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Phonics was discredited decades ago as boring and dull for children. They weren't learning, especially most disadvantaged children in our inner cities. We needed an approach that they could excel at.

Oh, really? Perhaps you should tell that to the National Institute of Health, because their 2000 article on the report of the Congressionally-mandated, independent National Reading Panel concludes exactly the opposite. Or, if you require training wheels, you'll have an easier time of it with PBS's summary of the panel's major findings.

But, since you have such a well-documented contempt for all things USA, you might be more comfortable referring to the Australian state of New South Wales Department of Education and Training's Literacy Teaching Guide: Phonics, instead. Or, given your general dismissal of governments as oppressors, it's possible that a private corporation that has spent decades focusing on primary-level educational materials like Scholastic.com's Parent & Child Magazine could seem more credible to you.

Or, alternatively, you could just read the Wikipedia page on phonics, which not only explains what phonics is and how it works, but goes into the history and controversy of phonics, especially phonics vs. whole language, not only in the USA, but in Australia, Great Britain, and Canada, as well.

There're plenty of other resources available to support the view that phonics (and its sister technique phonemics - you really need to use them in combination with each other for best results), in conjunction with primer material that is actually interesting, is the most effective strategy for teaching new readers.

And I'm sure you don't care, but my own, anecdotal experience is all the evidence I require. You see, when I was expelled from first grade for being disruptive (due to not having been diagnosed as being nearsighted to the point that I was legally blind), my mother undertook to teach me to read at home. In less than a month, I went from not even knowing the alphabet to reading at an eighth-grade level. Much of that was due to her using the phonics+phonemics approach, a roughly equal part can be credited to her choice of Dr. Suess, rather than the achingly-dull Dick and Jane books, as my primer. (When we exhausted his catalogue, she introduced me to the Reader's Digest, instead.) Within 30 days, from a standing start, I had read my first Tom Swift, Jr. novel, and embarked on a lifelong love affair with reading - especially science fiction, but also history, biographies, science and technology, and, as Robert A. Heinlein put it, "words in a line" in general.

So, please, by all means, pray continue to explain how phonics has been "discredited" for decades. You ignorance of the subject is simply fascinating.

Wait, what's the antonym for "fascinating" ... ?

Here: http://magazines.scholastic.co...

Same thing's going to happen with internships.

How many implementations are there out there? I've only read of one big corp trying to impose its version of the standard. When we have several, and they're all bad, then we'll talk.

A quick search turned up this,this, this, this, and this. But wait, those are more or less commercial offerings. It seems that individual states, districts, and schools are rolling their own implementations as well.

You notice the word "limited" has pretty much been ignored, too.

The founders were not micro-managers.

The limits of copyright were meant to be defined by legislation.

The average length of a state constitution is 26,000 words (compared to about 8,700 words for the U.S. constitution). The longest state governing document is that of Alabama, which has over 172,000 words. That document is also the most amended state constitution in the Union, with over 770 amendments. The average state constitution has been amended about 115 times. The oldest state constitution still in effect is that of Massachusetts, which took effect in 1780. The newest is the Georgia Constitution, which was ratified in 1983.

Georgia has had nine constitutions. Massachusetts one.

State constitution

The success of the framers of the U.S. Constitution in writing a document geared to serving the varied and changing needs of Americans has been complemented by an ability on the part of successive Congresses and courts to readapt it to these changing demands. The Constitution's 27 amendments, added over a period of 200 years, have in most cases plugged minor loopholes rather than changed the focus or the general structure of the document. As Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt stated in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933, ''Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced.'' Constitution of the United States

1. 1. What about an "Israeli contractor" stocked by Mossad taking over the plant is unclear?
2. 2. How do you explain the total explosion of an offline reactor? There is pretty graphic evidence of a major explosion, but supposedly no explosives?
3. 3. Where did the Tsunami come from, since it's clear from the evidence that it was not from an earthquake. At least not from an earthquake that was supposed to have been 9.1 on the Richter scale. Do you have any idea what 9.1 means? And that's the simpliied version. 9.1 is more than 3 times 8.8 on the log10 Richter Scale and almost 800 Megatons! How can a single building remain standing, undamaged, when such an event occurs, yet none seems to even have cracks?!

and many more questions to be answered, but most conveniently ignored by the ignorati-media...

