Just over two weeks to graduation, son James is concerned about global competitiveness. He’s off to study physics at Lawrence University in the fall; he is insistent I note the news in the paper this week. I still have an active stake in public schools, after all — good call, James. Here’s his concern, below.
Each child has two million minutes of life over the four years of high school. Whether the U.S. can remain competitive in the global economy depends more than ever on how each child allocates those two million minutes.
A new film raises concerns that U.S. children are losing out against students from India and China.
Science and mathematics education gets the major attention in the film. One wishes this film could compete with the anti-science film “Expelled!” which still lingers malodrously in a few theatres across the nation.
Landers wrote:
2 Million Minutes argues that “the battle for America’s economic future isn’t being fought by our government. It’s being fought by our kids.”
And in a series of international comparisons, the U.S. kids are not doing so well. The one area where they score better than the rest is self-confidence.
Once they leave the eighth grade, students have a little more than 2 million minutes to get ready for work or college and the transition to being an adult. This documentary, made by high-tech entrepreneur Robert Compton, follows two high school seniors in Carmel, Ind., two in Bangalore, India, and two in Shanghai, China, to see how they use their time.
All six are bright, accomplished, college-bound individuals.
Our students spend a lot of time watching TV, working part-time jobs, playing sports and video games, but not so much on homework. The Chinese kids spend an extra month in school each year, more hours at school each day and more hours doing homework. By the time they graduate, Chinese students have spent more than twice as much time studying as their U.S. counterparts.
While one may hope kids will pay attention, one may be unhappy to recall the topic, and many of the same or similar numbers, were published nationally in the 1980s by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) at the U.S. Department of Education. I remember it well, since I was publisher for some of the work.
The website for the movie offers more details, including a calendar of screenings. DVDs are available, but at very high prices — $25 for home use, $100 for school or non-profit use. I’d love to show it to students; I can get a couple of much-needed PBS videos for that same price. I hope producers will work to arrange distribution competitive with opposition movies like Stein’s. I’ll wager “Expelled!” will hit the DVD market at about $10.00, with thousands of DVDs available for free to churches and anti-science organizations.
Landers chalks up some of the stakes, and we should all pay attention:
Nearly 60 percent of the patents filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the field of information technology now originate in Asia.
The United States ranks 17th among nations in high-school graduation rate and 14th in college graduation rate.
In China, virtually all high school students study calculus; in the United States, 13 percent study calculus.
For every American elementary and secondary school student studying Chinese, there are 10,000 students in China studying English.
The average American youth now spends 66 percent more time watching television than in school.
SOURCE: “Is America Falling off the Flat Earth?” by Norman R. Augustine, chairman, National Academy of Sciences “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” committee
Real science is almost so much more interesting than faux science. #39 features the discussions about the claims that the Hobbits had dental fillings. While such a claim is damaging either to the claims of the age of Homo floresiensis or to the claims about the age of the specimens and, perhaps, human evolution, no creationist has yet showed his head in the discussion. When real science needs doing, creationists prefer to go to the movies. There is even a serious discussion of culture, and what it means to leadership of certain human tribes, with nary a creationist in sight.
#40 at Remote Central is every bit as good. World history and European history teachers will want to pay attention to the posts on extinctions on the islands of the Mediterranean. Any one of the posts probably has more science in it in ten minutes’ reading than all of Ben Stein’s mockumentary movie, “Expelled!” That’s true especially when science is used to skewer the claims of the movie, or when discussion turns to the real problems the mockumentary ignores.
Not perfect — there is a brown spot on it; but beautiful, surpassingly rare, a creature of the serendipity of nature, it is a natural dogwood blossom in Dallas County, Texas:
What we came to see - the magical dogwood blossoms.
On April 5 Kathryn and I joined David Hurt and a jovial band of hikers for a trip into Dogwood Canyon in Cedar Hill, Texas. The physical formation of Cedar Hill upon which the city of the same name and several others stand, is one of the highest spots between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. It is an outcropping of chalk, a formation known as the Austin Chalk, that runs from Austin, north nearly to the Oklahoma border.
This rock formation creates a clear physical marker of the boundary between East and West. Dallas is east of the line, Fort Worth, Gateway to the Old West, is 30 miles farther west. On this outcropping is married the plains of the west with the oaks and forests of the east. Within a few miles of the line, the botanical landscape changes, cowboy prairie lands one way, forest lands the other.
