“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)

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

On the one hand, you may look at YouTube comments and chat rooms and think literacy is going into the dumpster. On the other hand, those are millions of people who would otherwise never communicate a thought in public if the internet were not available to them. Writer Clive Thompson says the new technology has changed the meaning of writing for younger people.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see.

Of course, not every young internet commenter will go on to be a Stanford student. Do you see the internet as an aid or a hindrance to literacy? Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Mads Berg)

Harry Potter and the Scheming Students

Screwy Scoreboards

Caltech is M.I.T.’s biggest rival in pranks, despite being located at opposite ends of the country. They often take potshots at one another and are especially prone to pranks at football games. Although the Great Rose Bowl prank is pretty well known, another football stunt occurred when Caltech wasn’t even playing. During the 1964 Washington vs. Illinois Rose Bowl game, the audience of 100,000 was rather bored by a somewhat lackluster game. That is, until they looked up and realized that someone had changed the electronic scoreboard to make it appear as if Caltech was putting the hurt on M.I.T. It happened again in 1984 – although the teams were UCLA and Illinois (again), it appeared as if Caltech was stomping M.I.T., 31-9.

“We Suck”

In Cod We Trust

Rooftop Ride

Rice Gets More Comfortable

Fictional Facebook Fox

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.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

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Other tips include structuring time for peer tutoring every day, apologizing to students when necessary and asking students to conduct a "personal skills audit" where they focus on their individual strengths rather than their weaknesses.

The kit, designed to help Queensland teachers address mental health in the classroom, suggests social and emotional wellbeing has been linked to young people’s schooling, among other things.

The education aid has sparked a row in parliament, with deputy opposition leader Mark McArdle calling it "kooky, loony, loopy lefty policies."

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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?

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*a total of 30 percent overall — admitted stealing from a store within the past year.

*More than two of five (42 percent) said that they sometimes lie to save money.

*A substantial majority (64 percent) cheated on a test during the past year

*More than one in four (26 percent) confessed they lied on at least one or two questions on the survey.

*A whopping 93 percent said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character

The report released yesterday covered honesty and integrity. A later report will have survey results on drug use and violence. Link -Thanks, Geekazoid!