Archive for the “News Articles” Category

**An interesting article that was pulled from the Los Angeles Times and written by Kristen A. Graham.

Tony Danza goes back to school.
The actor teaches a 10th-grade English class while cameras roll, and he learns a lot as he goes along.

“Hope they actually air this reality show…would be interesting to see!!”

NASA to fly high school experiments.

-Pulled from UPI.com

NASA is inviting U.S. high school students to design and build an experiment or technology demonstration to be flown into the stratosphere.

The space agency says it will send the experiments into the near space environment of the stratosphere — an altitude of 100,000 feet. The Balloonsat High Altitude Flight Competition will be launched on a NASA weather balloon May 25-27 in Cleveland.

“To participate, student teams in grades nine through 12 must submit a research or flight demonstration proposal to NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland by Friday, Feb. 19,” the space agency said in a statement. “Teams of four or more may pursue a wide variety of topics in this competition, including science and weather observations, remote sensing and image processing. A panel of engineers and scientists at Glenn will evaluate and select four top-ranked proposals by Friday, March 5.”

The top four teams will be awarded travel expenses and up to $1,000 to develop their flight experiment or technology demonstration. Teams will participate in three flight days to release, track and recover their experiments.

NASA will host an informational webcast about the competition Wednesday from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. EST. A link to the webcast and additional information about Balloonsat High Altitude Flight is available at http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/balloonsat.

Girls’ math fears may start with female teachers.

Teachers who are worried about their own skills may pass it on, study says.

**To see this complete msnbc news article, click here**
 

**pulled from the New York Times and written by Winnie Hu**

Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions

Between Craigslist and eBay, the Internet is well established as a marketplace where one person’s trash is transformed into another’s treasure. Now, thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.

While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms.

“To the extent that school district resources are used, then I think it’s fair to ask whether the district should share in the proceeds,” said Robert N. Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents.

The marketplace for educational tips and tricks is too new to have generated policies or guidelines in most places. In Fairfax County, Va., officials had been studying the issue when they discovered this fall that a former football coach was selling his playbook and instructional DVDs online for $197; they investigated but let him keep selling.

A high school English teacher in upstate New York said her bosses barred her from selling plans used in her classroom; she spoke on the condition that she not be named.

Beyond the unresolved legal questions, there are philosophical ones. Joseph McDonald, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, said the online selling cheapens what teachers do and undermines efforts to build sites where educators freely exchange ideas and lesson plans.

“Teachers swapping ideas with one another, that’s a great thing,” he said. “But somebody asking 75 cents for a word puzzle reduces the power of the learning community and is ultimately destructive to the profession.”

Teachers like Erica Bohrer, though, see the new demand for lessons as long-awaited recognition of their worth.

“Teaching can be a thankless job,” said Ms. Bohrer, 30, who has used the $650 she earned in the past year to add books to a reading nook in her first-grade classroom at Daniel Street Elementary School on Long Island and to help with mortgage payments. “I put my hard-earned time and effort into creating these things, and I just would like credit.”

The humble lesson plan has gained value as focus on testing and individualized instruction has increased. At the same time, the Internet has diminished the isolation of classroom teachers. Just about every imaginable lesson for preschool through college is now up for sale — on individual teachers’ blogs as well as commercial sites where buyers can review and grade the material.

Teachers Pay Teachers, one of the largest such sites, with more than 200,000 registered users, has recorded $600,000 in sales since it was started in 2006 — $450,000 of that in the past year, said its founder, Paul Edelman, a former New York City teacher. The top seller, a high school English teacher in California, has made $36,000 in sales.

Another site, We Are Teachers, went online last year with a “knowledge marketplace” that includes lesson plans and online tutoring.

Kelly Gionti, a teacher at the High School for Law, Advocacy and Community Justice in Manhattan, has sold $2,544 worth of unit plans for “The Catcher in the Rye” and “The Great Gatsby,” among others, helping finance trips to Rome and Ireland, as well as class supplies.