On the chalk itself, the soil is thin and alkaline. The alkalinity is a function of the chemical composition of the chalk underneath it.
Dogwoods love the forests of East Texas with their acidic soils. Early spring produces fireworks-like bursts of white dogwood blossoms in the understory of East Texas forests. Dogwoods die out well east of Dallas as the soil changes acidity; driving from Dallas one can count on 30 to 60 miles before finding a dogwood.
Except in Dogwood Canyon. There, where entrepreneur David Hurt originally planned to build a family hideout and getaway, he found a stand of dogwoods defying botanists and the Department of Agriculture’s plant zone maps, blooming furiously in thin alkaline soil atop the Austin Chalk.
April 25, 2008, is World Malaria Day. I’ve purchased some bednets thorugh Nothing But Nets to help fight malaria. Educating others about the disease is one of the chief goals, too.
April 25th is World Malaria Day and also Malaria Awareness Day in the United States. In observance of this day and in recognition of the tremendous opportunities to reduce the burden that malaria imposes on the health of people worldwide, we, the Malaria Community, stand in support of the following statement.
We Have Made Progress
Dynamic new public and private partnerships and renewed commitments to strengthen
longstanding efforts to combat malaria are showing positive results. Global partners include
bilateral, multilateral and U.N. programs, faith-based groups, business coalitions and private
foundations. The single largest U.S.-funded malaria program, the President’s Malaria Initiative
(PMI), has accomplished the following:
Indoor residual spraying benefiting more than 17 million people;
Procurement and distribution of 5 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets;
Procurement of 12.6 million artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) treatments and training of more than 28,000 health workers in use of ACTs; and
Procurement of malaria treatment for more than 4 million pregnant women.
Expanding Access to Current Interventions
It is imperative that stakeholders in the fight against malaria maximize global access to existing proven interventions including insecticide-treated nets, indoor residual spraying with insecticides, and effective medications. Through generous donor contributions, access to essential interventions is improving—yielding dramatic successes in places like Ethiopia and Rwanda where malaria infections and deaths have decreased by more than 50 percent. But the availability of interventions is only half the battle. We must find means to expand delivery of proven interventions, strengthen the capacity of partner countries to administer basic interventions at the community level, share best practices across countries, and motivate individuals to protect themselves and their families.
Investing in New Tools
Simultaneously, we must increase investment in developing new, improved technologies for controlling malaria, including effective drugs, insecticides, and vaccines. Resistance to the most commonly prescribed drugs in most countries has been rapidly increasing. Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) must be readily available and affordable, and new therapies must be developed to prevent resistance to ACTs and eventually replace them. The U.S. government’s commitment to expedite the development of highly effective malaria vaccines is needed now, understanding that the process will take significant time and investment. The potential of developing a vaccine of even limited efficacy could have a significant impact on deaths and illness, especially among infants and young children.
Global Problem, Local Solutions
Achieving results will also depend on the effective engagement of national, regional and local governments in the effective deployment of malaria control tools. To guarantee the best use of resources, steps must be taken to ensure that anti-malaria tools, research and investment reach the communities that need them the most, while ensuring that no community is left unsupported. Community-based efforts to deliver malaria prevention and treatment programs must inform the development of the comprehensive global strategy needed so that efforts can be sustained over time. All stakeholders need to be engaged in thoughtful, coordinated planning that brings to bear the best evidence from all levels of efforts to control or eliminate malaria while addressing changes in the epidemiology of the disease.
Note carefully and well that the major organizations fighting malaria neither slam Rachel Carson, whose methods they use to fight malaria today, nor call for a return to wholesale poisoning of Africa and Asia with DDT, but instead urge wise use of resources including an expansion of health care to aid the human victims of malaria. Malaria is the problem, not science.
World Malaria Day is a logical extension of Earth Day; the two are not in opposition.
San Jacinto Day? April 21 is the anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto, where Sam Houston and the Texian Army got the drop on Gen. Santa Anna and his much larger force, and in the course of a half-hour put the well-trained Mexican regulars on the run, and won Texas independence.
Unfortunately, it’s also a day most Texas students get smothered with reviews from their teachers for the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), the state exam that had just ended last year on this date, and looms in the future this year. Instead of learning Texas history, Texas seventh graders spend this great day reviewing what educators are supposed to teach them. Nuts.
