More than 2,500 still photos were taken to make this video. At first, you’ll wonder why they used stop-motion animation, but it soon becomes necessary. Then there are a few “how did they do that?” moments. If you like it, continue for the improved photographic stunts in the sequel. -via Metafilter

Blackboard War II

(YouTube link)

Every year, we announce the results of Danielle Spencer’s Jell-O Turkey Mold Competition and for those of you who have been waiting to see the results this year, they’re finally up. Here’s the #2 winner, entitled School Lunch. Just look at that delicious vegetable serving.

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Check out this collection of posters made for classrooms in the 1970s. The captions have been removed, and newer (and funnier) captions attached by Michael Roberts of Denver Westword. The caption for the above image is “I’ll bet I can make big bucks selling those chemicals on the side.”

This image has the new caption, “I’d do a helluva lot better in this job than he would — and be paid 60 percent of his salary.”

Link -via Boing Boing

The schoolyard in Toronto, Canada, is safe again, thanks to the quick action of a school principal who has banned the dangerous weapon of ... soccer balls!

Before you deride the news as yet another example of school bureaucracy gone mad, won't you think of the children? They're an absolute terror when weaponized with hard balls:

Students at an east-end Toronto school are being told to leave their soccer balls — and other hard balls — at home.

The principal of Earl Beatty Public School banned the balls this week after a parent recently suffered a concussion from being hit in the head with a soccer ball.

The principal, Alicia Fernandez, banned hard balls, claiming they're dangerous. "Kids were coming in complaining of injury, or being scared," she said. [...]

Students can bring sponge or other soft balls to play with, but soccer balls, footballs, baseballs and even tennis balls are not allowed for safety reasons.

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School buses in America are so boring, but in Japan, it’s a whole different story. InventorSpot has a collection of 10 different buses from the country and I have to say, they are precious.

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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

Kansas City Schools have a program called No More Bullies, in which program volunteers, accompanied by trained dogs, teach kids about fairness, compassion, and integrity for one hour a day over five days. “The animals are the glue that helps the children stay focused and understand the message,” says Jo Dean Hearn, an ex-teacher who developed the program. “Children can easily identify with an animal. And it’s easy for them to transition when we ask them to consider how an animal feels (if ill treated) to how the kid sitting near them feels (if poorly treated).”

It’s a great program that’s showing promising results, and it isn’t the only one. Check out the rest of the story on The Week. Link

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Students did not receive their diplomas until they demonstrated a proficiency in their trade. The school helped them achieve this by establishing a job placement office that arranged employment for the girls after they finished their training. The girls were instructed to report back to the schoolabout their work experiences, and the employers were encouraged to report back on performance of the girls, and all of this information was recorded in the card packets. So these aren’t just scholastic records—they’re also employment records. Much like the teachers’ assessments, comments from the students’ employers run the gamut from encouraging (“Thank you for sending me such a smart little girl—she is all I would desire and does your school credit in every way”) to heartbreaking (“Terrific odor of perspiration, have to lay off”).

Lukas is in the process of finding the families of the women to share the information. In the first article of a series at Slate, he gives an overview of the records and the story of how he got them. Future installments will tell the stories of twelve of the women in the records. Link

There’s certainly some validity to this explanation. Yes, those charts and diagrams are expensive to produce, and the relatively small print runs of textbooks keep publishers from enjoying the kind of economies of scale they get on a bestselling popular novel. Any economist who has a pulse (and probably some who don’t) could poke holes in this argument pretty quickly, though.

In the simplest economic terms, the high price of textbooks is symptomatic of misaligned incentives, not exorbitant production costs. Students hold the reasonable stance that they’d like to spend as little money as possible on their books. Students don’t really have the latitude to pick which texts they need, though.

Read the real story behind sky-high textbook prices at mental_floss. Link

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.

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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.

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Redditor worstenememe snapped a picture of his nephew as the child modeled the outfit he plans to wear for his first day of school. This little boy’s teacher is in for a treat! Well, you know what they say, dress for the job you want, not for the job you have. Link

Link Via Geekosystem

Before you get too excited though, I should make note of the fact that most states place a dollar limit on what is tax-exempt. For example, Alabama’s tax holiday offers a tax break on any articles of clothing $100 or less. This means that a pair of jeans costing $125 would be taxed but a jacket for $99 would be tax-free, so be aware of any specific rules your state may have during tax holidays.

