the age of 15. Adults had a serious hankering to get those kids out of the workforce -not because they were concerned for their well-being but because adults resented the competition. After all, employers could get away with paying children much lower wages, and the little ones had energy to burn. Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, vice president of the National Women’s Trade Union League, put the situation bluntly: “Wherever child labor prevails there is a corresponding decrease in employment for adults.”

In fact, getting rid of the kids was one of the first causes to unite the American label movement. When labor leaders realized they couldn’t just turn youngsters out in the streets to fend for themselves, they proposed a one-two punch of ending child labor laws and requiring school. Massachusetts was the first state to pass a compulsory education law. In 1837, its state legislature barred factory owners from hiring anyone under age 15 who hadn’t attended public school for at least three months during the previous year. The law was ignored, and factory owners kept hiring kids anyway. Five years later, Massachusetts passed a second law, which went after factories more directly, limiting the amount of time children could work. When this law was ignored as well, the state made education compulsory in 1852.

By 1884, 16 states had instituted laws that forced children to go to school. Business owners, enamored with their short, low cost labor pool, denounced the status as “communist” and “un-American.” But the percentage of children in the workforce in cotton mills fell nonetheless; by 1890 it was just 10 percent. And not coincidentally, adult workers were awarded higher wages and better working conditions over the same period. From 1840 to 1880, average wages rose as much as 150 percent, while at the same time, the average workday fell from 13-14 hours to 10-11 hours.

At the turn of the century, labor unions lobbied for compulsory education nationwide, and they soon found an unexpected ally. The Ku Klux Klan supported the idea of public schools as a way of forcing immigrants to conform to white, Protestant culture. By 1918, labor unions had succeeded in getting compulsory education laws passed in every state. Two years later, a Catholic organization in Oregon demanded that the laws be amended to include private schools. The KKK took a more outspoken stance, and its membership grew quickly in support of the public school system.

But the fight wasn’t over -just because more kids were forced to go to school didn’t mean that they couldn’t work in factories. After all, there were always nights, weekends, and summer vacations, right? In 1923, a Klan newspaper warned that big business wanted to keep child labor legal to “secure a cheaper class of labor and hold the price paid to the American citizen down to a minimum at all times.” The Klan was nearing the apex of its size and clout, with more than 3 million members. Since a good portion of its ranks were poor whites, the Klan was more sympathetic to this group’s economic interests. It went on a full-throttle campaign to get kids out of the factories for good.

Around the same time that the national KKK began strongly advocating for a federal ban on child labor, a rift opened up between the Northern Klansmen and Southern industrialists. In the ensuing public relations battle, the industrialists tried to win points with Southern voters by portraying the debate over child labor as another fight against the Yankees. But the pull of the KKK was too great, and the Klan won a victory for children nationwide -well, white children. Southern business leaders agreed to child labor laws, but only as long as the adult minimum wage remained low and African-American children were prohibited from attending white public schools. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standard Act officially ended child labor, but it didn’t do much to help black kids living under Jim Crow. The result: White children across the country were guaranteed an education at the expense of black children in the South.

_______________________

The article above, written by Erik Sass, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

“We’ve been incredibly successful,” the founder and president of Urban Prep, Tim King, tells me. “All our students are African-American, about 85% are low income and 100% of our classes have gone on to college.”

In 2010 and 2011, 100% of students who graduated from Urban Prep were accepted to college.

“It’s extraordinary when you think about it because the number of African-Americans who go on to college in our country, the numbers are really low.”

Another cliche is that the only way out for some kids is to become a rapper or a sports star.

Mr King says he wants to create role models who are engineers and scientists. Even getting a college degree makes a big difference.

“Education is key. It can become trite when you hear it, but it is really true,” he says.

Link -via BBC

Can't get your students motivated enough to study? Not a problem in South Korea - in fact, they have the opposite problem: their students study too much.

How much? Let's say that the problem is so bad that the government started raiding study halls to stop students from studying. No, seriously.

Amanda Ripley wrote this must-read article for TIME Magazine:

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country's addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.

The raid starts in a leisurely way. We have tea, and I am offered a rice cracker. Cha Byoung-chul, a midlevel bureaucrat at Seoul's Gangnam district office of education, is the leader of this patrol. I ask him about his recent busts, and he tells me about the night he found 10 teenage boys and girls on a cram-school roof at about 11 p.m. "There was no place to hide," Cha recalls. In the darkness, he tried to reassure the students. "I told them, 'It's the hagwon that's in violation, not you. You can go home.'"