There friend, you've hit the crux of it. Until we all agree on the cause we cannot in good conscience be sure that we're attacking the right problem.

Until an abundant source of non-carbon energy is up and running these things are science fiction.

If you believe that CO2 is the problem there are really only two options, (1) a return to a stone age existence by a population dramatically reduced by mass murder. Merely simplifying the lives of 7 billion people will not work. And (2) implementing large scale industrial process to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and bury it. A bountiful carbon-neutral source of energy is required for this, it might require as much energy as we use to run our civilization. Nuclear fission is the only such possible source on the table.

The only CO2 sequestration technique that impressed me as possible was proposed by Marshall Savage in his book The Millennial Project... where floating OTEC platforms along warm equatorial waters pump cold nutrient-rich ocean water to the surface creating an algal bloom around the platform that is confined by booms. Some would be used to feed fish farms, but the bulk of it would be packaged into weighted bales and sunk into the ocean. It may have been a slow and arduous process (OTEC are only marginally possible and the best energy efficiency is ~1%) but it would at least work.

I've seen lots of global warming combative measures, and some that would induce warming to help combat an ice age... that involve synthesis of something and scattering of that something over large areas, but it all requires a clean energy budget that we just don't have. So it all comes down to energy.

In order to even consider these things we would need that proverbial 'clean, abundant and too cheap to meter' energy source.

If safe nuclear fission remains off the table and undeveloped, specifically the thorium fueled liquid fluoride molten salt reactor, it looks to me like we're screwed.

I personally never believed that pure chemical CO2 was a serious issue climate-wise, although if you believe coal is a problem (carbon black, atmospheric particulates) then we've always been on the same page.

It is no wonder that so many people fall back to the depopulation return to stone age solution. They refuse to realize it but they are really advocating mass murder by proxy --- for when the ineffective conservation phase has failed and the problem becomes worse they will elect bold courageous leaders who are not afraid to get the process rolling, and the (selective) mass murders will begin.

Mankind does encourage global warming and glacial melt via deposit of carbon black on the surface and arctic pollution. This is a particulate/aerosol problem not a purely chemical CO2 problem, which is why I think temperatures in the Antarctic have been more stable than the Arctic, the world's worst carbon polluters are in the Northern hemisphere.

Another (fascinating!) recent paper poses that our 1970~2002 use of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) was a key driver in the brief global temperature rise rather than carbon dioxide emissions.

Mankind does encourage global cooling regionally via airplane contrails, the seeding of clouds where none would otherwise form (it adds up) --- as described in this kick-ass documentary Global Dimming from BBC Horizon.

"Why", not "how". I read this in 3rd grade, probably around 1967 or '68? Piqued my interest in computers that lasted and that I finally got to explore senior year in high school. One thing I /think/ recall from the plot is suspicion that Danny was cheating by using the computer, but it turns out he needed to undestand the problems & the solutions better than the other kids in class in order to be able to do the programming. http://www.scholastic.com/browse/book.jsp?id=854

Others have mentioned The Hobbit and Narnia. We listened to Narnia on audiobook and my 7 year old eats them up. I just started the Hobbit and he's hooked half-way through chapter 1. Another idea is graphic novels. We got a few young reader books like Billy Blaster and Recon Academy (sort-of sci fi) which he can read along with. I discovered Missle Mouse which I had to read at first, but after a few readings he likes to look at for himself.

You are guys are the reason the USA is screwed in the long term - loads of people moaning when a 17 year old or so kid pushes himself and gets something like this happening? A better place would have praised the kid, I think it's great teenagers are trying to come up with technological hacks that are new to them and dreaming great goals.

No, you're the reason the USA is screwed up. This kid did not push himself, he watched a youtube video or googled it. Why should we praise a 17 year old for doing what he saw in a youtube video?

