Posts Tagged ‘school’
Teacher sings to her schoolchildren during shoot-out in Mexico
Teacher Martha Rivera Alanis was awarded a certificate for showing “outstanding civic courage” for her steady performance during a gunfight in the northern industrial hub of Monterrey.
As Miss Rivera Alanis proudly held up the framed certificate outside the local Governor’s office she said she was not concerned with fame – only the safety of her 5- and 6-year-old pupils. “Of course, I was afraid, but I tell you, my kids get me through it,” she said following the private ceremony.
Miss Rivera Alanis used her cell phone to tape the video, in which she is heard coaxing her 15 pupils to lie flat on the floor…
Then, loud bursts of gunfire break out, which local paramedics later confirmed were the sound of gunmen killing five people at a taxi stand a block from the school…
In the video, the teacher tries to take the children’s minds off the gunfire, leading them in a song from television show Barney & Friends.
“If the rain drops were chocolate, I would love to be there, opening my mouth to taste them,” the class sang as they hugged the floor at the Alfonso Reyes school.
“My only thought was to take their minds off that noise,” she told reporters Monday. “So I thought of that song…”
A mother of two children, she said her young students had set an example for the rest of the city. “I’m going to carry on, of course it is possible,” she said. “If my 5- and 6-year-olds can do it, it is up to the rest of us to carry on.”
What a terrible life. What courage and love.
Want to buy a used aircraft carrier?
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
The Royal Navy’s former flagship HMS Ark Royal has been put up for sale on the Ministry of Defence’s auction website.
Just two weeks after the aircraft carrier was decommissioned at its home port of Portsmouth Naval Base, Hampshire, the Ark Royal has been advertised on the edisposals.com website.
The sale follows that of its sister ship HMS Invincible, which was towed away last week to a scrapyard in Turkey after being sold on the same internet site.
Although the Ark Royal could also be sold for its scrap metal, other proposals for it include a commercial heliport in London as well as a base for special forces to provide security at next year’s Olympic Games.
And a move could be made to turn it into a nightclub and school in China…
The website edisposals.com is run by the Defence Equipment and Support arm of the MoD which has a budget of £14 billion to equip the UK’s armed forces.
Also on sale on the site are three Type-42 destroyers HMS Exeter, HMS Southampton and HMS Nottingham.
Just in case you only want to have a small navy.
Canada’s high school dropout rate cut in half since 1990
The number of young people dropping out of high school has been slashed in half in the last 20 years, according to new data from Statistics Canada.
In 1990-91, nearly 340,000 or 16.6 per cent of young people aged 20 to 24 had not completed a high school diploma and were not attending school.
But in the last two decades, that number has dropped dramatically, falling to 8.5 per cent of young people or 191,000 by the 2009-10 school year.
More young women continue to stay in school, with a dropout rate of 6.6 per cent, better than the 10.3 per cent of young men, however that gap has narrowed over the previous 20 years. In 1990-91, the rate was 14 per cent for women and 19.2 per cent for men…
The data also looked at the effect of the economic downturn in 2008-09, when nearly one out of every four dropouts in the labour market was unable to find a job. Among those who did find work, their earnings were less than for those with a high school diploma.
British Columbia, at 6.2 per cent, has the fewest number of young people without a high school diploma.
Golly gee, folks. How do those dropout rates from the GWN look compared to your own community, your state?
Think we should take a look at the hows and whys of what goes on in Canadian education – or leave it all in the hands of Congress and our state legislatures?
Pop goes the squirrel. School goes into lockdown. But better-safe-than-sorry… right?
Whew! It could have turned out to be something like this.
Police in Ohio said a high school was locked down for about a half hour due to the sound that resulted when a squirrel caused a transformer malfunction.
Columbus police said Brookhaven High School was locked down shortly after 8 a.m. Monday following the gunshot-like sound but the lockdown was lifted shortly after 8:30 a.m., when investigators discovered the sound was caused by the squirrel, WCMH-TV, Columbus, Ohio, reported Tuesday.
I’d hate to think what happens when some dizzy blond pops her bubble gum in class.
Boy who found cigarette lighter suspended from school
Students at Grace Breckwedel Middle School
Officials suspended a fifth-grader in New Jersey who found a lighter on his way to school.
Jamesburg school superintendent Gail Verona told The Home News Tribune of East Brunswick the lighter had the potential to compromise student safety.
Zero tolerance stupidity – designed for bureaucratic hacks – afraid to think and make responsible decisions on their own.
But the 11-year-old boy’s father questioned why school officials consider the lighter a weapon.
Patrick Halpin called police Wednesday to say there were weapons on school property because teachers at the Grace Breckwedel Middle School had lighters in the building…
The superintendent says a weapon is anything that ”has the potential to cause harm.”
Jamesburg Police Chief Martin Horvath says he believes the school took appropriate action.
Which goes to say that the school superintendent and the police chief enjoy mutual political masturbation. On the taxpayer dime.
South Korea repels North Korean invasion – which turns out to be kindergarten balloons
Balloons released into the sky by a kindergarten in South Korea sparked a security alert when the country’s military mistook the formation for parachuting North Koreans.
Amid growing military tensions between the North and South, Seoul mobilised troops and police early on Thursday after a resident of Ansan, 22 miles south-west of the South Korean capital, reported that 40 to 50 flying objects resembling parachutes had fallen on a mountain the previous night.
Upon inspection, the objects were identified as helium balloons released by children at a nearby school.
State inspectors have strongly criticised military chiefs for their inadequate response to the sinking of a warship near the disputed sea border on March 26, with the loss of 46 lives.
The inspectors recommended that 13 generals, 10 lower-level officers and two civilian defence ministry officials be punished. The country’s top military officer Lee Sang-Eui offered his resignation.