Margaret Whisnant, a retired teacher in North Carolina, earns an average of $750 a month from lessons based on her three decades of teaching middle school classics like “The Outsiders,” enough to pay for new kitchen counters and appliances.

“I have wanted to redo my kitchen for 20 years, and I just could not get the funds together,” she said. “Well, now I’m going to have to learn to cook.”

Lisa Michalek, 40, who taught for six years in Rochester and now works for Aventa Learning, a for-profit online education company, said she spent about five hours a week tweaking old lesson plans and creating new ones, like an earth science curriculum that sells for $59.95.

“I knew I had good lessons, so I thought, ‘Why not see what other people think of it?’ ” Ms. Michalek said.

After $31,000 in sales, she has her answer. Alice Coburn, 56, a vocational education teacher in Goshen, N.Y., said she saved two to three hours each time she downloaded Ms. Michalek’s PowerPoint presentations instead of starting from scratch. “I hate reinventing the wheel,” Ms. Coburn said.

Others find comfort in having a class-tested lesson by a more experienced teacher. Lauren Perreca, 24, used a $10 lesson on the Vietnam War novel “Fallen Angels” as a reference last year while creating her own lesson for her classes at Weston High School in Connecticut. She also revised her reading questions about “Lord of the Flies” after comparing them with two other lesson plans.

“At first I was self-conscious I had bought something, because what did that say about me?” she said. “But I realized I wasn’t just taking it and using it, I was adapting it to fill in the gaps of my knowledge.”

Now Ms. Perreca has started selling her own lesson plans, like a 54-page “Macbeth” unit with quizzes and homework assignments ($10) that she wrote in graduate school. She said she spent $140 of her $523 in earnings on cookies and books for her students, and used the rest to splurge on dinners out that she could not otherwise afford.

Her students are incredulous. “They’re like, ‘Who would want to buy those? They’re so boring,’ ” Ms. Perreca said. “I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m making money.’ ”

In Ms. Bohrer’s class the other day in Lindenhurst, N.Y., five children were counting M&Ms while she made sure they digested the lesson before the candy. The exercise, which comes with directions, sorting mats and work sheets, has sold 31 times for $3 a pop. A variation with Lucky Charms is popular around St. Patrick’s Day, she said.

“M&M sorting is not a new concept,” said Ms. Bohrer, who has been teaching since 2001. “I made it easier for teachers to do. They just have to click and print.”

Daniel Street’s principal, Frank Picozzi, said he supported Ms. Bohrer’s online business because his students reaped the benefits of her initiative and creativity.

Ms. Bohrer recalled that when she used to share her lesson plans at no charge, a poster of her reading strategies was passed around so many times that it ended up with a teacher in another school who had no idea where it came from.

“I’ll share with friends,” Ms. Bohrer said, “and if anyone else likes it, I’ll tell them where to buy it.”

Pulled from yahoo news and written by Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. schools are doing a little better to limit the amount of junk food students can buy in vending machines or elsewhere, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday.

The CDC’s survey of middle- and high-school principals in 40 U.S. states found that the number of schools limiting carbonated soft drinks was a median of 63 percent in 2008. That compared to 38 percent in 2006.

A median of nearly 44 percent limited sports drinks, compared to 28 percent in 2006, the survey showed.

“Schools should implement nutrition standards that provide students with healthy choices throughout the school day and throughout the school campus,” the CDC wrote in an e-mailed update, available at http://www.cdc.gov/schoolhealthprofiles.

The CDC estimates that 16 percent of U.S. children and young adults aged 2 to 19 are obese. Obesity raises the risk for heart disease, diabetes and asthma and obese children are very likely to remain obese as adults.

Federal and state governments have asked schools to help control how much access students have to junk food that can add calories without boosting nutrition. In the United States, such issues are often controlled by local school boards.

“From 2004 to 2009, the number of states with nutrition standards for foods outside of school meal programs increased from six to 27,” the CDC report reads.

“Despite these improvements, greater efforts are needed to ensure that all foods and beverages offered or sold outside of school meal programs meet nutrition standards,” it added.

