Group items tagged

Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they’ve always been. But many of them don’t read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. “We used to complain that K-12 schools didn’t hold students to high standards,” he says with a sigh. “And here we are doing the same thing ourselves.”

all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Dr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education.

“Business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters,”

The most obvious takeaway, he said, was that "the age of the computer lab is kind of out," in which students travel out of their classrooms to log on.

The idea kids can access tools for learning 24 hours a day and can access learning not bound by the walls of the school is critical," Hobbs said. "It's indicative of what we mean by a 21st-century education."

Supporters for Klein quickly rallied around the 23-year school district veteran, raising more than $99,000 early Thursday in a campaign on Indiegogo.com. “She doesn’t earn nearly enough ($15,506) to deal with some of the trash she is surrounded by. Lets give her something she will never forget, a vacation of a lifetime!” the campaign urges. A Facebook support page called “Kindness for Karen” had more than 2,000 "likes" late Wednesday. “I wanted to make sure that she doesn’t lose faith,” the page’s founder, Kendra Fee, told the Daily News. “There are way more people who have her in their hearts and want to support her, and there’s a lot more kindness in the world,” said Fee, of Rochester, who doesn’t know Klein.

Everybody was a good student. The kids were just encouraged to do what they like to do and what was best, and there was a structure; there was a program. It's not you ran around doing anything you felt like. I skipped a grade, but I didn't pay any attention and no one else paid any attention. Just that I was the smallest kid in the class, but the idea that somebody is a good student; somebody is not a good student - it just never arose. There were tests, but they just gave information about what's going on. This is something we ought to be doing better. The kids weren't ranked; there were no grades. There's a lot of cooperative work and cooperative projects and they encouraged us. You know, study, challenging questions, and it was extremely successful. I remember everything very well. I went into the academic high school and it's kind of like a black hole. I was able to get all As and a scholarship to go into college. I might well not have gone, except for what I learned on my own.

American maverick who insisted that the only way to tell a great story was to go out and report it.

journalism could offer the kinds of literary pleasure found in books.

Wolfe scorned the reluctance of American writers to confront social issues and warned that self-absorption and master’s programs would kill the novel. “So the doors close and the walls go up!” he wrote in his 1989 literary manifesto, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” He was astonished that no author of his generation had written a sweeping, 19th century style novel about contemporary New York City, and ended up writing one himself, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

There is no legal definition of "hate speech" under U.S. law, just as there is no legal definition for evil ideas, rudeness, unpatriotic speech, or any other kind of speech that people might condemn. Generally, however, hate speech is any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, religion, skin color sexual identity, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, or national origin. 1 In the United States, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. Courts extend this protection on the grounds that the First Amendment requires the government to strictly protect robust debate on matters of public concern even when such debate devolves into distasteful, offensive, or hateful speech that causes others to feel grief, anger, or fear. (The Supreme Court's decision in Snyder v. Phelps provides an example of this legal reasoning.) Under current First Amendment jurisprudence, hate speech can only be criminalized when it directly incites imminent criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group. Hate Crime For the purposes of collecting statistics, the FBI has defined a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity,” including skin color and national origin.  Hate crimes are overt acts that can include acts of violence against persons or property, violation or deprivation of civil rights, certain "true threats," or acts of intimidation, or conspiracy to commit these crimes. The Supreme Court has upheld laws that either criminalize these acts or impose a harsher punishment when it can be proven that the defendant targeted the victim because of the victim's race, ethnicity, identity, or beliefs.  A hate crime is more than than offensive speech or conduct; it is specific criminal behavior that ranges from property crimes like vandalism and arson to acts of intimidation, assault, and murder.  Victims of hate crimes can include institutions, religious organizations and government entities as well as individuals.

They recognized that the only real solution for the "bad stuff" was building a solid foundation of the good: the empathy, connections and healthy relationships that create effective learning communities and bolster individual happiness and success. Accountability and amends are key, but discipline, punishment and "zero-tolerance policies" are not the answer.

This approach to learning benchmarks students' development of empathy and understanding of others, their ability to form positive relationships and demonstrate effective approaches to conflict resolution as well as other critical qualities.

No Name-Calling Week provides a critical opportunity to bolster the empathy and understanding that underlie respect of others from the earliest years and evoke the joyful sounds of all children as they play on playgrounds of respect.