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Too Cool for School
Amidst all the fuss of new Tumblrs (Britney! Beasties! State!) over the past few days, we’d like to point another, ongoing effort that’s really great: Tumblr Teachers. The brainchild of Girl with a Lesson Plan, Tumblr Teachers is a self-reported listing of the hundreds of teachers and education students who use Tumblr every day, and as a listing of great Tumblrs in that field it’s second to none. Check it out, and if Tumblr should be on the list, submit it here!
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Which Schools Have the Best Broadband Connections?
Access to broadband at school gives teachers and students access to a wealth of online educational resources. With a quality broadband connection, students from rural areas, inner cities and the suburbs have equal access to the same educational tools.
To see which areas of the country have high quality broadband access, view the interactive Education Broadband Map.
ONA on Tumblr, awesome.
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The Montessori Mafia
It may seem like a laughable “only in New York” story that Manhattan mother, Nicole Imprescia, is suing her 4-year-old daughter’s untraditional private preschool for failing to prepare her for a private school admissions exam.
But her daughter’s future and ours might be much brighter with a little less conditioning to perform well on tests and more encouragement to discover as they teach in Montessori schools. Ironically, the Montessori educational approach might be the surest route to joining the creative elite, which are so overrepresented by the school’s alumni that one might suspect a Montessori Mafia: Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, videogame pioneer Will Wright, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, not to mention Julia Child and rapper Sean “P.Diddy” Combs.
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A comparison of standards of living on several variables among the world’s wealthiest nations. Interesting presentation that encompasses both the underlying complexity of the United States but also its failures in a number of areas.
From Charles Blow, New York Times, February 20, 2011.
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Today in small victories.
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Heads of state in order of succession for the US and China, and their college majors. Notice anything? Full article here.
(Thanks, Cayman)
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Please help me celebrate my birthday by donating to my DonorsChoose campaign!
Welcome to my Birthday Giving page! You may know that I started Charitini two years ago to encourage small donations to charity during a tough economic time. Things are better now - but not for everyone. Luckily DonorsChoose is helping to make it better for some great kids with some super-worthwhile projects.
So! My birthday is on Wednesday December 8th and in lieu of gifts I am throwing my birthday karma behind Fred Wilson’s AVC Challenge in support of science and math projects for young women. Think of it as a follow-on round. It is, after all, a great investment.
DonorsChoose + Changing The Ratio + a funding pun. And that is how you make Rachel happy on her birthday. That and fries.
So far we’ve raised $2500. Not bad! Could be better. So donate here. Go on, I’ll wait.
Special thanks to Merc Bar, which is hosting my actual birthday party, and which has been amazing. Please go spend your money there and at Lure, Chinatown Brasserie, Burger + Barrel and their other fine establishments. They rule.
Special thanks also to our sponsor Jess3, who has very kindly underwritten an open bar at the event. This is why I can charge people to come to my birthday party. Oh come on now, IT’S FOR THE CHILDREN.
Oh and special thanks to awesome iPad DJ Rana Sobhany who will be rocking some of her wizardry for the event.
And more special thanks also to everyone who is supporting: BirchBox, Rent the Runway and Fashism (see above re: Changing the Ratio); Square, helping me take donations at my actual party (swiping is fun!); maybe another awesome sponsor if a certain last-minute thing comes through; Leslie Bradshaw at Jess3, my CTR partner-in-crime Emily Gannett at IRL Productions, and Fred Wilson, who let me piggy back on his campaign and his event, thus allowing me to make a follow-on round joke well before I ever get to an actual follow-on round.
Donate here. Sure, now would be a good time.
Help spread some SKLARITY to kids who just want a chance to have the opportunity at a better life through their own education.
This is a GREAT cause. Please, if you can, donate here
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A Favor: Fill out form letter about Section 127
As you may or may not know, I work full time for a university and go to grad school at night.