John Copley painted all the bigwigs of revolutionary Boston, including this portrait of the famous horse-mounted alarm before he turned older and grayer.
And as April 18 is the anniversary of Revere’s ride, April 19 is the anniversary of the “shot heard ’round the world.”
In New York this summer? You rather owe it to your grandchildren to go see the stadium, don’t you? Note this is the last year for Shea Stadium, too — better plan an extra day on that trip to the home office in Manhattan.
Confession: I’ve never been inside the stadium. Once, on a road trip to New York City, visiting a friend, Mark Wade, we parked in the shadow of the stadium. Oops — somebody didn’t lock one door. Two days in the City, parked in a tough neighborhood, with a door wide open, nothing happened to the car. There’s some magic in that ballpark.
The ad says “Come visit Utopia in Baltimore.” With an orgy of maps like that planned, it should be a Utopia for somebody: Geographers, cartographers, historians, and anyone interested in travel.
Among the treasures is a huge and beautiful map of the fossil-embedded geological strata that underlie England and Wales. That masterpiece, published in 1815 by a pioneering geologist named William Smith, offered evidence used to support Darwin’s theory of evolution and set the stage for creation-vs.-evolution debates that still rage.
Then there’s the map researched by a doctor named John Snow in the 1850s. It allowed him to trace the source of a cholera outbreak in London to a well used by residents of a single neighborhood.
And there will be charts prepared by geographer Marie Tharp of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, a mountainous rise in the mid-Atlantic seabed, based on data gathered by American submarines during World War II and later used to provide evidence of how the Earth’s crust has evolved through geological time.
The Smith and Snow maps anchor key events in science, the origin of paleontology and one of the greatest examples of public health sleuthing. To have both of those maps in one exhibition is a great coup for the Walters, and for Baltimore.
The exhibit also features a map of Utopia drawn by Sir Thomas Moore. Other maps were drawn by Benjamin Franklin, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Here’s a video description of one of the more remarkable pieces on view, a map of London, on a glove:
Below the fold, a partial list of some of the other exhibits and events planned in and around Baltimore, which will convince you, I hope, that it is indeed an orgy worth getting a ticket to see.
Baltimore remains one of my favorite towns, despite the loss of my Johnny Unitas-led Colts, despite the Orioles’ recent mediocrity; it’s a place of greathistory, great neighborhoods, and good food. Crabcakes from several sites, dinner at Sabatino’s, maps in the museums. Utopia indeed.
Found the story via Prehistoric CSI, a blog which normally tracks dinosaur digs in Texas at the Seymour, Texas, “red beds” — and which is billed as having a limited run. Texas history and science teachers need to get over there to see what’s up. (Seymour is about midway between Fort Worth and Lubbock.)
Well worth it. The entire exhibit is a travelogue about Ethiopia, really — but I got chills looking at real bones. You will, too, I suspect.
The exhibit closes in Houston on April 27. Wouldn’t it be great if the demand were so high that they had to hold it over a few months? If you’re in Houston, you owe it to yourself to see the bones. If you’re near Houston, if you’re within a half-day’s drive, go see. If you’re within a day’s drive, plan some other activity (there are other special exhibits at the Houston Museum of Natural History, on Leonardo DaVinci, on CSI and forensic science, marshes, and cowboys in Texas; there are regular exhibits, including one on gemstones that is better than anything similar at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.) — but go to Houston.
This exhibit was controversial, taking such a treasure out of Africa at all. You owe it to yourself, to your children, to Ethiopia, and to future policy, to see the exhibit if you can.
Chiefly because I know there are students in Lubbock, Odessa, Killeen, Houston, Galveston, Victoria, Beaumont, Tyler, Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, Austin, and San Antonio — plus starry spots in between — who should have a chance to see some stars on National Astronomy Day.
“The Meade Instruments 4M Community will donate an ETX-80 telescope for each venue to give away and also provide a 8-inch LX 90 for the grand prize — Astronomy will pick the grand-prize winner from names collected at each venue.”
Astronomy Day is a grass roots movement to share the joy of astronomy with the general population - “Bringing Astronomy to the People.” On Astronomy Day, thousands of people who have never looked through a telescope will have an opportunity to see first hand what has so many amateur and professional astronomers all excited. Astronomy clubs, science museums, observatories, universities, planetariums, laboratories, libraries, and nature centers host special events and activities to acquaint their population with local astronomical resources and facilities. It is an astronomical PR event that helps highlight ways the general public can get involved with astronomy - or at least get some of their questions about astronomy answered. Astronomy Week is the same concept as Astronomy Day except seven times long.