Cha smokes a cigarette in the parking lot. Like any man trying to undo centuries of tradition, he is in no hurry. "We don't leave at 10 p.m. sharp," he explains. "We want to give them 20 minutes or so. That way, there are no excuses." Finally, we pile into a silver Kia Sorento and head into Daechi-dong, one of Seoul's busiest hagwon districts. The streets are thronged with parents picking up their children. The inspectors walk down the sidewalk, staring up at the floors where hagwons are located — above the Dunkin' Donuts and the Kraze Burgers — looking for telltale slivers of light behind drawn shades.

At about 11 p.m., they turn down a small side street, following a tip-off. They enter a shabby building and climb the stairs, stepping over an empty chip bag. On the second floor, the unit's female member knocks on the door. "Hello? Hello!" she calls loudly. A muted voice calls back from within, "Just a minute!" The inspectors glance at one another. "Just a minute" is not the right answer. Cha sends one of his colleagues downstairs to block the elevator. The raid begins.

Link

We all know the inspiring story of Charles Lindbergh being the first person to fly across the Atlantic, but as it turns out, he’s only the first person to do it by himself. In fact, eight years before he made the flight, two British men completed the same journey.

And that’s not the only incorrect first you were taught in school. Jackie Robinson wasn’t the first black man to play professional baseball and Copernicus wasn’t the first person to realize the earth revolved around the sun. Cracked has all the details.

Link

Everyone wants to be successful - yet obviously not many are - so it's natural to ask whether there's a secret to success.

Do having high IQ, rich parents, and going to college prep school guarantee success? One would think so, but ask anyone who knows a smart and promising student drop out of college or otherwise flame out.

So, what is the missing ingredient? In this interesting article by Paul Tough for The New York Times Magazine, the secret sauce is "character".

For the headmaster of an intensely competitive school, Randolph, who is 49, is surprisingly skeptical about many of the basic elements of a contemporary high-stakes American education. He did away with Advanced Placement classes in the high school soon after he arrived at Riverdale; he encourages his teachers to limit the homework they assign; and he says that the standardized tests that Riverdale and other private schools require for admission to kindergarten and to middle school are “a patently unfair system” because they evaluate students almost entirely by I.Q. “This push on tests,” he told me, “is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”

The most critical missing piece, Randolph explained as we sat in his office last fall, is character — those essential traits of mind and habit that were drilled into him at boarding school in England and that also have deep roots in American history. “Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful,” he said. “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that.”

Parents, if you read only one article today, let it be this one: Link (Image: Tape installation by Stephen Doyle / Photo by Stephen Wilkes for the NY Times)

I know school’s about to start (if it hasn’t already), but just in case you want to provide them with a few last educational activities at home, this geode egg project is a good way to get them interested in the science of crystallization.

Link Via Craftzine

We’ve already linked to Mental Floss’ list of weird college courses, but if you can’t get enough of these strange course listings, then you probably ought to head over to Cracked and read about six more of these classes including Super Smash Bros. Melee Theory and Practice.

Link

I’m sure we can all agree that it’s important to keep kids safe from the big dangers of this world, but there is certainly a line between safety and stupidity and many schools these days have jumped right over that border. Cracked ha a great list of the most idiotic things schools are doing in the name of safety, including making them wear electric tracking bracelets, banning all photography and preventing all physical contact. Read about the rest over at the link.

Link

16. How to Watch Television
Montclair State
Has that big screen in your living room always perplexed you? Flummoxed by the little rectangle that seems to control its every image and sound? Sorry to say, this class isn’t going to help. Despite its title, “How to Watch Television” is really about analyzing the medium and evaluating TV’s impact on our lives.

17. Invented Languages: Klingon and Beyond
University of Texas at Austin
The class explores the Star Trek language and Esperanto, among others. I’m willing to bet there’s a bit of Elvish thrown in there, too.

18. The Phallus
Occidental College
I feel like this one speaks for itself, but just in case you need it spelled out for you, here’s an excerpt from the syllabus: Topics include the signification of the phallus, the relation of the phallus to masculinity, femininity, genital organs and the fetish, the whiteness of the phallus, and the lesbian phallus.

Find all 22 of them at mental_floss. Link

What do you guys think? Is this a realistic request or just plain over dramatic?

Link

I’m sure just about everyone reading this was yelled at at least once in school for chewing gum, doodling, day dreaming or fidgeting, but as it turns out, science says those behavoirs are actually beneficial to your ability to learn. Learn how over at Cracked.

Link

Link Via Geekosystem

I think that the system, grading in general, grading as a gold standard of employability, college as the necessary step between high school and employment, all of these things alone aren’t necessarily wrong. But when you get them all together in this network, and college is going to define your future, the grades will determine where you go, one, for a fifth of you, those of you who are going to grad school or law school or med school. For the rest of you, to get that job, you need that paper that says, “Diploma,” which means you need to pass. That’s all that matters.

If the only purpose in going to college is to get a diploma (not knowledge, not an education, and not good grades), then its no wonder students assume that you should get one just for paying the tuition and arranging for the required papers by any means necessary. Link -via TYWKIWDBI, where you can join the discussion.

