Tag Archives: school

June 26, 2012 · 2:19 pm

Sunday Scraps 63 (Wildly Behind the Times Due to Vacation)

1. CABRINI: Great (long) essay from Harpers about the infamous Chicago housing project Cabrini-Green. Unlike other things I’ve read in the wake of the project’s destruction, this one actually talks to residents. Imagine that.

2. POP CULTURE: Matthew O’Brien at the Atlantic compares lyrics from frothy pop singer Carly Rae Jepsen to the Euro crisis. It almost kinda sort works.

3. JENNER: Did you know Bruce Jenner was once an Olympic athlete? Add that to the list of boats I missed when the Kardashians took over the world. From the Wheaties box to stepdad to the “stars” in Esquire.

4. FOOD: The blog of a 9-year-old about the pitiful condition of her school lunch quickly embarrassed her community enough to generate change. Shame is a powerful thing (via Grist).

5. INTERVIEW: The Rumpus interviews former GOOD Magazine editor Ann Friedman about the future of magazines, and writing, and goodness, and stuff.

6. GENDER: There’s this book. It’s called The Gender Book, and it looks pretty sweet. Independently made, it purports to be a friendly, easy, colorful way to talk about the range of human gender expression. We should probably all buy it and send it to our grandparents. Kidding.

Related Post: Sunday 62 – Racism, writers in bathing suits, StoryCorps

Related Post: Sunday 61 – Diet quitters, white male privilege, Chicago’s 1871 space

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January 18, 2012 · 5:48 pm

Meryl + Ellen + Deborah

Does it get any better than this?

When Meryl tarted talking about the first woman to take a bullet for the United States, I had a sudden and overpowering urge to raise my hand and shout “Call on me! Call on me! I know the answer!”

You can tell I was really fun in elementary school, right?

Growing up in Massachusetts, we often skip crucial parts of American history (Alamo what?) in order to review, for the seventh consecutive year, the Revolutionary War. What can I say, proximity rules. Of the many, many books we read about colonial New England (Johnny Tremain, April Morning, etc) none sticks in my mind more than Ann McGovern’s The Secret Soldier. Deborah Sampson was the shiiiit.

I love when Meryl and I are on the same page.

Related Post: Here’s how not to teach eighth graders about slavery.

Related Post: How many essays could you read an hour, if you really had to?

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June 13, 2011 · 3:06 am

Sunday Scraps 14

Due to a long and complicated story involving Alfred Hitchcock, a 38 caliber shotgun, turquoise jewelry and a bad case of emphysema, I missed a plane this morning and was unable to post Sunday Scraps until now. Have no fear, that fascinating story will follow later this week. In the meantime, it is still technically Sunday. Enjoy:
1. WHERE ARE THEY NOW? What if Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte had suffered through the recession with the rest of us? The $400 shoes go out the window. Susannah Breslin wrote a great “what if” piece for HuffPo.

2. SECRETARY: A slide show of “office wives” through the last century.

3. DETROIT: Super cool ride-along piece from GQ about the demolition crews responsible for the knocking down thousands of Detroit’s abandoned houses.

4. ART: The world’s 25 most pointless pieces of graffiti. Featured: plums, continental breakfasts, Rod Stewart, and low-cost airlines.

5. WEIGHT LOSS “MIRACLES”: Ugh. See what really makes people drop 14lb in a week. Hint: It’s not healthy living and a moderate amount of exercise. After a starvation strategy, one contestant gained back 32lb in 5 days as his body tried to find equilibrium.

6. BEST PRANK EVER: Large scale “landscaping” and a bunch of middle schoolers produce a penis you can see from Google Earth.

Related Post: Sunday 13 (Groupon, YA, MDowd, why Chicago is “Always” and New York is “Now”)

Related Post: Sunday 12 (Chelsea, Beyonce, contraception, modern “art”)

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May 31, 2011 · 2:34 pm

“I’m Too Pretty to Do Math”

Academics have a term for how much people identify with math (i.e. identify with phrases like “math is for me”). It’s called the math self-concept. A March study out of the University of Wisconsin found that girls as young as second-grade have less of a math self-concept than their male peers, even though this is significantly earlier than when math achievement differences start to show.