To help out, BargainJack has assembled a handy chart detailing the dates and limitations for each state, with links to government information. Link

When I was in school, the only things you could do to show off your originality was to switch up your clothes, hair and make up. One Russian school decided to let the kids have a little more fun by allowing each one to draw up their own background on the chalk boards. The results are delightfully fun so be sure to check out the other pics at the link.

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When I was in high school we actually built giant sling shots in our physics class. These days though, kids are learning from sling shots in video games. Really though it was only a matter of time before Angry Birds entered the public school system.

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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.

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“When he did it the first day, I was in shock,” Rain said. “It’s my first day of my sophomore year.”

The embarrassment was a thrill for his father.

The second day of school, there he was again, only this time Price was wearing a San Diego Chargers helmet and jersey. Day three, it was an Anakin Skywalker helmet, and the next day, swim trunks and a snorkel mask.

Other kids started to take note.

“Most of them like it, and we roll down our windows and wave. It’s fun,” Rain said.

His dad admits it took a lot of effort to keep it up, but said it was “a way of letting him know that we really care about him, but do something a little different.” He described it as “a father’s way” of saying I love you.

Rain’s father wore a different costume almost every day of the school year, including a white wedding dress once. Link to story. Link to website. -via Metafilter

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?

Like many soon-to-be graduates, two seniors of Westfield High School in Westfield, Mass., decided to pull a little senior prank during lunch in their high school’s cafeteria. The two staged a mock lightsaber fight, “battling” for about 30 seconds in front of a packed lunchroom before ending to a standing ovation from the crowd. The principal didn’t find the homage to Star Wars as impressive as the students did, however, and suspended the two seniors from school, adding that they won’t be able to walk in their graduation next week. The incident is currently under review and the decision may be reversed after a hearing next week. There’s a Facebook group petitioning the school to allow the pair to walk, if you care to add your support.

Link via Geekologie

Teresa Watanabe explores the tale of two students – both successful students – with two very different summer plans:

Summers for eighth-grader Jade Larriva-Latt are filled with soccer and backpacking, art galleries and museums, library volunteer work and sleep-away camp. There is no summer school, no tutoring.

"They need their childhood," says Jade’s father, Cesar Larriva, an associate professor of education at Cal Poly Pomona. "It’s a huge concern of mine, the lack of balance from pushing them too hard."

For 10th-grader Derek Lee, summer is the time to sprint ahead in the ferocious race to the academic top. He polishes off geometry, algebra and calculus ahead of schedule and masters SAT content (he earned a perfect 800 on the math portion last fall). This year, he plans to take college-level courses, maybe at UCLA or Stanford.

"You give your kids pressure so they can learn to handle it," says Derek’s mother, Meiling Lee, smacking her fist into her hand. "Because finally they have to go out into the real world, and the real world is tough."

What do you think? Which is the better summer plan? Link (Photo: Anne Cusack / LA Times)

Saggy pants? Not in Principal Bobby White’s school. The Memphis educator has enacted “The Urkel Initiative,” a program that secures those droopy drawers up around the offending student’s waist with zip ties through the belt loops.

He says it has cut down the number of kids being sent home or receiving citations for inappropriate dress from more than 80 per week to about five.

Link via Best Week Ever via AV Club

It has long been theorized that the week prior to an exam is an extremely dangerous time for the relatives of college students. Ever since I began my teaching career, I heard vague comments, incomplete references and unfinished remarks, all alluding to the “Dead Grandmother Problem.”

Few colleagues would ever be explicit in their description of what they knew, but I quickly discovered that anyone who was involved in teaching at the college level would react to any mention of the concept. In my travels I found that a similar phenomenon is known in other countries. In Eng- land it is called the “Graveyard Grannies” problem, in France the “Chere Grand’mere,” while in Bulgaria it is inexplicably known as “The Toadstool Waxing Plan” (I may have had some problems here with the translation. Since the revolution this may have changed anyway.) Although the problem may be international in scope it is here in the USA that it reaches its culmination, so it is only fitting that the first warnings originate here also.

The basic problem can be stated very simply:

A student’s grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year.

