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Don’t feel stupid.  You’re a lot better off than some people…


(1994 Sept 17:  Alabama’s Heather Whitestone was chosen Miss America 1995.)
Q: If you could live forever, would you and why?
A: ‘I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever,’
–Miss Alabama in the ‘94 Miss USA contest.
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‘Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean I’d love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.’
–Mariah Carey
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‘Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life,’
– Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson for federal anti-smoking campaign .
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‘I’ve never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body,’
– Winston Bennett, University of Kentucky basketball forward.
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‘Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country,’
–Mayor Marion Barry , Washington , DC ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

‘That lowdown scoundrel deserves to be kicked to death by a jackass, and I’m just the one to do it,’
–A congressional candidate in Texas .
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‘It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.’
–Al Gore, Vice President
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‘I love California I practically grew up in Phoenix ‘
– Dan Quayle
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‘We’ve got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need ?’
–Lee Iacocca
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‘The word ‘genius’ isn’t applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.
–Joe Theisman, NFL football quarterback & sports analyst.
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‘We don’t necessarily discriminate. We simply exclude certain types of people’
– Colonel Gerald Wellman, ROTC Instrutor .
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‘Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992 because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in

your circumstances.’
–Department of Social Service s, Greenville , South Carolina  
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‘Traditionally, most of Australia ’s imports come from overseas.’
–Keppel Enderbery
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‘If somebody has a bad heart, they can plug this jack in at night as they go to bed and it will monitor their heart throughout the night. And the next morning, when they wake up dead, there’ll be a record.’
–Mark S. Fowler, FCC Chairman
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So cheer up.

USA: Colleges are starting to give students more engagement, involvement and work in their chosen vocations alongside faculty and community because employers prefer hiring people with experience. Some colleges or groups thereof have designed websites publishing information for parents about what the students get for the cost, promoting transparency as ‘the right thing to do’ (as says Julia Williams, who heads the institutional research office at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana) because people need to make sure this major life choice—college—is chosen correctly. Each institute has a purpose, attracts different students, offers different resources, provides innovative programs. Many schools offer various assessments: the Collegiate Learning Assessment measures critical-thinking skills, is used by 330 universities; the College Senior Survey shares data among 130 universities; the National Survey of Student Engagement has surveyed 1200 schools with 85 questions in five categories:
1. level of academic challenge (How many books do teachers assign students to read? How many papers do students write? How long do they prepare for class? Does coursework apply theories to practical problems, or synthesize ideas?)
2. student-faculty interaction (How many full-time faculty teach? How long and often are they available to students? Do students work with faculty members on activities outside coursework, or on research projects? Do faculty give prompt oral or written feedback?)
3. active and collaborative learning (Do students participate in classroom discussion, make class presentations, work with classmates outside class to prepare assignments, discuss ideas from readings outside class time?)
4. cultural and extracurricular experiences (Do students seriously discuss different beliefs or values with other students? Do they interact with students of different ethnicity? Do they participate in student clubs, learning communities, internships, or culminating senior experiences?)
5. support for groups on campus (Does campus provide support to succeed academically and thrive socially? How are student relationships with other students, faculty and administration?)
Assessment results lead to redesigning curriculum (for example, the amount of writing required), advisory services.
Most schools decide to quietly improve rather than to publish results, since most people don’t have the time ‘to become experts on what it all means’, says John Novak, director of institutional research at Indiana University at South Bend. The purpose is to enhance college experience to include activities helping students develop mental habits ‘to survive and thrive during and after college’, says NSSE director George Kuh.

When applying for college, a prospective student can:
a. Consider your own interests and strengths. If you want to go to a large research institute and want to work with faculty in research, then find student-faculty interaction scores for new students at those institutions. You might work better on your own or with group collaboration. Choose a college that works your way.
b. Consider the school’s nature. Commuter schools or adult-education schools have lower student involvement because their students have other jobs and/or live off-campus.