(Image credit: The “Gold Guys”)

It sounds strange, but it’s true. One of the vulgar humor site’s recent article dives in to five simple ways to make our kids smarter, which involve surprising simple things like starting school later, adding more windows to classrooms and taking kids out for a walk before they take a test. While the article is filled with typical Cracked humorous quips, it is surprisingly free of curse words, making me wonder what the site is up to these days.

Link

The Pyramids Weren’t Built By Slaves

If you learned one thing about Egypt in school, it was that the pyramids are marvels of ancient technology…and that they were built by slaves. There are movies based around slaves working on the pyramids and every one has seen at least half a dozen pictures of the poor workers straining under the hot sun as their cruel masters wait, whip in hand, for someone to slack off.

But working on the pyramids might not have been so bad after all. While it was still hard work to construct the massive monuments, recent research has shown that the workers were more likely skilled masons who had the right to leave whenever they wanted. Evidence to back this claim is supported in the fact that the workers had their own tombs right beside the pyramids. Egyptologists point out that someone that low on the social ladder would never have been buried so close to the pharaohs.

Image via anniemarieangelo [Flickr]

Everything You Knew About Dinosaurs Is Wrong

Ok, maybe not everything you learned about dinos back in school was wrong, but a lot of it sure was. For one thing, there is no brontosaurus. Yeah, that giant lumbering monster we all learned about in grade school was actually an apatosaurus with the head of a camarasaurus. The worst thing about this inaccuracy is that it was discovered over a century ago, but up until recently, everyone (including a lot of elementary school teachers) still insisted on calling apatosauruses brontosauruses.

I guess one mislabeled dino isn’t that big of a deal…but the incorrect visual representation of just about every dinosaur imaginable is. By now, you’ve probably heard that many dinosaurs probably had feathers, a huge change for those of us who grew up thinking about giant lizards roaming the prehistoric plains. But even those that probably didn’t look like giant birds still looked way cooler and more versatile than the oversized iguanas popularly imagined. These days, we even know what color some dinosaurs were, and they are a far call from the multitude of green shades we once imagined. If you really want to know just how different dinosaurs were compared to what we were taught, check out this great article on Listverse, about the Top 10 Dinosaurs That Aren’t What They Were.

Image via Geoff S. [Flickr]

Arsenic Is One of the Building Blocks of Life

If you learned chemistry or biology in high school, you were probably taught that there are six chemical elements known as the “building blocks of life.” They are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus.  These components make up the chemical composition of DNA and without them, life isn’t possible…or at least, we thought it wasn’t possible.

Last year, scientists discovered a bacteria species living in a salt lake in California that was missing one of the building blocks of life, phosphorus, and instead had arsenic in its place. For some people, this might not seem like such a huge deal, particularly considering that arsenic is very close to phosphorus in its physical and chemical properties, but it’s a huge deal to scientists who suddenly saw a massive expansion in the scope of potential living things. It really makes a difference in intergalactic research, since the discovery opens up whole new planets as potential life-supporting ecosystems.

Image via Artful Magpie [Flickr]

Humans Aren’t Really All That Special

Maybe this wasn’t the case for all of you, but when I was in school, the teachers seemed overly fascinated with telling us how much better humans are than other animals. They’d tell the class, “we’re the only animals who have complex emotions,” “no other animal is self-aware like we are,” “humans are the only creatures who use tools,” “we are the only species to communicate through complex language,” etc. I don’t know why they felt our fragile homo sapien egos were so threatened by other creatures, but I always thought that was a little strange. As it turns out, it was completely incorrect too.

Recent studies show that elephants mourn the loss of their companions and many animals, particularly dogs (who have evolved in the companionship of humans), have far more complex emotions than scientists had ever imagined. And chimps don’t just have emotions; they also are self-aware enough to understand how their own actions will affect those around them.

Well, we still have our intelligence to set us apart from the beasts right? Not so quick you homo sapien- supremacists. Actually, there are a lot of intelligent animals out there, many of which use tools and converse amongst themselves. Chimps have used spears to hunt for thousands of years, octopuses use coconut shells as both camouflage and as protection, and dolphins use sponges to help uncover fish that are hiding in the sand.

As for language, bees have an incredibly complex language system allowing them to communicate what type of flower is located in a given place and how to get to that location. Monkeys not only communicate with one another vocally, but they even understand grammar rules. In fact, in some ways, animals are actually ahead of us in the language game. While humans cannot yet speak the language of any other animals, primates can be taught sign language so they can communicate with us in our own language.

Image via Mundoo [Flickr]

If this crushed your memories of grade school, I’m sorry, but now it’s your turn to get revenge. What have you learned isn’t true even though they told you it was a “fact” back in school?

