Field of Dreams 2: NFL Lockout with Taylor Lautner from Taylor Lautner

Think About This

It's My Life

Song of the Day

A Reminder

Funny of the Day from Pokey

Song of the Day: December 5th, 2010

Kobe Bryant and Call of Duty

Recently, Kobe Bryant participated in an advertisement for Activision's "Call of Duty: Black Ops." In the advertisement Kobe is seen brandishing a firearm with the word "MAMBA" on it (that's Kobe's nickname). Many people are saying the Kobe is inadvertently promoting gun violence in America. Do video games promote violence? Should young people be allowed to play these games that are becoming incredibly realistic? Does rampaging through a jungle, blasting enemy combatants as you go, encourage people, young or not, to not value life? Should we ban violent video games? Violent movies? Violent music?


Post your comments. Remember to frame your argument logically.

iPod, iTouch, iPad, I Need

I can't work or study in complete silence, yet the chattering and fooling around many students engage in during class is not my idea of a pleasant working environment. Personally, I like to have music or movies going while I work. Why shouldn't students be allowed to listen to their favorite music or movie while they work? Should this be an earned privilege? Is having a pencil an earned privilege? If something helps me work better, why can't I have it?

Post your answers or responses. Remember: Logic is the way to win a discussion; create a logical argument in support of your opinion, you're trying to convince college-educated adults not your friend's dog.

Song of the Day: November 16th, 2010

Song of the Day: November 8th, 2010

Legalized 'Cheating' ?

WSJ.com Education

Legalized 'Cheating'

Text-messaging answers.

Googling during exams.

In the Internet age, some schools have a new approach to cheating: Make it legal.

By ELLEN GAMERMAN

January 21, 2006

It was a situation every middle-school student dreads. Bonnie Pitzer was cruising through a vocabulary test until she hit the word "desolated" -- and drew a blank. But instead of panicking, she quietly searched the Internet for the definition.

At most schools, looking up test answers online would be considered cheating. But at Mill Creek Middle School in Kent, Wash., some teachers now encourage such tactics. "We can do basically anything on our computers," says the 13-year-old, who took home an A on the test.

In a wireless age where kids can access the Internet's vast store of information from their cell phones and PDAs, schools have been wrestling with how to stem the tide of high-tech cheating. Now, some educators say they have the answer: Change the rules and make it legal. In doing so, they're permitting all kinds of behavior that had been considered off-limits just a few years ago.

The move, which includes some of the country's top institutions, reflects a broader debate about what skills are necessary in today's world – and how schools should teach them. The real-world strengths of intelligent surfing and analysis, some educators argue, are now just as important as rote memorization.

The old rules still reign in most places, but an increasing number of schools are adjusting them. This includes not only letting kids use the Internet during tests, but in the most extreme cases, allowing them to text message notes or beam each other definitions on vocabulary drills.

Schools say they in no way consider this cheating because they're explicitly changing the rules to allow it.

In Ohio, students at Cincinnati Country Day can take their laptops into some tests and search online Cliffs Notes. At Ensign Intermediate School in Newport Beach, Calif., seventh-graders are looking at each other's hand-held computers to get answers on their science drills. And in San Diego, high-school students can roam free on the Internet during English exams.

The same logic is being applied even when laptops aren't in the classroom.

In Philadelphia, school officials are considering letting kids retake tests, even if it gives them an opportunity to go home and Google topics they saw on the first test. "What we've got to teach kids are the tools to access that information," says Gregory Thornton, the school district's chief academic officer. “‘Cheating’ is not the word anymore."

The changes -- and the debate they're prompting -- are not unlike the upheaval caused when calculators became available in the early 1970s.

Back then, teachers grappled with letting kids use the new machines or requiring long lines of division by hand. Though initially banned, calculators were eventually embraced in classrooms and, since 1994, have even been allowed in the SAT.

Of course, open-book exams have long been a fixture at some schools. But access to the Internet provides a far vaster trove of information than simply having a textbook nearby. And the degree of collaboration that technology is allowing flies in the face of some deeply entrenched teaching methods.

Grabbing test answers off the Internet is a "crutch," says Charles Alexander, academic dean at the elite Groton School in Massachusetts. In the college world, where admissions officers keep profiles of secondary schools and consider applicants based on the rigor of their training, there are differing opinions. "This is the way the world works," says Harvard Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis, adding that whether a student was allowed to search the Internet for help on a high-school English exam wouldn't affect his or her application.