The lead researcher, Dario Cvencek, is from the former Yugoslavia and was surprised by how pervasive the math-is-for-boys, reading-is-for-girls mentality is in the United States. “We didn’t have that stereotype where I grew up. People there thought that math went with girls just as much as it did with boys.” I’m curious to see what would happen if they conducted the same association studies in the former Yugoslavia; I’m hoping evidence would support Cvencek’s theory.

In the meantime, can we stop selling shit like this? How do you quantify what kind of damage you do on a daily basis when an 12-year-old opens up her locker every day to stare at this magnetic gem from Forever 21? It’s made by a company ironically called Ata-Boy.

This was originally posted on Sociological Images, which also made the excellent point that there is no “I’m to handsome too do math” magnet. In other words, while stereotypes about good-looking men being Ken Barbies exist, they usually aren’t displayed in middle-school lockers.

Related Post: 1000% cute lingerie (and no, that was not a typo) for tweens.

Related Post: What kind of messages do girls get when toys tell them that marrying a prince is the definition of success?

Related Post: Other ways that elementary-schoolers of both genders get short changed.

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May 22, 2011 · 2:35 pm

Sunday Scraps 11

1. SPORTS: In the wake of a whole bunch of sports-related gay friendliness, Charles Barkley added his two cents, “I’d rather have a gay guy who can play than a straight guy who can’t play.”

2. PUBES: Pornstar Ashley Blue just published a memoir, Girlvert. Fifty limited editions actually have one of her pubic hairs embedded in the cover. What ever will they do next?

3. FOOD: Guess how many calories in an average school meal? I’ll say this, it’s embarrassingly high and embarrassingly low in nutritional value. GOOD Magazine has a comparison between school meals and prison meals. Who comes out on top?

4. NEWS: This Newsweek piece does a good job of laying out the rising price tag of disaster journalism against the backdrop of slashed budgets, “Covering Charlie Sheen is cheap; covering Afghanistan is expensive. Boots-on-the-ground reporting may win awards, but it doesn’t pay the bills.”

5. GRAY: Oddity Central has a profile of Daphne Selfe, an 82-year-old supermodel whose career has only gotten hotter as her hair has gotten grayer.

6. TUBE: Ever wonder how the intricate televisions schedules are created every fall? Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about balancing the comedy blocks, crime dramas and reality drivel.

Related Post: Scraps 10 had Asian dude angst, Adele covers, video game chicks and gorgeous illustrated recipes.

Related Post: Scraps 9 had Jersey Floor, immigration vs. gay marriage, vintage ads and Twitter trends.

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April 15, 2011 · 2:19 pm

Think It Through

When I was in 8th grade social studies class, we each drew a colony out of a hat and duked it out at a faux constitutional convention. Big states argued for population based representation, small states wanted one vote per state, we had our own Great Compromise and went off to tater-tot lunch happy as clams.

I don’t actually remember what colony I was, or what legislating lessons I learned. What I do recall is the excitement of the fight, knowing that I was trying to get the best deal for my colony, that the compromises we agreed on would set the tone for centuries (or, you know, until we moved on to geometry). Yes, I was (am) a history geek, but I’d like to think that my social studies-averse peers maybe got something out of the deal too.

Unlike these poor kids at Sewells Point Elementary. Jeez. Their teacher, in what I’m sure was a sincere attempt to liven up those dull slavery-filled years, orchestrated a similar but oh so misguided exercise. Directing the black kids to the corner (auction block?), the teacher had the white students bid on and buy their peers. So yeah.

If (and this is a big if) one decided that a fake auction was a decent vehicle for demonstrating the horrors of purchasing people (because let’s not forget that’s what we’re talking about), why split the kids by race? To convey the base absurdity of the slave system, wouldn’t it be more effective to have the kids randomly assigned to the slave and slaveowner groups? Wouldn’t that teach kids that there is no reason, nothing you could point to, that would make it okay for one group of people to own another?

Apparently, this teacher wasn’t the only one with this idea.

Related Post: How many 6th grade essays could you read in a day? How many could you read if you knew your grades affected millions of dollars in aid?

Related Post: Maybe the Sewells Point teacher deserves more credit… it’s hard enough to teach anything when your classroom time is being cut, much less make it interesting.

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