There are always excuses for not showing up, or not turning work in. I’ve heard them all. But lives built on excuses generally don’t turn out well. [...]

Few people care whether you succeed or fail. You are not showing up to class for your teachers or even your parents. You’re not doing these assignments for anyone but yourselves. If you cut classes because your teachers bore you, then you should be dropping those classes, not piddling away your GPA.

I went to a community college too. I screwed up in high school, graduating in the bottom third of my class. But I married and became a father not long thereafter. Those responsibilities made me quite serious about the second chance offered by the community college system. It’s difficult to maintain a slacker attitude when you’re up nightly with 2 o’clock feedings of an infant daughter whose vulnerability and dependence on you are impossible to overlook. Had I not shown up regularly and done the work conscientiously, I would have blown that second chance. I would have had a much different life, a much poorer one, not only materially but intellectually and even spiritually. And my children would have had poorer lives too, because what I learned in college was shared with them in ways too numerous to count. I’ve never regretted the portion of my youth that I devoted to study.

Like Woody Allen supposedly said, 80% of success is showing up: Link

The authorities led by President Serzh Sarkisian, an enthusiastic supporter of the game, have committed around $1.43 million to the scheme – a large sum in the impoverished but chess-mad country.

Children from the age of six will learn chess as a separate subject on the curriculum for two hours a week.

Aivazian said the lessons, which start later this year, would “foster schoolchildren’s intellectual development” and teach them to “think flexibly and wisely”.

Do you think that the children will benefit from this time spent studying chess?

Link via reddit | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user Andréia used under Creative Commons license

Back in 2010, researchers from Brown University have noticed that first generation immigrant children generally outperform second and third generation immigrant children, despite having the largest linguistic and cultural barriers. They call this "Immigrant Paradox":

“These are very unusual findings,” said Garcia Coll, the Robinson and Barstow Professor of Education, Psychology and Pediatrics at Brown. “In a time where immigrants are seen as detriments to our society and not making contributions, what this research is telling us is that the first generations come in with amazing energy and amazing capabilities of surmounting lack of education in parents, poverty, and language differences. The tragedy is that as some kids acculturate and become American, they start doing worse.”

Now, a new research from the University of Florida found further support for the Immigrant Paradox: the second and third generations also tend to get into more trouble. Mildred Maldonado-Molina, et al. looked at the pattern of DUI arrests and found that first-generation immigrants have the lowest rate of DUI arrests, as well as marijuana and alcohol use. Second generation US-born Hispanic youth has higher rates of those three things, and third generation even worse.

Interesting, huh? What do you think the reason for immigrants’ children and grandchildren doing progressively "worse" in those metrics?

Braille With Sign Language Alphabet Blocks – $36.95

Are you always on the look out for unique educational toys for your budding genius? The Braille With Sign Language Alphabet Blocks from the NeatoShop are for you.

Not only are these handmade Braille With Sign Language Alphabet Blocks beautiful, they are fun too. What toddler can resist knocking over a tower of  perfectly stacked blocks? Not mine.  Roar!!!

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Baby and Kids products.

With no monitor, the original version of Oregon Trail was played by answering prompts that printed out on a roll of paper. At 10 characters per second, the teletype spat out, “How much do you want to spend on your oxen team?” or, “Do you want to eat (1) poorly (2) moderately or (3) well?” Students typed in the numerical responses, then the program chugged through a few basic formulas and spat out the next prompt along with a status update.

“Bad illness—medicine used,” it might say. “Do you want to (1) hunt or (2) continue?”

Hunting required the greatest stretch of the user’s imagination. Instead of a point-and-shoot game, the teletype wrote back, “Type BANG.”

If the user typed it in accurately and quickly enough, the hunter bagged his quarry.

The game was first played in a history class on December 3rd, 1971. Students had to wait up to a half hour just to take a turn! But they wanted to play again and again. Strangely, the code was deleted from the school computer at the end of the year, but the teacher, co-creator Don Rawitsch, printed out the code -hundreds of lines- on a roll of computer paper. It may have never been used again if Rawitsch hadn’t looked for a community service job in order to avoid the Vietnam draft. What happened was that Oregon Trail became “the most widely distributed educational game of all time.” The story of how three Minnesota student teachers invented the game but never saw any profits is a fascinating tale. Link -via Rue the Day

Hate taking tests? Too bad! A study has shown that to really learn, you should stop studying and start taking tests:

Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques.

The research, published online Thursday in the journal Science, found that students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods.

One of those methods — repeatedly studying the material — is familiar to legions of students who cram before exams. The other — having students draw detailed diagrams documenting what they are learning — is prized by many teachers because it forces students to make connections among facts.

These other methods not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students the illusion that they know material better than they do.