GREAT MOMENTS IN CHEATING HISTORY

Throughout history, new social mores -- and advances in technology -- have altered what it means to cheat. Take a look at some notable moments in the history of cheating. Though it might not ultimately factor into a student's acceptance at University of Pennsylvania, Lee Stetson, dean of undergraduate admissions there, has a different take. "The definition of what's cheating has been changing, and fudging seems to be the way of the world now," he says. "It's not an encouraging sign."

At High Tech High International, a charter school in San Diego, kids in Ross Roemer's 10th-grade humanities class are allowed to scan the Internet during some tests; earlier this week, they looked up what scholars had written about Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" while they were writing their essay exams.

Mr. Roemer says students' essays are better informed when they can compare their ideas with what others have written. But he acknowledges that traditionally an approach like this would be against the rules. "You'd have to rip up their test and call their parents," he says. But at this school, which is funded partly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he says there's no sense fighting technology: "You can't ignore it. You have to embrace it."

When the Kent School District in Washington decided last year to create a technology "school within a school" at Mill Creek Middle, where there'd be a 1-to-1 ratio of kids to computers, parents quickly began pushing to get their kids accepted. Now, teachers say letting kids look up answers online helps show they can find and analyze information then synthesize it into a cohesive argument.

In Bonnie Pitzer's case, teacher Becky Keene says using the Internet helped the seventh-grader, but in the end, she aced the test because she demonstrated she could also use the word in a sentence. "I want the kids to be able to apply the meaning, not to be able to memorize it," says Ms. Keene.

Karen Waples says she's teaching her students the skills to work with others in an era of information sharing. The AP government teacher at Cherry Creek High School outside Denver has kids team up on some of their exams -- even when they're multiple choice. It doesn't hurt, she adds, that it has the side benefit of relieving the stress that students say comes from keeping all the answers in their heads. Ms. Waples, who was originally encouraged to try this by a fellow teacher, says she hopes to spread the technique to other classrooms this year with the backing of the principal. "I tell them it's closed-book, open friend," she says.

Some schools are only partially embracing the new tools for test taking.

Sixth-graders in Nancy Dean's class at Aire Libre Elementary School in Phoenix used their new Palm hand-helds to beam each other answers to an exercise on "The Toothpaste Millionaire" earlier in the school year. But Ms. Dean stops short at administering more serious tests on them for the time being; when and if she does, she'll step up her classroom patrol.

"It's real easy for me to spot a student who has roaming eyes -- but a student can hit 'beam' and I won't know it," she says. "You have to be careful."

These uses of technology are part of a broader shift in academic rules that has been underway for several years. Educators say the concept of "collaborative learning," which has students working in groups and essentially answering test questions or tackling assignments for each other, continues to gain currency. Its proponents say it can help teach group skills and critical thinking.

A similar argument is being used to support widespread access to the Internet, and even to other classmates, during testing. By some estimates, at least seven million new Web pages are added every day. In a competitive global labor market, where white-collar jobs are increasingly outsourced to other countries, being able to find and synthesize information about the World Bank could be more crucial than memorizing the date it opened.

Failing to teach kids how to navigate in the knowledge economy, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Frank Levy, "is like putting them on the track with the locomotive."

Technology companies see an opportunity. Last month SparkNotes, which offers online summaries and analyses of books popular on high-school required reading lists, branched out with the launch of SparkMobile. The service lets students stuck on English essays send SOS messages from their cell phones: Type in "Gatsby themes" and a text-message comes back reading: "the decline of the American dream." The company recently made the service available on iPods, and an audio version debuted last week. The cost to download an audio summary of "Pride and Prejudice": $3.95.

Dan Weiss, publisher of SparkNotes, which is owned by Barnes & Noble, says the company isn't selling directly to schools but does plan to promote the new technology to school librarians and teachers at coming education conferences. "We provide a lot of free copies of everything and get teachers to sample the material," he says. "We persuade them."

But if text-messaging test answers isn't cheating, what is? Educators agree that copying whole passages from other writers without citing them constitutes plagiarism. Beyond that, schools say the shift places a bigger burden on teachers to make the rules crystal clear -- especially when some permit sharing answers and others don't. Students in Ms. Waples's class at Cherry Creek High who try talking to friends during tests in other classes are likely to get the same punishment as ever: an "F" and the possibility of suspension.

There are even new twists on the old open-book test. At Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., teacher Temba Maqubela has started giving students an option on their environmental chemistry tests: They can take the exams with their notes and an open book, but they'll get no higher than a B even if they get everything right. "There's no shame in not knowing the answers," says Mr. Maqubela, who has been lobbying the head of the department and plans to champion this kind of testing more heavily next year. "I have a feeling some of them might warm up to it."