Colleges and students can do things to make student engagement happen:
1. Learning communities provide a stake in each other’s well-being and success. Study together. Form small, discussion-based seminars. Help each other with mutual accountability, knowing each other. This helps more students graduate.
2. Writing a lot helps you think more deeply, understand more highly. Struggling for precise language means struggling for precise thought. Rewriting means rethinking: ‘Do I mean that? What did I learn? How does this matter?’ Prompt, honest, constructive faculty response helps people turn a mistake into a step up.
3. Senior capstone courses with low enrollment and high group involvement on real problems. ‘Step forward, take responsibility, prepare carefully, work with other students in preparation’ for an oral and written comprehensive exam synthesizing everything experienced over college program.
4. Set inclusive tone at residence halls, intervene if there’s bias. Expect respect.
5. During admissions, note student leadership in former school. Have a student-led honor system (to report and punish cheating) and judiciary committee (to investigate, defend and resolve complaints). Student-organized and –led Contracted Independent Organizations meet individual interests. This can help meet a college requirement of cultural activities related to completed coursework. For instance, students can be required to attend a Convocation program of lectures, symposia, concerts and other arts performances.
6. Work with older students through career-oriented distance-learning programs. ‘Adults already have a social life. They’re looking specifically for credentials.’
7. Students whose parents did not graduate from college, ‘first-generation students’, need advice on campus life. They move from looking like ‘deer in the headlights’ to ‘I have what it takes to do this and I’m in the right place.’

USA: Some people ask if handwriting has a practical purpose in an era of computer keyboards beside the occasional retro appeal of a handwritten thank-you note?

When the Remington typewriter was introduced in 1873, people began predicting the death of penmanship. The Zaner-Bloser Co. published penmanship curriculum starting in 1904 and during the 1960s and 1970s recommended 45 minutes a day of writing. By the 1980s, they recommended only fifteen minutes a day, and now more like ten, and only 12% of teachers had taken a course in how to teach penmanship. Educators noticed decline in quality of students’ penmanship and increase in letter-reversals: they’d forgotten to mind your p’s and q’s.

But ‘when kids struggle with handwriting, it filters into all their academics. Spelling becomes a problem; math becomes a problem because they reverse their numbers. All of these subjects would be much easier for these students to learn if handwriting was an automatic process’, says Emily Knapton, director of program development at Handwriting without Tears.

Since this and other evidence suggests that handwriting fluency helps build learning, the College Board, to reverse the de-emphasis on handwriting and composition in 2005 added a handwritten essay to the Scholastic Aptitude Test. ‘If you put something like a writing test on the SAT, children’s skil level will begin to be addressed,’ says Ed Hardin, senior content specialist at the College Board. The effect will probably trickle down to the middle schools and to third grade, where the problem often begins.

A new study by Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham says most primary school teachers believe students with fluent handwriting produce written assignments superior in quality and quantity and so get higher grades. From KG to grade 4, children think and write at the same time. Only later is mental composition separated from the physical process of writing. If they struggle to remember how to write, their ability to express themselves suffers. They need automatic motions, both for expressive writing and for note-taking, which they’ll need later in life. ‘Measures of speed among elementary-school students are good predictors of the quality and quantity of their writing in middle school,’ says Stephen Peverly, professor of psychology and education and Columbia University Teachers College. So now they want it back in the curriculum. ‘After all, no one has suggested that the invention of the calculator means we don’t have to teach kids how to add, and spelling is still a prized skill in the era of spell check. If we stop teaching penmanship, it will not only hasten the dreaded day when brides acknowledge wedding gifts by email; the bigger danger is, they’l be composed even more poorly than they already are’, says Raina Kelley, ‘The Writing on the Wall’, Newsweek 2007 Nov 12, p69.

In 2002, a study by Brett Pelham, associate professor at SUNY University in Buffalo, New York, found people disproportionately likely to live in cities or states resembling their names, have careers resembling their names, and marry people whose surnames begin with the same letter as their own. His study emphasized positive outcomes.

In 2007, psychologists in marketing at Yale and the University of California, San Diego, say in a Psychological Science article that people prefer their own names and initials—‘name-letter effect’, and so students with names starting with C or D get lower grades on average than students whose names begin with A or B. Major league baseball players whose names begin with K are more likely to strike out. The research effect is more than coincidence but still small.

What goes up must come down. America’s housing market in the ‘bubble’ states of Florida, Nevada, California and western Arizona is collapsing. People have apparently noticed that the best part of America in which to live is West Texas, New Mexico, West Oklahoma, Colorado (except the Denver area), Utah, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho and Washington. If they’d added Nebraska and Oregon, I could have told them the same thing.

Renault-Nissan will introduce all-electric cars and a charging-points set-up in Israel and Denmark by 2011. They plan to launcha battery-powered car in America in 2010, and in every large car market by 2012. Everything is ready now except the batteries. Electric car batteries had only a 50-mile range in the early 1990s, now can go 200 miles, and fast-charge systems will allow 70% top-up in the time it takes to fill a tank with petrol.

