Fun & Exciting Stuff

This is very cool. I normally don’t like cabbage, but I wonder what they taste like after being frozen for 100+ years.

It is something that has to smack some of our kids in the face. I don’t know that they realize how good they have it. Maybe they do, but the vast majority of them have no idea what the real world is like.

As good jobs become harder to find, bad jobs have become much easier to get. In 1979, 41 percent of workers who didn’t finish high school held “bad jobs,” those with no health insurance or pension plans and paid less than $16.50 an hour in inflation-adjusted wages. By 2005, that number had gown to 61 percent, Schmitt found.David Meza of Beaverton, Ore., is struggling to escape that trend. Meza, 47, worked 14 years assembling heavy-duty trucks for the Freightliner truck company. But when most of the production operations were moved to Mexico, he was laid off in March 2007.

An 11th-grade dropout who taught himself to read and write, Meza never earned his General Equivalency Diploma because he was making $21.50 an hour without it. He didn’t realize his mistake until he started looking for a new job.

“I had a lot of experience. I ran a forklift, worked at canneries in Alaska, been a truck driver, but none of that matters unless I’ve got a GED. So I’m pushing myself as hard as I’ve ever done in my life to get it,” he said.

This is a great idea for students. We are always saying we want to make dry boring history interesting, illustrating the ideas of communism and why the art director used this type of advertisement would be an interesting way to start a lesson. I knew a teacher who asked kids to make a CD case (I suppose now it would be an iPod play list) of Gandhi’s favorite music as a project. You had to demonstrate why the song would be one of his songs. It was just a different way of getting to the content.

From American Heritage. This is one of those places that isn’t seen by many people. One is the people. J. Adams and J.Q. Adams were not the easiest people to know. They aren’t Washington, being the first or Jefferson, one of the most intelligent, or Lincoln being Lincoln. Also the neighborhood isn’t that great. A lot of expressway and congestion. But well worth the visit if you are in the Boston area.

By using the universal language… Oprah-speak!!!

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

I am sure this would make more sense to some of our techno-scared teachers.

I don’t know how much you are reading on the housing crisis and the economic situation of the US and the world, but this article from Harper’s magazine is a great and non-economics jargony article.

More than a decade of economic and financial-market chaos followed, as the dollar remained the international currency but traded without an absolute measure of value. Inflation rose not just in the United States but around the world, grinding down the worth of many securities and brokerage firms. The Federal Reserve pushed interest rates into double digits, setting off two global recessions, and new international standards and methods for measuring inflation and floating exchange rates were established to replace the gold standard. After 1975, the United States would never again post an annual merchandise trade surplus. Such high-value, finished-goods-producing industries as steel and automobiles were no longer dominant. The new economy belonged to finance, insurance, and real estate—FIRE.

Wired has this:

A San Francisco web designer used Twitter to pop the question Thursday, asking his co-worker to marry him in what looks like might be the microblogging service’s first-ever second marriage proposal.

What happened to good old fashioned romance?? Sheesh!

Wednesday, I hear a high pitched machine-like noise in my homeroom.

“You can hear that Mr. Potter???”

Yes, Yes, I can hear that.

“Oh, I guess we can’t use it in here then.”

Apparently, this new ringtone finally came to Gananda. Notice the date on the article. We are a little behind here.

If only they put this much effort into schoolwork.

Well, we are coming down the home stretch. There are 11 weeks left in the school year. A Regents exam is coming up for the 11th grade and a local exam for the 9th graders. Are they ready, I think they would be if they studied.

Exhibit A: Today as part of our Religions project, students needed to identify the founder of Islam. More than five 9th grade students throughout the day asked me who the founder of Islam was. As an outside observer, gentle reader, you would have thought that they had never heard of Islam or “the Islams” as they call this religion. Speaking as one who was there when they learned Islam and graded their tests, I know they were taught it, because I taught it to them.

Now, Is this because, it was 2 months ago, Mr. Potter is boring, history sucks and I have never passed a history class, I have a test tomorrow in science, I forgot to finish my project, I hate gym, this book is too heavy, I can’t find my notes, I won’t use this in the future, etc. etc. Not to mention there have been two week vacations since we learned this, my locker is jammed, my boyfriend isn’t speaking to me, my girlfriends aren’t speaking to me, I need to watch out for the mean girl after school, my parents are always fighting, I don’t have a pencil, my cellphone is going off and someone is supposed to text me directions to the party this weekend, etc.

or

Because their teacher didn’t use the material to properly teach it to them.

or

Because they don’t use the material regularly, we haven’t talked about the Muslim culture since January, they have lost touch with the material.

I don’t know, I can’t really help the first one. But I can work to fix the last two.

I think this post is very important to educators.