This generation has been brought up to believe that every child is a winner. Awards aren't just given to the top of the class anymore, they give awards to every kid, no matter what they do or fail to do. Brookings Institution 2006 Brown Center Report on Education finds that countries in which families and schools emphasize self-esteem for students—America for example—lag behind the cultures that don’t focus on how students feel about themselves.

All this praise has resulted in overconfident college grads, who believe they should be given larger salaries than their peers without working for it.

So you should not praise a kid that did the same or worse than other kids else, praise should only be given when the child actually excels or achieves something few of their peers have achieved.

This story is really fascinating to me as I just finished up the Hunger Games trilogy. I wonder if Collins got the idea for mockingjays here or it's just a coincidence...

Those of us who are a certain age and were geeky enough to read Danny Dunn books know exactly where the CIA got this idea.

I may not yet be an Invisible Boy, but I've got one hell of a Homework Machine these days. (Especially compared to the computers I grew up with, let alone a 1958 "Miniac" that filled an entire house :)

Solar PV is roughly 20x-100x more expensive than coal or nuclear power.

Really? Did you also subtract the subsidies coal and nuclear power get? Yes, they both get subsidized as well.

If I was Obama, I'd toss a billion or so at this scientist and see if he couldn't get mass production of it up and running.

Ah if only... If I were President of the USA I'd veto all subsidies and let a freer market pick winners and losers. As it is now venture capitalists have been investing in different technologies for years, from Sergey Brin and Larry Page investing in Nanosolar to Elon Musk, founder of Paypal and CEO of SpaceX, investing in Tesla Motors.

I mean, as long as we're spending billionS keeping teachers temporarily employed (because their states can't afford them right now), right?

I hate it that the feds have to give the states the money but it was the feds who mandated a bunch of new regulations with No Child Left Behind and other laws. If the feds stayed within it's Constitutional limits federal taxes could be significantly reduced if not totally eliminate the federal income tax. States and local governments could then raise their own taxes if they so chose to. Of course that's only part of the problem. States like California went on a spending spree during the roaring '90s. Then when the economy tanked they lost a lot of revenue. Then there's CA's teachers unions. Try to fire an underperforming teacher and watch the years speed by before they are fired. About the only way to fight the unions is by allowing school choice with charter and private schools getting matching funding. Then watch as the bad public schools are emptied out so the teachers can be fired.

Falcon

Oh please, not this tripe again.

For one thing, your invention list is severely flawed. Many things which you say were invented by one group were actually invented by someone else and then developed or refined by another. The Japanese didn't invent hybrids; locomotive and heavy construction equipment makers have been using diesel-electric powertrains for decades.

You're also forgetting the Arabs and algebra and various other things (granted, this was back around 1000 AD, not recently when they've been too busy fighting with each other and everyone else to do anything productive).

A quick google search for "african inventions" yields the following website:
http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/bhistory/inventors/

Did you know the carbon filament in light bulbs was invented by an African-American?
Or that peanut butter was invented by famous African-American George Washington Carver?
Garrett Morgan invented the gas mask and the first traffic signal.
Otis Boykin invented the pacemaker, among other electronic devices.
And Lonnie G. Johnson invented the all-important Super Soaker.

The reasons for the African continent's problems are explained in Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel", and has a lot to do with geography making agriculture much easier in Europe than in Africa, causing Europe to develop faster technologically.

What have you invented? Probably nothing.

AMEN.

This is my biggest problem w/ people posting their own works. Because while maybe they have some good stuff to contribute, I know they are really just looking for people to get clicks on their page.

And overall, I think the official release on site or any of the numerous sites that cover this would have done better.

And why no props for JK Rowling herself?

RonB

Adverbs ok - right. But verbs surely bad. Unevitable!
http://www.scholastic.com/artandwritingawards/gall ery/2001/winners2001/tedholm.htm

FWIW there is a very good page on EFF's website about the ins and outs of student blogging.

And another one from Scholastic Administrator is also interesting.

Also, in case you are wondering; yes I do work at a school part time as a NetAdmin.

But you see... In america, you BUY your way in to the whitehouse. in the 2004 Election, Bush spent $150Million on his campaign.
Kerry Spent a measly $33Million. Who won?