Pam Belluck of The New York Times has the full report: Link

Well, it’s because Chinese kids have Chinese mothers. Amy Chua explains why Chinese moms are superior in scorched earth, no holds barred, extreme child-rearing techniques:

Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic
success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be "the best" students, that "academic achievement reflects successful parenting," and that if children did not excel at school then there was "a problem" and parents "were not doing their job." Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams. [...]

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)

Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, "You’re lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you." By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about how their kids turned out.

Amy – a professor at Yale Law School and author of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," a book about raising children the Chinese Way – explains the 3 big differences between Chinese and Western parental mind-sets in this intriguing article in the Wall Street Journal.

See if you agree: Link (Photo: Erin Patrice O’brien/WSJ)

The New York Times has a series of interactive maps of the US with which you can study population distribution by race and ethnicity, income, housing (such as mortgage, home value, and rent), and by education. I found that the average household income in my county in 2009 was $21,195, which is 10% less than in the year 2000. The data comes from the US Census Bureau. Link -via Metafilter

YouTube link.

Prepared by students at Kansas State University, this short video summarizes “some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.”

The methodology is explained here, along with a textual summary of the contents.   Responses to the video on a variety of education-related websites range from praise and sympathy to disagreement and dismissal.

Via Libraryland, where there is also a response by faculty at the University of South Carolina.

The scandal has triggered fears of early elections and has inflamed a bitter dispute between journalists and members of parliament.

An investigation has found some MPs never finished their studies while others bought their qualifications from dodgy colleges…

The chief minister of Balochistan Province, Nawab Muhammad Aslam Raisani, told the press: “A degree is a degree, whether it is fake or genuine.”

Link, via Reddit, where there is an insightful (and humorous) discussion thread.

The Biegler children live as though school doesn’t exist.

They’re at home all day, but they’re not being homeschooled. They’re being "unschooled." There are no textbooks, no tests and no formal education at all in their world.

What’s more, that hands-off approach extends to other areas of the children’s lives: They make their own decisions, and don’t have chores or rules.

Christine Yablonski and Phil Biegler of Westford, Mass., are self-described "radical unschoolers." They allow their teen daughter and son to decide what they want to learn, and when they want to learn it.

"They key there is that you’ve got to trust your kids to … find their own interests," Yablonski told "Good Morning America."

Yablonski described unschooling as "living your life as if the school system didn’t exist."

Juju Chang of Good Morning America has more on this unusual approach to educamacation: Link

Cake Wrecks has a roundup of tragic cakes specifically for school events: back to school, the last day of school, graduation, teacher training, or in the case of the cake pictured, a special lesson in history (I think). Did I spell all those words right? I wouldn’t want these cakes to rub off on me! Link

Here’s another study linking the importance of reading books (technically, book collection – but I suppose the two typically go hand in hand) to academic success:

After examining statistics from 27 nations, a group of researchers found the presence of book-lined shelves in the home — and the intellectual environment those volumes reflect — gives children an enormous advantage in school.

“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports the study, recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books.

“This is a large effect, both absolutely and in comparison with other influences on education,” adds the research team, led by University of Nevada sociologist M.D.R. Evans. “A child from a family rich in books is 19 percentage points more likely to complete university than a comparable child growing up without a home library.”

Link

If spanking is bad, what about bribery? Should parents bribe kids to learn? Is it wrong to reward kids for doing well in school if they’re supposed to do it in the first place for "the love of learning"?

Someone finally did the experiment:

To find out, a Harvard economist named Roland Fryer Jr. did something education researchers almost never do: he ran a randomized experiment in hundreds of classrooms in multiple cities. He used mostly private money to pay 18,000 kids a total of $6.3 million and brought in a team of researchers to help him analyze the effects. He got death threats, but he carried on. The results, which he shared exclusively with TIME, represent the largest study of financial incentives in the classroom — and one of the more rigorous studies ever on anything in education policy. [...]

In the last city, something remarkable happened. Kids who got paid all year under a very elegant scheme performed significantly better on their standardized reading tests at the end of the year. Statistically speaking, it was as if those kids had spent three extra months in school, compared with their peers who did not get paid.

"These are substantial effects, as large as many other interventions that people have thought to be successful," says Brian Jacob, a University of Michigan public-policy and economics professor who has studied incentives and who reviewed Fryer’s study at TIME’s request. If incentives are designed wisely, it appears, payments can indeed boost kids’ performance as much as or more than many other reforms you’ve heard about before — and for a fraction of the cost.

TIME Magazine has the exclusive story: Link

The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail. The company advertises that its graders hold advanced degrees and can quickly turn around assignments with sophisticated commentary, because they are not juggling their own course work, too…

The assessors use technology that allows them to embed comments in each document; professors can review the results (and edit them if they choose) before passing assignments back to students. In addition, professors receive a summary of comments from each assignment, designed to show common “trouble spots” among students’ answers, among other things.