While this idea has long been a matter of conjecture or merely a part of the folklore of college teaching, I can now confirm that the phenomenon is real. For over twenty years I have collected data on this supposed relationship, and have not only confirmed what most faculty had suspected, but also found some additional aspects of this process that are of potential importance to the future of the country. The results presented in this report provide a chilling picture and should waken the profession and the general public to a serious health and sociological problem before it is too late.

Table 1: The mean number of family deaths/100 students for periods when no exam is coming up, the week prior to a mid-term exam and the week prior to finals. Values are corrected for the number of students in each grade class and the relative frequency of mid-terms and finals.

As can be seen in Table 1, when no exam is imminent the family death rate per 100 students (FDR) is low and is not related to the student’s grade in the class. The effect of an upcoming exam is unambiguous. The mean FDR jumps from 0.054 with no exam, to 0.574 with a mid-term, and to 1.042 with a final, representing increases of 10-fold and 19-fold, respectively. Figure 1 shows that the changes are strongly grade dependent, with correlation coefficients of 0.974 for mid-terms and 0.988 for finals. Overall, a student who is failing a class and has a final coming up is more than 50 times more likely to lose a family member than is an A student not facing any exams.

Figure 1. Graph of data in Table 1, showing the relationship between exam, student grade and FDR. The equation for the simple linear regression on each is shown, as is the correlation coefficient.

Only one conclusion can be drawn from these data. Family members literally worry themselves to death over the outcome of their relatives’ performance on each exam.

Naturally, the worse the student’s record is, and the more important the exam, the more the family worries; and it is the ensuing tension that presumably causes premature death. Since such behavior is most likely to result in high blood pressure, leading to stroke and heart attacks, this would also explain why these deaths seem to occur so suddenly, with no warning and usually immediately prior to the exam. It might also explain the disproportionate number of grandmothers in the victim pool, since they are more likely to be susceptible to strokes. This explanation, however, does not explain why grandfathers are seldom affected, and clearly there are other factors involved that have not been identified. Nonetheless, there is considerable comfort to be had in realizing that these results indicate that the American family is obviously still close-knit and deeply concerned about the welfare of individual members, perhaps too much so.

Family Values
As some colleagues have expressed some degree of skepticism over my interpretation of these data, I have extended the scope of my research into the phenomenon. Using readily available sources (including the National Census Bureau and The National Enquirer ) have examined the relationship between education and family structure. Interestingly, there appears to be no correlation between FDR and the size of the extended family (Table 2). Either large families worry less on a per capita basis than do small families, or there is a single “designated worrier” in each family, who bears the brunt of the danger. The exceptionally high death rate among grandmothers (24 times greater than for grandfathers) suggests the latter explanation is correct. If not, then people from very small families would be well advised to discourage other family members from attending college, since the potential risk becomes excessive with so few members to share the danger.

Table 2. Mean FDR for all exam periods and all student GPAs over the last decade. Families ranging in size from 1-30+ show no significant correlation (0.04) between family size and FDR. The figure for students with no family would have been zero, had the class not included a family-less student (a member of the baseball team) who tragically lost at least one grandmother every semester for four years.

The problem is clearly far more pervasive than most people realize. For example, if one examines the percentage of the population attending college and the mean divorce rate on a country by country basis, there is a very strong positive correlation between the two. The United States has the highest percentage of its population attending college and also the world’s highest divorce rate, while South Yemen is last in both categories.

Although this study is still in progress and will form the basis for a future CSU grant proposal, it seems results already are becoming clear. As more people go to college, their families find that, for safety reasons, it is wise to increase the number of grandmothers per family. Since there is currently no biological way of doing so (though another grant proposal in preparation will ask for funds to look into the prospect of cloning grandmothers, using modern genetic engineering techniques), the families must resort to increasing the pool by means of divorce and remarriage. Sociologists may wish to use these data to examine the effect of education on family structure from a new perspective.

While the general facts of this problem have been known, if not widely discussed, I have recently become aware of a potentially far more dangerous aspect of the whole process. This trend came to light when a student reported two family members dying prior to an exam. Examination of the numbers of deaths over the last two decades clearly showed that we are in a period of “death inflation.” When the figures for all students and all exams are pooled for each year, a disturbing outcome is seen (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: The mean FDR/100 students for all exams and all grades of students for the years 1968-1988. The best-fitting curve shows an exponentially rising curve, with the equation shown in the figure.