The CDC survey found large variations from one state to another in controlling junk food access in public schools.

“For example, in Connecticut, Hawaii, and Maine, in more than 80 percent of schools, students could not purchase candy and salty snacks in 2008; however, this was true in only 18.2 percent of schools in Utah,” the report reads.

About one-third of U.S. adults over age 20 are obese and another one-third are considered overweight. Adult obesity rates have increased dramatically over the past two decades.

The U.S. Institute of Medicine, an independent body that advises the U.S. government on medical and health matters, says Americans should eat at least nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day, and at least three servings of whole grains and notes that people who eat this much will have little room left for sugar or fatty foods without overeating.

The Institute last month also said local governments should consider zoning laws to limit access to junk food near schools.

The American Heart Association now recommends that U.S. adults eat less than one soft drink’s worth of sugar a day.

“We know that states with laws regulating the competitive food environment are doing well and those that are holding schools accountable are doing better,” American Heart Association President Dr. Clyde Yancy said in a statement.

“Strong public policy initiatives could close the gap in areas that have yet to improve nutrition standards and minimize access to these less healthy food and beverage options.”

Not sure how much I am in agreement on this theory, but I thought it was an interesting news article on Yahoo Healthday news, by Serena Gordon.

Spanking May Lower Kids’ IQs

The bad news is that youngsters who are spanked might lose IQ points.

The good news is that it appears that children’s IQs are on the rise — and at least one expert believes that part of the reason why is that corporal punishment is falling out of favor in the United States and elsewhere.

That’s the view of discipline and domestic violence expert Murray Straus, a professor of sociology and co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire. Straus was scheduled to present the findings from recent research on spanking on Friday at the International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Trauma in San Diego.

The results of a survey of more than 17,000 university students from 32 countries “show that the higher the percent of parents who used corporal punishment, the lower the national average IQ,” Straus wrote in his presentation.

In looking at spanking just in the United States, Straus and a fellow researcher reviewed data on IQ scores from 806 children between 2 and 4 years old and another 704 kids aged 5 to 9.

When their IQs were tested again four years later, children in the younger group who were not spanked scored five points higher, on average, than did children who had been spanked. In the group of older children, spanking resulted in an average loss of 2.8 points.

“How often parents spanked made a difference,” Straus said in a news release from the university. “The more spanking, the slower the development of the child’s mental ability. But even small amounts of spanking made a difference.”

Dr. Rahil Briggs, a child psychologist with the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York City, said she believes that “discipline should be an opportunity to teach your child something.”

“If you spank, you teach your child that hitting is the way to deal with a situation,” she said. “But if you use other methods of discipline, you can begin teaching your child higher-level cognitive skills, self-control, cause-and-effect and logical thinking.”

Briggs said that previous research has clearly shown that when children are in negative stressful situations, it can actually change the architecture of their brains and impair certain neural processes.

Dr. Stephen Ajl, a child abuse pediatrician, director of pediatric ambulatory care at the Brooklyn Hospital Center and medical director of the Jane Barker Brooklyn Children’s Advocacy Center in New York City, said that “spanking and other forms of corporal punishment mean that someone has lost control, and if that goes on on a chronic basis, it may affect some part of children’s psychological well-being.”

And though some people believe that they can use spanking as a form of punishment without losing control, Briggs said that’s very difficult to do all the time.

“When you’re physical with your child, you open that floodgate, and the likelihood that it could veer into where you don’t have as much control increases,” Briggs said. “Plus, if you’re just spanking, you haven’t taught your child anything.”

Straus’s presentation at the violence conference was also to include findings from the study of university students, done by researchers in 32 countries. It found that in nations with decreasing use of corporal punishment, the countries’ average IQ scores rose.

Those findings are plausible and make some sense, Briggs said, but she added that it’s difficult to tease out all the other factors that could play a role in IQ scores — including poverty and parental education.

Ajl recommended that parents think about how they want to discipline they’re children before they’re faced with a situation. And, he said, a pediatrician can help parents come up with more effective ways to discipline their children.