Critics decry the lack of personal relationship between teacher and student, but defenders of the process counter that grading in the past has often been done by teaching assistants, and the use of “virtual TAs” in the Indian subcontinent is not fundamentally different.  The process is not inexpensive; one example cited at the link indicates a cost of $12 per assignment per student.

The responses of students and the reactions of faculty at various universities, graduate schools, and community colleges is discussed in the excellent article at The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Not discussed at the link is to what extent the papers being outsourced for grading were outsourced by the students to be written by someone else…

Link.  Bobblehead image via the Neatoshop.

Beginning in May, people who take six-week courses in certain subjects will be guaranteed a job within a year — or else they’ll be refunded their tuition money.

It’s a radical idea, particularly for a school located in Lansing, Mich., where unemployment sits at 11.7%. Lansing Community College, the third largest community college in the state, has 30,000 students a year but is looking for more. The new money-back guarantee will apply to the four most in-demand technical jobs in the area: call-center specialists, pharmacy technicians, quality inspectors and computer machinists.

Link

We’ve looked at contemporary grades from over 160 colleges and universities in the United States with a combined enrollment of over 2,000,000 students and historical grades from over 80 schools… The rise in grades in the 1960s correlates with the social upheavals of the Vietnam War. It was followed by a decade period of static to falling grades. The cause of the renewal of grade inflation, which began in the 1980s and has yet to end, is subject to debate, but it is difficult to ascribe this rise in grades to increases in student achievement.

In a companion piece, the authors discuss these trends in detail, compare the sciences to the humanities, and note that the same trend is not evident in community colleges.  Of particular interest are links to the data from over 200 colleges and universities.  At my college the GPA was 2.7 in the mid-1960s, and is now nearly 3.5.

Link.

TopTenz.net has a list of the ten smallest accredited colleges in the U.S. The largest on the list has 260 students, and the smallest has 38. In the #3 position with 84 students is the Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire:

It is a Roman Catholic college and all students spend one semester in Italy, living in a monastery and studying at the Rome campus, just five miles away from St. Peter’s Basilica. According to the college’s website, students will have “visited over 100 baroque churches, Roman architectural sites, Renaissance palazzos, or catacombs” and “translated over 1,000 lines of Homer, Cicero, or other Classical authors” after four years of study.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo: TopTenz

A poll of 2,524 households found that 47.2% of those with a cat had at least one person educated to degree level, compared with 38.4% of homes with dogs.

The study said longer hours, possibly associated with better qualified jobs, may make owning a dog impractical.

Link

Believe what you will, but the study authors made one big error: cats don’t have owners. They have staff

This year’s 72-student class is split into four groups that rotate through five courses during the day: Codeworlds (math/English), Being, Space and Place (social studies/English), The Way Things Work (math/science), Sports for the Mind (game design), and Wellness (health/PE). Instead of slogging through problem sets, students learn collaboratively in group projects that require an understanding of subjects in the New York State curriculum. The school’s model draws on 30 years of research showing that people learn best when they’re in a social context that puts new knowledge to use. Kids learn more by, say, pretending to be Spartan spies gathering intel on Athens than by memorizing facts about ancient Greece.

Most sixth-graders don’t expect to ever need to identify integers, but at Quest, it’s the key to a code-breaking game. In another class, when creatures called Troggles needed help moving heavy objects, the class made a video instructing how long a ramp they should build to minimize the force they needed to apply. “They’re picking concepts up as well as, if not better than, at other schools,” says Quest’s math and science teacher Ameer Mourad. Beyond make-believe, Quest is the first middle school to teach videogame design. Salen says building games teaches students about complex systems, which will prepare them for growing fields such as bioinformatics.

Link via Fast Company | Official Website | Photo: Claudio Midolo

Jordan Breindel of Urlesque compiled thirteen student-made music videos about Advanced Placement courses and tests available in many American high schools. Those subjects featured are: calculus, chemistry, economics, European history, U.S. history, English, statistics, Spanish, art history, government, psychology, world history, and physics.

The video above was created by students of Ms. Seckar-Martinez of McCallum High School in Austin, Texas.

Link

For one, people under 30 experienced anger of all forms or intensities more frequently than did older adults. This was mainly due to the fact that young people are more likely to be affected by three core stressors that can trigger angry feelings, Schieman said:

* Time pressures
* Economic hardship
* Interpersonal conflict at the workplace

Time pressures had the strongest link to anger, especially low-grade versions termed "feelings of annoyance," the study found.

Those who were under financial strain tended to report higher levels of anger, a connection that could be particularly important in today’s flagging economy, Schieman noted. The financial influence tended to be stronger among women and younger adults.