Three Solutions
The FDR is climbing at an accelerating rate. Extrapolation of this curve suggests that 100 years from now the FDR will stand at 644/100 students/exam. At that rate only the largest families would survive even the first semester of a student’s college career. Clearly something will have to be done to reverse this trend before the entire country is depopulated. Three possible solutions come to mind:

1. Stop giving exams. At first glance, this seems to be the simplest answer to the problem. Like many simplistic solutions, however, it fails to consider the full ramifications of such a course. Without exam results, all medical schools would be forced to close their doors, having no way of identifying worthy students. The resultant dearth of physicians in the next generation would throw so many other professionals (tax accountants, malpractice attorneys, golf pros, etc.) out of work that the economy would go into a nosedive. Regretfully, we cannot recommend this solution.

2. Allow only orphans to enroll at universities. This is an attractive idea, except for the shortage of orphans. More could be created, of course, but this would replicate the very problem we are trying to avoid, i.e., excessive family deaths.

3. Have students lie to their families. Students must never let any of their relatives know that they are at university. (Initial field tests show that keeping just the grandmother ignorant is neither feasible nor safe for the rest of the family.) It is not enough merely to lie about exams; if the family doesn’t know when the exams are, they may then worry constantly and this may lead to even higher death rates. The only solution is that the family must never be aware that the student is even enrolled at a university. Students must explain their long absences by pretending they are in the armed forces, have joined some religious cult, or have been kidnapped by extraterrestrials. All of these alternate explanations will keep the family ignorant of the true, dangerous, fact. Although it might be argued that such large-scale deceptions cannot be maintained for long periods, the success of many politicians suggests other- wise.

What I Recommend
It will take time to discover whether any of these solutions are feasible. In the interim, the problem is clearly far too important to be ignored. Following the US government’s lead on so many similar, potentially catastrophic problems (global warming, ozone layer depletion, and ocean pollution), I propose that a commission be established to study the problem in more depth. While the state is deciding on the make-up of such a committee and what its charge should be, I would urge all members of the academic community to start keeping their own records. If faculty throughout the world were to send me summaries of their own knowledge about this matter, I could compile a follow-up report for publication in a year or two.

(Title illustration by Peaco Todd)

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This article is republished with permission from the November-December 1999 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

Doodling a robot elephant is so much more fun than etoecology! -via Buzzfeed

This picture shows a school restroom stall on which someone has written the entire first chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Schools have much nicer restrooms now than when I was a student. Link -via The Daily What

How true are these stereotypes? I have accounts at a half-dozen of these networks, but since I don’t spend much time at any of them, it’s hard to keep up with trends. Found, of course, at a Tumblr blog. Link -via Buzzfeed

Kelley Williams-Bolar, a single mother who’s going to college and working as a teaching assistant (and who has no prior criminal record) while living in a housing project, claimed that her two daughters live part time with their father who lives in a better school district.

The school disagreed, and hired a private investigator to film her dropping off her children. They wanted to charge her $30,000 and when she refused, the case went to court and the jury convicted her. The judge sentenced her to 5 years in prison, but suspended all but 10 days, with community service and probation.

Williams-Bolar’s father, Edward Williams, told CNN affiliate WJW-TV that the children did live with him, so he believed the family was within the law.

He said his daughter’s Akron neighborhood – where she lives in government-subsidized housing – isn’t safe.

"She had 12 police reports that her house had been broken in, so what am I supposed to do? Just leave them there?" Williams said to WJW-TV. "I mean, I can protect them better if they was with me."

Williams-Bolar, a single mother, works as a teacher’s aide at a high school in Akron and is just 12 credits away from earning a teaching degree at the University of Akron, according to the Beacon Journal.

Her felony conviction will bar her from being licensed to teach in Ohio.

The school, obviously, disagreed:

Copley-Fairlawn Superintendent Brian Poe told WJW-TV the case cost the district $30,000 in two years of lost tuition and $6,000 it spent on the investigation. [...]

"The way I look at it is, the bottom line, you need to follow the law," he said. "If you choose to step outside of the law, what’s going to happen at that point is you are going to have to face the consequences for that."