I am able to do this largely in part due to my tuition benefit being considered non-taxable income. This means the government sees my “free” tuition as additional salary from my employer and that cannot be taxed until the tuition amount “added” to my salary goes over $5,000. This bill will expire 12/31/2010.
Please REBLOG or fill out the FORM LETTER to renew the bill that will allow me to continue grad school. It will NOT sign you up for any mailing lists.
From CBS Money Watch’s Lynn O’Shaughnessy:
“While Congress is debating whether to kill off the tax cuts created during George Bush’s presidency, politicians don’t seem to be focused on a valuable college tax benefit for working students, which is in danger of getting the axe this year.
Since 1978, employers have been able to reimburse students for some of their college costs without these payments being taxed. But unless Congress acts, this college tax benefit, which is officially referred to as Section 127 of the Internal Revenue Code, is scheduled to expire at the end of the year.
Under Section 127, student can receive up to $5,250 in employer education assistance without being taxed and the money can be used for such things as tuition, fees and books….
- Roughly 913,000 students received Section 127 benefits during the 2007-08 school year. In comparison, 431,500 students benefited from this tax break 15 years ago.
- Forty-six percent of the participants were graduate students while the rest were undergrads.
- The average age for undergrads using the benefit was 37 versus 35 for graduate students.
- The average salary for these employees was $42,711. In comparison, the average earnings of a full-time employee in this country is $50,233.
- The average yearly benefit for a grad student was $3,701 and for a undergrad it was $1,849.”
Do it for Emily and everyone else trying to get an education without going bankrupt in the process.
(Source: em-brenn)
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Last April, at the New York Tech Meet Up, a company named DonorsChoose.org presented their website, which allowed anyone to help teachers fund projects they were trying to create to help teach their students. They would ask for things as simple as pencils, notepads, books, anything they needed that they could not find funding for through their local administrations or benefactors.
To date, they’ve raised $36 million dollars and funded over 92,000 projects. 75% of the projects that currently need funding need less than $400.
Last night, the theme of the New York Tech Meetup was ‘Back to School’ where many very cool projects from places like NYU were presented, but what stuck with me was the impact that DonorsChoose.org has had since that 2008 presentation.
One other presentation by My Teacher, My Hero seemed poised to make a similar impact. It launches soon and will not only provide a way to fund teacher projects directly, but will also present videos from people describing the impression that a special teacher left on their lives.
I was not a great student in high school, I was always caught up in my own projects, and had trouble directing my attention on things that were forced on me. However there was one teacher, Dr. Schwartz, my marine biology teacher, who was a little strange. He was a short, rotund ball of energy, kind of like a hobbit version of Chris Farley, who had this almost childlike enthusiasm for science that drew me in. I couldn’t help but be hooked on everything he had to share with us, and my ADD addeled brain was somehow locked in. He made me pay attention because he genuinely cared about what he was teaching.
I’m glad there are places like DonorsChoose and MyTeacherMyHero to fill in the gaps where our system seems to fail. They have one of the most important jobs in the world and need our support.
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So maybe I was wrong. I used to consider health care our greatest national shame, considering that we spend twice as much on medical care as many European nations, yet American children are twice as likely to die before the age of 5 as Czech children — and American women are 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as Irish women. Yet I’m coming to think that our No. 1 priority actually must be education. That makes the new fiscal stimulus package a landmark, for it takes a few wobbly steps toward reform and allocates more than $100 billion toward education. That’s a hefty sum — by comparison, the Education Department’s entire discretionary budget for the year was $59 billion — and it will save America’s schools from the catastrophe that they were facing. A University of Washington study had calculated that the recession would lead to cuts of 574,000 school jobs without a stimulus. So for those who oppose education spending in the stimulus, a question: Do you really believe that slashing half a million teaching jobs would be fine for the economy, for our children and for our future?
Our Greatest National Shame, Nicholas D. Kristof (NYT)
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