Novices get a chance to look at the stars, and one person at each site wins a telescope; one person in the nation gets a very nice 8-inch telescope. What are your chances? Last year 28 telescopes were given away; there were 3,700 people who registered to win the things.
Science, arts and social studies teachers especially, go look. What local museums are you overlooking? Which museums should you plan a long-distance trip to see?
Duncanville ISD teachers sometimes require “field experience” for students, including visits to local museums. I doubt we’d have gotten our kids into the African American Museum otherwise; I think too few kids bother with the Frontiers of Flight Museum (or the C. R. Smith Museum closer to DFW Airport), and I know way too few bother with the Jack Harbin Museum of Scouting, a great shining gem obscured by its working class, Scout camp location and the proximity of the National Scouting Museum in Irving, Texas.
The Times’s section makes me lust for Star Trek™-style transporters that take a whole classroom of kids, cheaply, to see the real stuff. Be sure to check out the on-line videos and slide shows, too.
Getting snowed out of Springfield, Illinois last week gave me an extra 8 or 10 hours to sit around airports and find things to gripe about.
Is anyone else bothered by the tendency to use high-definition television monitors with a regular TV signal, and then spread the picture out to cover the screen, which makes the victims on the television look as if they’d been modified for a guest appearance on South Park?
(This image is for illustration of the phenomenon only.)
Am I the only person who prefers that people look like people, even if there is a blank area on the television screen? In the past year I’ve been in a couple dozen classrooms where the projectors were set to distort every image transmitted. For a presentation on, say, Emmitt Till, or the death of Rosa Parks, I thought the settings disrespectful at best.
How can they call it “high definition” if it distorts everyones’ faces?
I was relieved late Sunday to get back home to our old, analog televisions and normal human proportions on the screen.
Time flies, people sometimes don’t. I’m in O’Hare, now with a few hours to spend because, for the third time today, fifth flight, a flight I was booked on was canceled due to weather.
Above, the neck of American Airlines’ Concourse H and K, in Terminal 3; picture is many months old, but I like it because it contains many hours of my sweat in hammering out the lease agreements. The photo is from a Chicago limousine service.
The trip to DFW Airport that I used to make a couple of times a week minimum in about 25 minutes took nearly an hour today — the roads are wider, but the traffic is much heavier. The trip from the curb to the gate that I used to sprint now takes 40 minutes, and I have to get undressed.
And then the flight to St. Louis was cancelled. And then the flight from St. Louis to Bart Simpson’s Springfield was cancelled . . . I tried a back door, to Chicago and then on United back to Springfield (Illinois — isn’t every Springfield Bart’s hometown?). The hop from O’Hare was cancelled. I’ll miss the 3:00 p.m. seminar start.
It’s been more than 15 years since I actually got stuck on a weather delay. Airlines fly very well, most of the time. I also fly about 99.7% less than I used to fly.
It’s a lot of trouble. It’s a good cause. The Bill of Rights Institute and the Liberty Fund teamed up for a seminar on presidents and the Constitution, focusing on Lincoln, in Springfield. I always get material that sparks classroom discussion and great learning experiences for students.
Our department chair told me that our district won’t consider this as part of my required in-service training, however. Go figure. I can sit through hours of people who don’t know Excel as well as I do and be counted as learning; but when I get great sessions with hard reading requirements and outstanding discussion with great experts, zip. Quality in education? What?
I can easily see a time when a student with a computer terminal gets an assignment to look at some of the activitiesavailable at a site like America by Air, with on-line quizzes as the student progresses through the exhibits.
How far away are we? Two questions: Does your school provide an internet-linked computer for each student? Do you have the software or technical support to give an on-line assignment and track results?
Teaching stays stuck in the 19th century, learning opportunities fly through the 21st.
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Business, Capitalism, Economics, Education, Education quality, Education success, Geography - Economic, Globalization, Higher education, History, Politics, Public education, Science, Teaching, Travel, Video and film, Voodoo science, foreign affairs | Tagged: Business, Capitalism, China, Economics, Education, Entertainment, Globalization, India | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