Oh, and to make matters a bit muddier, Williams-Bolar is black and the school district is predominantly white.

Link – Thanks Tiffany!

"Fraud is fraud" or do you think that it’s a heavy-handed punishment for someone trying to make better lives for their children?

In the early part of the 20th Century, most kids packed their school lunch in an empty cookie, biscuit, or tobacco tin. In 1935, a company called Aladdin tried to create a market for specialized lunch boxes by putting Mickey Mouse on the cover of their tin box. But even The Mouse couldn’t convince kids to buy en masse. Aladdin didn’t give up, though, and they had their first bonafide lunchtime hit in 1950 when they released the Hopalong Cassidy lunch box to young baby boomers. Available in red or blue, the box and thermos combination featured a crudely drawn picture of the popular TV and radio cowboy on one side.

Read more about lunch boxes and other school items at mental_floss. Link

Here’s a study by Brown University sleep researcher Judith Owens on how starting school just 30 minutes later could lead to huge improvements:

An eye-opening study says delaying high school starting times by just 30 minutes can reap big rewards for tired teens.
A small study at St. George’s School in Middletown, Rhode Island, says students there were more alert in class, expressed better moods, arrived to class on time, and even reported eating a healthier breakfast due to the later start.

"The results were stunning. There’s no other word to use," says Patricia Moss, academic dean at the boarding school where the study was done. Similar results have been found in some public schools that let teens start school late.

Researchers say there’s a reason why even 30 minutes can make a big difference. Teens tend to be in their deepest sleep around dawn – when they typically need to get up for school. Interrupting that sleep can leave them groggy, especially since they also tend to have trouble falling asleep before 11 p.m.

So why do schools start so early in the morning? You can blame the parents and their pesky jobs: Link (Photo: Shutterstock)

Here’s a fun pint glass to give your recent graduates as an inspiration to go out to the real world and find themselves a job. From the witty humor of Someecards: Link

See also:

You’re somewhat useful at work but irreplaceable at happy hour pint glass
They can’t lay us off if they can’t find us coffee mug
I’d like to offer moral support but I have questionable morals coffee mug
Let’s factor my hangover into today’s workload coffee mug

More Glassware & Drinkware from the NeatoShop

Christan Morales said her son just wanted to honor American troops when he wore a hat to school decorated with an American flag and small plastic Army figures.

But the school banned the hat because it ran afoul of the district’s zero-tolerance weapons policy. Why? The toy soldiers were carrying tiny guns.

"His teacher called and said it wasn’t appropriate," Morales said.

Morales’ 8-year-old son, David, had been assigned to make a hat for the day when his second-grade class would meet their pen pals from another school. She and her son came up with an idea to add patriotic decorations to a camouflage hat.
Earlier this week, after the hat was banned, the principal at the Tiogue School in Coventry told the family that the hat would be fine if David replaced the Army men holding weapons with ones that didn’t have any, according to Superintendent Kenneth R. Di Pietro.

The edumacators win again! Link (Photo: WPRI)

Did you ever want to know what the kids in the US public school system were eating for lunch everyday? A public school teacher started the blog “Fed up with lunch: The school lunch project” where she photographed and ate everything the kids were served since the beginning of the year. Have a look at their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It’s an eye-opener!

“It’s very challenging to teach students when they are eating school lunches that don’t give them the nutrition they need and deserve. Oftentimes what is served barely passes muster as something edible.”

Link – via askmoxie

From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by Lee.

There’s no word on what school this is, or even what state it’s in, but the pictures are stunning! The class of 2010 decorated the science hall with colorful post-it notes on all four walls, as you’ll see in a panoramic photograph at the link. The results are worth keeping around for a while. Link -via Digg

Many students will tag along when Mom or Dad heads to the office Thursday, skipping class to shadow their parents in a nearly two-decades-old national tradition.

But several local school districts are issuing warnings to parents in advance of Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day: Students will be marked absent and held responsible for missed work.

Link (Photo: Shutterstock)

Her pupils are among the 10 million Indian children who are outside the state education system because their parents are so poor that they need them to work or no schools are nearby. Earlier this month the Indian government pledged £3.6 billion for a “right to education” scheme which aims to provide free schooling for all.