Of course, when it comes to some of the most critical evaluations students face, such as Advanced Placement tests and the SAT, there's no Internet surfing allowed. And from graduate school entrance exams to real-world job interviews, people are expected to perform solo. Indeed, a major issue in education right now is an increased reliance on standardized testing fueled by the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Letting kids get answers from each other or online is also a luxury critics say only elite schools with high-performing kids can afford.

Most of the new testing techniques are taking place at private or well-funded public schools, with individual teachers taking the initiative on some exams, and even applying for grants to do so.

But the technology available to help students is rising so fast that some in academia are quietly admitting that fighting it might be a losing battle. In Philadelphia, public-school English teachers estimate they spend more than 20% of their time checking essays for plagiarism – time they could be spending actually teaching, according to the district's Mr. Thornton. Indeed, despite a nationwide crackdown on everything from camera phones to drugs that help students' test performances, three in four high-school students still admit to cheating. The number admitting to plagiarizing from the Internet in particular quadrupled between 1999 and 2005, according to studies by Donald McCabe, a professor at Rutgers Business School.

For Oren Kantor, a senior at the private Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., his teacher's group work assessments make it "easier to get a better grade." A member of the golf team who was recently accepted early admission to the University of Florida, Oren says he wouldn't have had time for 18 holes of golf last week if he'd had to prepare alone for a project on Hamlet. His group gave a PowerPoint presentation and sang a song they'd found online: "To be or not to be, that's the question I'm digestin' in my soliloquy." They got an A.

Corrections & Amplifications:

The Bowmar 901b hand-held electronic calculator, released in 1971, reached the market before the Texas Instruments TI-2500, released in 1972. A chart accompanying this article incorrectly said the TI-2500 was the first hand-held electronic calculator.

Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Parts of a Flower

Do students have the same rights as adults?

We’ve talked about PDA’s (Public Displays of Affection) and rights; what rights do students have? Many adults say that rights don’t take full effect until responsibility is assumed by becoming a legal adult. What do you think? Can you have one without the other? If you are not legally responsible for your actions, how can you assume the rights that those who are responsible for their actions have?

What are Rights?

Post a comment, a paragraph or two, giving your definition of what a right is. Extra credit will be given.

Songs That Move You

Here is a song that moves me:

Butterfly Kisses by Bob Carlisle

There's two things I know for sure:
She was sent here from heaven and she's daddy's little girl.
As I drop to my knees by her bed at night
She talks to Jesus and I close my eyes and
I thank god for all the joy in my life
Oh, but most of all

For butterfly kisses after bedtime prayer;
sticking little white flowers all up in her hair;
"Walk beside the pony, Daddy, it's my first ride."
"I know the cake looks funny, Daddy, but I sure tried."
In all that I've done wrong I know I must
have done something right to deserve a hug
every morning and butterfly kisses at night.

Sweet 16 today
She's looking like her mama a little more everyday
One part woman, the other part girl.
To perfume and make-up from ribbons and curls
Trying her wings out in a great big world.

But I remember
Butterfly kisses after bedtime prayer;
stickinglittle white flowers all up in her hair.
"You know how much I love you, Daddy, But if youdon't mind
I'm only gonna kiss you on the cheek this time."
With all that I've done wrong I must have done
something right to deserve her love every morning
and butterfly kisses at night.

All the precious time
Like the wind, the years go by.
Precious butterfly.
Spread your wings and fly.

She'll change her name today.
She'll make a promise and I'll give her away.
Standing in the bride-room just staring at her.
She asked me what I'm thinking and I said "I'm not sure -
I just feel like I'm losing my baby girl."
She leaned over...
gave me butterfly kisses with her mama there,
Sticking little white flowers all up in her hair
"Walk my down the aisle, Daddy-it's just about time."
"Does my wedding gown look pretty, Daddy? Daddy, don't cry!"

Oh, with all that I've done wrong I must have
done something right.
To deserve your love every morning and butterflykisses-
I couldn't ask God for more, man this is what love is.
I know I gotta let her go, but I'll always remember
every hug in the morning and butterfly kisses.

Share your song!

FDR Asks for a Declaration of War

Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation, and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our secretary of state a formal reply to a recent American message. While this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

Yesterday the Japanese government also launched as attack against Malaya.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.

Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Wake Island.

And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.

As commander in chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. . .

Source: Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.