Fear-based politics brings predictable results. Homeland security is defined by paranoid balderdash.
Let’s all cower and tremble – then rush about madly brandishing weapons of mass dementia – protecting our brave nation from school children at play.
Healthy school wins battle against local fast food joint
Try one of these on for size in Shadwell
A judge declared that Tower Hamlets council in east London had ”acted unlawfully” when it gave the go-ahead for ”Fried & Fabulous” to open for business close to Bishop Challoner Catholic Collegiate School in Shadwell.
The judge said councillors had voted in favour of permission after being wrongly directed that they could not take account of the proximity of the local secondary school because it was not ”a material planning consideration”…
Councillor Peter Golds, leader of the council’s Conservative group, said later: ”This is a very important High Court decision.
”It clarifies the law and sets a benchmark that will enable local authorities everywhere to take account of health and well-being – particularly of schoolchildren – as factors in determining planning applications…”
The school’s executive head, Catherine Myers, wrote a letter describing how the establishment was achieving outstanding examination results by educating ”the whole person”.
Its healthy eating policy meant ”no chips, fatty foods, sweets, fizzy drinks etc are sold on the premises”.
The ruling was a victory for Edward Copeland, who lives opposite the proposed takeaway and brought today’s successful legal challenge.
His lawyers pointed to the potential adverse impact of Fried & Fabulous on Bishop Challoner’s attempt to encourage healthy eating among its pupils.
Here in the freedom-loving American West, golly, I can only think of a half-dozen drive-up greasy food specialists in the middle of a three-school complex in the South Side of Santa Fe.
Give ‘em a chance, though. The business community is still developing. And portable food on wheels is allowed on any vacant bit of land.
Including “Los Doggos”
Death metal teacher sacked
School governors have sacked a philosophy teacher from his job after discovering his secret life – as a blood smeared death metal rock singer.
By day shaven-headed Thomas Gurrath, 29, discussed ethics with his 14-year-old pupils at his high school in Stuttgart.
But by night he calls himself The Bloodbeast and writhes around on stage covered in animal blood with topless backing singers and his band Debauchery…
“It was very worrying to listen to his music and then realise he was teaching our children,” said one parent…
They ordered him to choose between teaching and his music – saying he could no longer teach anywhere in Baden-Wuerttemberg state unless he gave up the band.
But Gurrath said he was too addicted to death metal music to quit and agreed to give up his career as a teacher instead.
I admit to mixed feelings on this one. If you maintain reasonable standards, define the curriculum to encourage growth and development of understanding in a changing world – there shouldn’t be a problem with a teacher’s avocations and beliefs.
Fact is – I haven’t known very many good teachers here in the States or in Europe. Though, Europeans would have the edge over the dimwit religion faction that controls a significant portion of American education.
Cultural differences rule!
Wi-Fi transforms school bus into rolling study hall
Students endure hundreds of hours on yellow buses each year getting to and from school in this desert exurb of Tucson, and stir-crazy teenagers break the monotony by teasing, texting, flirting, shouting, climbing (over seats) and sometimes punching (seats or seatmates).
But on this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops.
Morning routines have been like this since the fall, when school officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The students call it the Internet Bus, and what began as a high-tech experiment has had an old-fashioned — and unexpected — result. Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.
“It’s made a big difference,” said J. J. Johnson, the bus’s driver. “Boys aren’t hitting each other, girls are busy, and there’s not so much jumping around.”
On this morning, John O’Connell, a junior at Empire High School here, is pecking feverishly at his MacBook, touching up an essay on World War I for his American history class. Across the aisle, 16-year-old Jennifer Renner e-mails her friend Patrick to meet her at the bus park in half an hour. Kyle Letarte, a sophomore, peers at his screen, awaiting acknowledgment from a teacher that he has just turned in his biology homework, electronically.
“Got it, thanks,” comes the reply from Michael Frank, Kyle’s teacher.
Internet buses may soon be hauling children to school in many other districts, particularly those with long bus routes. The company marketing the router, Autonet Mobile, says it has sold them to schools or districts in Florida, Missouri and Washington, D.C.
RTFA. Delightful upgrade to what otherwise tends to be wasted time. And additional motivation for schoolkids to get computerized.
Homework – where you remember not to smoke the seeds
Yup. Looks like Trailer Park Boys to me!
At most colleges, marijuana is very much an extracurricular matter. But at Med Grow Cannabis College, marijuana is the curriculum: the history, the horticulture and the legal how-to’s of Michigan’s new medical marijuana program.
“This state needs jobs, and we think medical marijuana can stimulate the state economy with hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars,” said Nick Tennant, the 24-year-old founder of the college, which is actually a burgeoning business (no baccalaureates here) operating from a few bare-bones rooms in a Detroit suburb.
The six-week, $485 primer on medical marijuana is a cross between an agricultural extension class covering the growing cycle, nutrients and light requirements (“It’s harvest time when half the trichomes have turned amber and half are white”) and a gathering of serious potheads, sharing stories of their best highs (“Smoke that and you are … medicated!”)…
Even though the business of growing medical marijuana is legal under Michigan’s new law, there is enough nervousness about the enterprise that most students at a recent class did not want their names or photographs used. An instructor also asked not to be identified…
Because the Michigan program is so new, gray areas in the law have not been tested, creating real concern for some students. For example, it is not legal to start growing marijuana before being officially named a caregiver to a certified patient, but patients who are sick, certified and ready to buy marijuana generally do not want to wait through the months of the growing cycle until a crop is ready. So for the time being, coordinating entry into the business feels to some like a kind of Catch-22.
Even though I don’t smoke or drink, I have to hope programs like this continue to progress. Anything and everything that nudges, drags, pulls or shoves this society out of the 19th Century morass of morality and fear – is worthwhile.