Having children was also associated with angry feelings and behaviors, such as yelling, particularly in women, the survey found.

"There’s obviously a lot of joys and benefits that come with parenthood," but other aspects of parenting, such as having to discipline a misbehaving child, can cause feelings of anger and annoyance, Schieman said.

Link

One of these successful people is Flava Flav, who dropped out of school when he was only 13, although, admittedly, it shows. He’s now planning to return to school to get his G.E.D., and the ordeal may even become a reality show on VH1. He’s not the only celebrity that dropped out of high school and still did well though. In fact, some high school dropouts are actually pretty brilliant.

Image Via Jeremy Farmer Photography [Flickr]

Dave Thomas

The founder of Wendy’s, Dave Thomas started working in the restaurant industry at only 12 years old. His family was constantly on the move and at age 15, he refused to keep moving with his parents. He was working part time at the Hobby House restaurant in Fort Wayne and dropped out of high school to start working at the business full time.

After working as a mess sergeant during the Korean War, he began working for KFC, where he was able to help turn several of their failing franchises around. In 1969, he sold of the KFC franchises he owned and opened his own restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. He named the restaurant after his daughter, who was actually called Melinda, but was nicknamed Wendy. These days, Wendy’s is the third largest burger chain in America.

In 1993, Dave decided that he didn’t want to set a bad example for any youngsters out there, so he enrolled at Coconut Creek High School and earned his GED.

Source

George Bernard Shaw

Famed Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw held an outright animosity towards schooling that he maintained throughout his life. He was quoted as saying, “schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.” Not surprisingly, the writer never completed his own education, having dropped out of the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School.

His main complaints about schooling was the standardization of the curriculum, which he believed deadened the spirit and stifled the intellect. He also deplored the corporal punishment being used in schools, although most modern teachers and parents would agree with him on this issue.

Source Public Domain Image Via Wikipedia

George Eastman

Creator of the Kodak Camera Company, George Eastman, was forced to drop out of school due to financial circumstances. At only 14, his father died and the only way George could keep his two sisters and mother alive was to quit school and begin working as an office boy full time. By the age of 26, Eastman found his true calling and began working to improve the emulsion process involved in photography. He thought the liquid emulsions proved quite a problem as they were excessively sticky and had to be used quickly before they dried. In only three years, Eastman had perfected his dry emulsion plates and he started his own photographic business in 1880.

Source Public Domain Image Via U.S. Library Of Congress

Quentin Tarantino

While a lot of famous directors hone their skills during college, Quentin Tarantino built up his film knowledge by working in a video rental store in Manhattan Beach, California.

He not only never went to college, but he quit going to Narbonne High School in Harbor City, California in his freshman year. He started learning the acting craft in acting school at the James Best Theatre Company in Toluca Lake, but it really wasn’t until he started working at Video Archives with Roger Avery, also a director these days, that he really began sharpening his future skills. Some people complain about Tarantino’s movies having too much focus on the dialogue, but for a high school dropout, I’d say that’s not such a bad thing.

Source Image Via pinguino [Flickr]

Richard Pryor

If comedy really is born from tragedy, then it is only logical that Richard Pryor became one of the top comedians of the seventies. Pryor had anything but an easy life.

He was raised in his grandmother’s brothel, where his mother “worked” and his father served as her pimp. At only ten, his mother abandoned him and his strict grandmother took over his care, beating him whenever she thought he was acting “eccentric.” With a home life like this, it’s not all to surprising that he ended up being expelled from high school at 14.

In the end, Pryor ended up proving the adage that “whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger” and his comedy career was one of the longest lasting and most successful of the last fifty years.

Source Image Via Alan Light [Flickr]

Peter Jennings

Peter Jennings started broadcasting when he was only nine years old. He followed the footsteps of his father, a respected radio broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and operated as the host of a CBC children’s program called “Peter’s People.” Surprisingly, his father was out on assignment when Jennings was chosen for the gig and he was furious at the network for hiring his son solely because he was the son of a broadcaster.

When it came to schooling, Jennings was a great athlete, but a terrible student, which he said was due to “pure boredom.” He failed to pass the 10th grade and dropped out as a result. He tried to attend Carleton University, but “lasted about 10 minutes” before he dropped out there.

After school, he started working at The Royal Bank of Canada, but he dreamed of being a professional broadcaster. I’d say did pretty well at meeting those goals, wouldn’t you?

Source

Peter Jackson

Before he directed the Lord of The Rings, or even his cult classics like Meet The Feebles, Peter Jackson was just a film-obsessed kid. He was trying to make his own film by age of nine, complete with the special effects he loved to see in shows like “Thunderbirds.” After he saw the original King Kong, he started trying to mimic the stop-motion from the film. He spent his entire childhood and all of his teenage years making short films and developing his own special effect techniques, which even included making his own minuscule models.