That reliable classroom news source for third graders, Scholastic News Edition 3, reported in their April 18, 2005 edition (not archived on-line) that a Long Island (New York, USA) firm converted discarded turkey bones, feathers, and guts into fuel. A quick Google Search led to the Wikipedia description of thermal depolymerization, a process for rendering complex organic material, typically waste, into light crude oil. Turkey parts are more readily available than dead cats.

If you're trying to get a child to turn out well-adjusted, which is more important... making sure the kid is never exposed to sex, or making sure he actually goes outside sometimes and makes friends and has a life?

The problem with a statement like that is that those aren't mutually exclusive issues (i.e. you could not be exposed to sex and also go outside and make friends). Also, it kind of misses the point: it's not necessarily about keeping a kid totally unexposed to adult content. It's about keeping their exposure to that content on par with their maturity to deal with that content. You know, I like horror fiction, and it'll be fun if my kid likes it too. But I'm don't let him read my books right now: when he expressed an interest in scary books, I directed him to the Goosebumps books, which are age-appropriately "spine-tingling".

I appreciate the rating systems in assisting me keep the content on par with his maturity, whether that assistance is coming from the ESRB, MPAA or even the TV ratings. From TFA, "Parents perceive age ratings as a guide but not as a definite prohibition," said Jurgen Freund, Modulum chief executive.. That's definitely how I deal with them.

What frustrates me is that the marketers scuttle the really adult content so the ratings folks keep making the "almost-adult" rating more and more meaningless. Generally, mass-market stores won't sell an AO-rated game, mass-market movie houses won't show an NC-17-rated movie, and of course broadcast TV has limits that cable and especially pay-cable doesn't. So, it appears that the industries keep pushing the envelope of their "almost-adults-only" ratings, putting more and more content in their M-rated games, R-rated movies and TV-14 that maybe should be restricted to AO, NC-17 or TV-MA. But they don't dare actually release products with those ratings (or just show it on cable or paytv or whatever) because then they won't get the buying power of the whole Mass Market.

They're so hard-core for maximum profits that they've let this nonsense go too far, imo. Put out the adult content, label it as adult content, and let adults buy it. What's the problem? Loading up the "almost-adult" ratings with adult content is why parents may be "ignoring", or at least not trusting, some of the ratings.

I know the US is low in quality of schooling, lower than the UK and most of Europe. I wonder if this could be factored in and result in different results for different countries?

For example, I'm told that when French students graduate their equivalent of high school at 18, they have the American equivalent education of an AA degree that they call a baccalauréat.

Perhaps in the U.S. due to the already IQ-lowering effects of long hours spent in front of the TV, the computer is a "step-up", but for European schools, long hours in front of the TV have not been the "norm", so adding computers there might be detracting from study & homework hours.

One of the latter stories on computers helping scholastic performance listed in the first paragraph talked, in particular about how it helped children in low-income families -- again, possibly pulling children into the computer rather than time spent in front of TV or doing other non-scholastic activities.

The center of this study focused on "problem solving" and ability to focus, though, as measures of Intellectual Function. Email and computer multi-tasking might indeed hurt this type of function.

It really might depend on what "activity" the computer-spent time is replacing, and how good of schooling the children in the area would have been getting before computers were available.

In a society or school where children spend It could be the computer, like many technologies before it, has an equalizing effect: having weakening effects on those who were stronger before their arrival but having help affects on those who were weaker before arrival.

I suppose the ability to randomly check email in the middle of a class might not be the greatest thing...but certainly, having a computer for use to store "facts" might improve "Intelligence" in those schools that required "rote" memorization of facts. I know I feel a bit cut off from part of my "brain", when I am disconnected -- can't just google up an answer or bring up a dictionary or calculator or measurement converter. It's a slow down to manually look things up, most certainly.

However, facts != intelligence. So schools that focused on problem solving and thinking for one's self, might suffer with the introduction of something (i.e. a computer) that provides easy answers.

L

Sometimes, too many links can obfuscate important content instead of helping to direct interested parties to it.

