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What's Y teaching? For Lori: The Styx Elsewhere
on this site:
The Puritans
Thornburg-Real
The
Five Ws: "Where you
stand depends on "Trust, but
verify." Occam's
Razor states that the simplest solution is usually
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The FPL fight in Wellington, Florida Many of our internet visitors want to keep up with what's going on in the battle to preserve the urban forest that makes up most of the Florida Power and Light easement that runs parallel to Wellington's northern border. Here's the latest in WhatDoYaKnow.com's foray into saving the planet. Click on the text to jump to the FPL Update.
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What's changed since this
was written almost five years ago? WASHINGTON — Addressing the nation’s governors, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates delivered a scathing critique of U.S. high schools Saturday, calling them “obsolete” and saying that elected officials should be "ashamed" of a system that leaves millions of students unprepared for college and for technical jobs. Gates spoke at a National Governors Association meeting devoted to improving high school education across the country. “Training the workforce of tomorrow with today’s high schools is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe,” said Gates, whose $27 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made US. education one of its main priorities. Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat and chairman of the nonpartisan association, said high school education is in need of an overhaul to raise standards and to closely align instruction with the requirements of colleges and employers. The governors’ winter meeting coincides with a push by President Bush to extend elements of his No Child Left Behind initiative from the primary grades to the high school level. [Note: That has happened. Some estimate that over 80% of this country's schools will not meet federally mandated standardized test score gains in the next three years.] The governors painted a dire picture of the state of public high schools, releasing statistics that show only 68 percent of ninth-graders graduate from high school on time. But, measuring a different way, U.S. government statistics show steady increases in high school graduation rates, particularly among whites and blacks, although less so for Hispanics. Behind the national numbers, there is general agreement that wide disparities exist among high schools, and that geography, income, race and ethnicity affect the value of a diploma. “Only a fraction of our kids are getting the best education,” Gates said. [From the Palm Beach Post Sunday, February 27, 2005 23A] |
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 Just
Think...If we hadn't won the Revolution we'd still be speaking English today! To study American history before the Revolution is to study English, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American, Dutch, Mexican, Brazilian, Italian, Greek, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, and a bunch of other histories. It's all about context. It's ironic that the stereotypical American is so ignorant of World Geography and World History. How better to know ourselves than to get to know others? |
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The
American Revolution was begun in Boston, declared in Philadelphia, and fought
mainly in the South. Here we are, just beyond the midpoint of the school year,
and we're finally learning about AMERICAN history! In the next couple of weeks
we'll examine how thirteen peaceful colonies could be coaxed into a revolution
2/3 of the population either didn't want to or didn't care to participate in.
We'll answer the question, "Why was it that the elites of the colonies were the
guiding force behind the American Revolution?" And we'll even get into the
military tactics employed by the heavily overmatched colonies that allowed them
to send the most powerful army and navy in the world packing. We won't forget
the role the French played--without them we surely would not have won.