In America, some Republican senators want to ease legal requirements to increase amount of ethanol used in fuel. The British government will selectively support biofuels.

In Harlem, New York, not one primary school has more than 55% of hits students reading at grade level. 75% of 14-year-olds cannot read at grade level. Therefore, Harlem parents are leaving the system. Where to go?

Harlem started charter schools within the government school system, and now has the most per mile of any place in America. At one of these, called Harlem Success Academic Charter School, tests taken at the beginning of the 2006-2007 school year showed only 11% of six-year-olds at their grade level in mathematics. By the end of the year, 86% were. How? Among other causes:

a. The school groups student by ability rather than by age;

b. Parents have to read six books a week to their children.

Result: 5000 people attended Harlem Success’ lottery to fill attendance slots, and 3,600 applied for 600 available places. 900 applied for 11 open slots in the second grade.

Joel Klein, chancellor of New York City’s schools, says he thinks the system is getting better, but this charter-school appeal transforms vision to ‘charterize’ the city’s whole school system of 1.1 million children.

Harlem Success will open three new schools this year. About 40% of all kindergarten children in Harlem applied for admission at Harlem Success.

Meanwhile, of course, some politicians are against charter schools, try to stop them, limit them, refuse to let them share buildings with public schools, demand that they unionize (which harms them as it does the public schools).

Chicago had some of the worst schools in America. Mayor Richard Daley announced Renaissance 2010 (‘Ren 10’) to bring 100 new schools to Chicago’s worst areas. Chicago’s business leaders formed the Renaissance Schools Fund, and recently conferred to discuss a ‘new market of public education’ to welcome ‘education entrepreneurs’ tostart schools, run them most as they choose, usually with longer days and sometimes with their own salary structure, and sets standards they must meet. Schools receive money on a per-pupil basis. Chicago is trying to bring Ren Ten’s flexibility to two new models: ‘performance’ schools, where teachers are unionized; ‘contract’ schools, which may hire non-union teachers but must still abide by some district rules. Chicago’s Office of New Schools says a good school needs reviews by local parents, educators and national experts, strong leaders, neighborhood outreach and a rigorous curriculum based on a clear mission. For instance, Urban Prep Charter Academy is designed to help local boys get to college. Longer school days give teachers more time to help students catch up in their ‘job’ of being a pupil. RSF chooses schools most likely to succeed, gives them start-up funds over 30 months, looks for sound management and uses data to aid performance. They test students every six weeks. Every five years, they assess each new school to decide whether to renew their contract or not. So far, 55 schools have opened: 32 charters, 19 performance schools and four contract schools. As they get close to their goal of 100, the state Senate might raise the cap, but of course the teacher unions might try to block it, claiming it creates a two-tiered system and mocks its attempts to ‘apply business models to students.’ Meanwhile, demand increases and, as gang violence increases in regular schools, many more parents want their kids at the charters.

At Urban Prep Charter Academy, 300 boys, 80% of them poor, each wearing a blazer and red tie, stand in straight lines in the gym, shout, ‘We believe. We are the young men of Urban Prep. We are college-bound.’ In 2006, 4% of the student began the school year reading at grade level; in 2007, 11%. In 2006, 87% were from poverty; in 2007, 83%. Groups of parents now visit local neighborhoods to tell parents about new schools and how to send their kids there. Now, parents have a choice.

Some black students who study hard get accused of ‘acting white’. Teachers know this. Roland Fryer asked many public school kids to name their friends. He counted it only if both parties named each other. For white pupils, the higher their grades, the more popular; for blacks, the reverse: ‘studiousness was stigmatized among black schoolchildren’. He gave cash—a nine-year-old kid completing an exam gets $5, for doing well, he gets more—can earn $250 this way. He also gave free mobile phones, which don’t work during school hours., and students can recharge them wthh call minutes only by studying (phone companies helped).

Universities recruit black scholars, admitting them with lower test scores than required for whites or Asians, but the most blatant racial preferences were outlawed in 2003, and more states are barring them altogether. Academic preferences hinder students who undeservingly get them because they get admitted to institutions where they can’t cope. ‘Many who drop out of top-tier colleges might have thrived at slightly less competitive ones….the net effect of pro-black preferences was actually to reduce the number of blacks who passed the bar exam. That is, racial preferences for black law students result in fewer black lawyers’ and ‘lowering the bar for blacks also reduces their incentive to excel at school’ (Economist, 2008 May 10, p32). This same phenomenon would be true of any race, tribe or caste.