If this concept works in the long run, I wonder how (if at all) it might be used to find the "tenth planet" that some scientists think might be orbiting beyond Pluto?

It already was - with negative results. Here's a quote:

When a new NASA satellite called IRAS was launched, we hoped that it could be used to find Planet X. IRAS looks at the sky in the infrared, which would make finding another planet much easier, and it could also find very faint things. People looked very hard (everyone wanted to be the one to find the new planet!), but there is no sign of Planet X. So right now, we believe that there is no Planet X.

You can thank the Supreme Court for that. Schools were allowed newspaper censorship as a result of a 1985 case concerning a newspaper wanting to publish an article about teen pregnancy. The case is Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier. Some more info can be found here.

"We are heading to orbit sooner than you think," Burt Rutan, the creator said earlier. "We do not intend to stay in low-earth orbit for decades. The next 25 years will be a wild ride. ... One that history will note was done for the benefit of everyone."

1. One-eighth of the whole population were slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.

Unlike the US, India has had a woman as the head-(honcho)-of-state for quite a while. It was sad to see the bruhaha (about how far women had come in the US) when a woman was just put on the VP ticket, when there have been many democracies in the world that have elected women to the highest position in the government long before the largely symbolic woman on the VP ticket (for one of the major parities) stunt.

AFAIR, women in India have held high political positions (Chief Minister of states) for over 50 years, and Indira Gandhi first became Prime Minister in 1965 (?). So it's not really a big deal.

What is a big deal is the fact that Abdul Kalam (President) is a Muslim, Manmohan Singh (Prime Minister) is a Sikh, and Sonia Gandhi (President of the ruling Congress Party) is a Catholic. All hold elected positions. This has happened in a country made up of ~80% Hindus.

If this is not a resonding success story for secular democracy, I don't know what would be.

We'll just have to see how long it takes the US to elect a woman/black/hispanic to the top spot.

... and bound to be much more educational than this other one.

Magic School Bus

Besides, Ms. Frizzle be the schnizzle dizzle!

Just to point out that they were English initially,

The Pilgrims were English Separatists who founded (1620) Plymouth Colony in New England. In the first years of the 17th century, small numbers of English Puritans broke away from the Church of England because they felt that it had not completed the work of the Reformation. They committed themselves to a life based on the Bible. Most of these Separatists were farmers, poorly educated and without social or political standing. One of the Separatist congregations was led by William Brewster and the Rev. Richard Clifton in the village of Scrooby in Nottinghamshire. The Scrooby group emigrated to Amsterdam in 1608 to escape harassment and religious persecution. The next year they moved to Leiden, where, enjoying full religious freedom, they remained for almost 12 years.

http://teacher.scholastic.com/researchtools/resear chstarters/plymouth/article10.htm

I only bring this up because as a child I was convinced that pirhana fish were man sized, due to misinterpreting an image in a book, that many years later I realised was an inset ! Don't want some innocent people thinking that they RTFA, and get the history AAF (arse about face).

And this is what happens when you leave it to those idiots in America.

Russia has, by far, the best record in space.

Probably bribes from Mom & Dad, especially if they are college-educated professionals. They like to encourage their kids to read.

In elementary school, my parents would let me go hog wild ordering books from the Scholastic Book Club. They didn't mind, as long as I was reading.

• Yahooligans is Yahoo's directory of kid-friendly sites
• Discovery Channel stuff for kids
• News for kids ... get them used to keeping up with world events!

Have any of you heard about the Harry Potter books? They are aparrently very good. The entire of the UK was going mad over them a couple of months ago.

I am the avarage teen punk geek. So this is way before my time. Do you have the Title/Author or better yet ISBNS?

Finally tracked them down; they were published by Scholastic back in the mid-80's, under the "Micro Adventures" title. Apparently they're out of print though, which is too bad; only online retailer who even lists them is Amazon. Probably have a bigger audience nowadays, though ironically fewer people probably have access to a BASIC compiler now than back then (when almost every home computer came bundled with it). But including a CD-ROM with Perl wouldn't be too hard. Actually be a better language to use, give kids some knowledge of non-linear programming without making them worry about all those variable declarations or header files.
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