When he was 16, he dropped out of high school and started working as an apprentice engraver in a newspaper photography department. He kept living with his parents so he could save money for film-making supplies, which he soon used to begin production on what would become his first full-length film, Bad Taste. When you know that your future is film you don’t have a real need for the three Rs of “reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic.”

Source Image Via Natasha Baucas [Flickr]

The University of Washington Libraries has a very interesting collection of over 450 print advertisements in local magazines, city directories, and theater pamphlets of the Pacific Northwest from 1867 – 1918.

I’m particularly intrigued with this one: The Reed School of Nervous and Backward Children (1906). The ad noted:

The "family physician" notes that this school is not for the exploitation of any "fad" in child training, but is open to the acceptance of the latest developments in its line of work which have received scientific approval.

The parent notes the truly "homelike" atmosphere which is present, as indicated by the entire absence of anything "institutional."

The school was in Detroit, Michigan, and was conducted by Mrs. Frank A. Reed. According to The Handbook of Private Schools (1920) by Porter Sargent:

"Instruction is given in manual and physical training, vocal and instrumental music, drawing, painting, and the usual school subjects. The School for Stuttering and Stammering at the same address is entirely separate"

Link – via Information Junk

After 26 years of teaching children (literally my entire life), Reading Rainbow is being cancelled. It’s not for a lack of interest, but a lack of funding for the show. NPR says the show also was victim of a “shift in the philosophy of educational television programming,” that started under Bush.

I don’t know how many of you grew up in the 80′s, but Reading Rainbow will be sorely missed by those of us who did have the show to thank for our early interest in reading.

Link

Advice sent to teachers says there are too few words which follow the rule and recommends using more modern methods to teach spelling to schoolchildren.

The document, entitled Support for Spelling, is being distributed to more than 13,000 primary schools. [...]

It says: "The i before e rule is not worth teaching. It applies only to words in which the ie or ei stands for a clear ee sound. Unless this is known, words such as sufficient and veil look like exceptions.

"There are so few words where the ei spelling for the ee sounds follows the letter c that it is easier to learn the specific words." These include receive, ceiling, perceive and deceit.

The document recommends other ways to teach pupils spelling, like studying television listings for compound words, changing the tense of a poem to practise irregular verbs and learning about homophones through jokes such as "How many socks in a pair? None — because you eat a pear."

Link

Foreign accent syndrome, exploding head syndrome, werewolf syndrome, alien hand syndrome … walking corpse syndrome? Have you heard of any of these baffling (but completely real) medical conditions?

Werewolf Syndrome: Hypertrichosis, or werewolf syndrome, is a medical condition that causes the excessive growth of body hair — typically on the upper body, including the face. There are only 50 or so documented cases, and sufferers generally acquire it through genetic inheritance.

Link Link redirected for some people to a spammy page, which ain’t cool. Too bad, because it was an interesting article.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by yugosakimi.

A short film celebrating the wonderful gifts that (Klingon) teachers give to their students, and all of society as well. Directed by Gord McWatters, RT: 1 minute, 37 seconds.

Via Topless Robot

Mindy Babbitt entered Davenport University in her mid-20s to study accounting. Unable to cover the costs with her previous earnings as a cosmetologist, she took out a $35,000 student loan at 9% interest, figuring her postgraduate income would cover the cost.

Instead, the entry-level job her bachelor’s degree got her barely covered living expenses. Babbitt deferred loan repayments and was then laid off for a time. Now 41 and living in Plainwell, Mich., she is earning $41,000 a year, or about $10,000 more than the average high school graduate makes. But since she graduated, Babbitt’s student loan balance has more than doubled, to $87,000, and she despairs she’ll never pay it off.

"Unless I win the lottery or get a job paying a lot more, my student debts are going to follow me to the grave," she says.

Link (Illustration: Alex Nabaum) – via The Zeray Gazette

Remember when video games were bad for you? Mom and Dad would complain about how they tied up the television, kept you from playing outdoors, ruined your eyesight and wasted your time. That’s a thing of the past. Re-tooled videogames are now helping children and teens boost basic skills in reading, writing and math.

At West Nottinghamshire College in the U.K., computer science teachers were struggling to get teenage students into literacy and numeracy classes. The college needed to take drastic measures to assist “disaffected students”.

The resolution came in the form of Neverwinter Nights, Atari’s popular computer game. Teachers rebuilt the game to deliver educational challenges players must tackle in order to progress.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

A teacher who could no longer afford to print out the tests for his classes has taken to selling ads on his students’ tests. The current pricing is $10 per quiz, $20 per test and $30 per final. Most of the ads are from parents and local businesses. What kind of a message would you put on your kid’s test?

Link