Kumari has decided she wants to be a teacher, even after she grows up. Link -via Arbroath

School administrators have found an effective way to crack down on students who engage in food fights: Let them eat cheese. And nothing else.

Students at Atlantic City High School were served plain cheese sandwiches for two days this week as punishment for a cellphone-coordinated food fight that broke out recently.

One parent likened the American cheese between two dry slices of plain white bread to "a prison meal."

Link (Photo: Shutterstock)

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

It is not uncommon for schools to have a toilet permanently occupied by the mysterious girl, who is known in Japanese as Toire no Hanako-san (lit. “Hanako of the toilet”). She is often found in the third stall in the restroom on the third floor — usually the girls’ room — but this can vary from school to school. Details about her physical appearance also vary, but she is usually described as having bobbed hair and wearing a red skirt.

Hanako-san’s behavior also varies according to location, but in most cases, she remains holed up in the bathroom until an adventurous student dares to provoke her. Hanako-san can be conjured up by knocking on the door to her stall (usually three times), calling her name, and asking a particular question. The most common question is simply “Are you there, Hanako-san?” If Hanako-san is indeed present, she says in a faint voice, “Yes, I’m here.” Some stories claim that anyone courageous enough to open the door at this point is greeted by a little girl in a red skirt and then pulled into the toilet.

See more possibly disturbing pictures of Hanako-san at Pink Tentacle. This story is part of a series on Japanese urban legends. 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

We don’t usually post about pranks and means things like that on Neatorama, but this one is just too cute to pass. Here’s Becky prank calling a local demolition company in Dublin, asking them to demolish her school (with her teachers in it because they give her extra homework on Friday!). Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

More prank calls here: 10 Telephone Pranks That Make You Squirm – Thanks David!

(YouTube Link)

ESCP Europe is a business school that recently promoted itself with this stop motion video.  Well done, people, well done.  ESCP website.  via Yay!Everyday

The insanity crept up on us slowly; we just wanted what was best for our kids. We bought macrobiotic cupcakes and hypoallergenic socks, hired tutors to correct a 5-year-old’s "pencil-holding deficiency," hooked up broadband connections in the treehouse but took down the swing set after the second skinned knee. We hovered over every school, playground and practice field — "helicopter parents," teachers christened us, a phenomenon that spread to parents of all ages, races and regions. Stores began marketing stove-knob covers and "Kinderkords" (also known as leashes; they allow "three full feet of freedom for both you and your child") and Baby Kneepads (as if babies don’t come prepadded). The mayor of a Connecticut town agreed to chop down three hickory trees on one block after a woman worried that a stray nut might drop into her new swimming pool, where her nut-allergic grandson occasionally swam. A Texas school required parents wanting to help with the second-grade holiday party to have a background check first. Schools auctioned off the right to cut the carpool line and drop a child directly in front of the building — a spot that in other settings is known as handicapped parking.

We were so obsessed with our kids’ success that parenting turned into a form of product development. Parents demanded that nursery schools offer Mandarin, since it’s never too soon to prepare for the competition of a global economy. High school teachers received irate text messages from parents protesting an exam grade before class was even over; college deans described freshmen as "crispies," who arrived at college already burned out, and "teacups," who seemed ready to break at the tiniest stress.

Link (Photo: Hugh Kretschmer / TIME)

“My children have to appear in court,” Erica Russell, the mother of two eighth-grade girls who spent eight hours in jail, said Tuesday. “They were handcuffed, slammed in a wagon, had their mug shots taken and treated like real criminals.”

“They’re all scared,” Ms. Russell said of the two dozen arrested students. “You never know how children will be impacted by that. I was all for some other kind of punishment, but not jail. Who hasn’t had a food fight?”

What do you guys think?  Link (Image from aggrotech‘s Photobucket album)

This ad for the Thai Insurance Company features children from the Srisangwan School for the disabled, a project of the Princess Mother’s Volunteer Foundation. Link -via b3ta

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

“Oreo’s a really smart cat… She keeps up with current events,” said Collins.

Apparently, Collins hardly even lied on the application.

“I did lie about one thing. You have to be 18 to take the test and Oreo is only two, but that could be 18 in cat years. Who knows?” he said.

Link Via Consumerist