Interested in just about any aspect of film? Online College Blog has collected fifty open college courses for movie lovers, running the gamut from movies as art and exercises in philosophy, to the actual filmmaking process. And what’s more, all of these courses are free! Props to Kelly Sonora for passing this along 🙂...
Longtime readers of this blog know that I’m fond of posting classic clips from Sesame Street whenever I find them on YouTube. That should be a lot easier to do from now on ‘cuz Sesame Workshop (the outfit that used to be Childrens Television Workshop) is on YouTube and putting up officially-sanctioned Sesame Street videos! You can’t embed them in your own blog or site (yet, and let’s hope they consider allowing embedding eventually) but you can certainly link to ’em and watch them. Like, f’rinstance, the now-infamous “Sesame Street News” where Kermit the Frog reports on Prince Charming’s attempt to rescue Rapunzel.
I’m glad Sesame Workshop is doing this, and I hope they post many more in the weeks and months to come. Especially Bert and Ernie sketches. Can’t get enough of Bert and Ernie… 🙂...
A few months ago my wife Lisa shared on her own blog her thoughts and experiences about the problems with the federal government’s teacher loan forgiveness. She’s received quite a bit of correspondence since then from teachers all over the country who have experienced similar frustrations.
Well, now Lisa is taking it an extra mile further by directly petitioning not only her own senators and governor, but some of those who created the legislation that led to this. You can read the full text of the letter she has sent out here.
Wouldn’t it be neat if we wound up seeing Lisa testifying on live television before a congressional committee in Washington D.C.? 🙂...
In case anyone believed that Yours Truly had some kind of obsession about “getting” Ron Price, bear in mind that it has now been well over six months since I’ve posted ANYTHING about him. And if I never did write about him again, I would have been happy. In fact, I’ve rather enjoyed not having anything new to write about the disgraced Rockingham County Board of Education member.
Alas, all good things must come to an end.
Here now is another chapter in the bizarre and twisted tale of…
The last time we peered into this sordid drama, Price had dropped his lawsuit against local publisher Richard Moore and his wife for trying to hold Price accountable for all the campaign signs that Price was caught stealing on the night before the 2006 election (which saw Price taking fifth place and getting the last of the new at-large seats ...
Today brought an experience that I haven’t enjoyed in a number of years: substitute teaching a second grade class at a nearby elementary school. I heard yesterday afternoon that they needed someone to fill-in for a teacher, so I promptly called and volunteered for duty. Subbing is something that I’ve been doing for a month or so now, one reason is that I’m seriously thinking about teaching full-time and am sorta giving it a “trial run”, you could say.
So I arrived a little after 7 this morning, the kids were in the room by 7:30 and their regular teacher had everything planned out. And I had an awesome assistant that I got to work with. We followed things per the instructions… but I also couldn’t resist “improvising” a bit.
F’rinstance, when it came time to do Math, here was a written problem that the students had to figure out:...
The one that we did back in the fall of 2007? Transformers composer Steve Jablonsky gave us a signed copy of score CD and we put it up on eBay, with the understanding that 100% of the proceeds would go toward music education here in Rockingham County. When all was said and done the sale netted over $300!
So, wanna know what the money went toward?
The original plan was to assist the funding of a special concert for the elementary students because at the time we didn’t know if we would be able to have it this year. Fortunately that was taken care of. But we were still able to put the proceeds to some good music use.
This is what’s called an Orff Xylophone. Its specially made for use with the Orff Approach to music education. Most of the funds from the auction went to purchase ...
I’m the treasurer for his campaign, but this is the first time that I’m getting to see this. In this video of his appearance at the Wake County Republican Convention a few weeks ago, Eric discusses why North Carolina parents should be fully liberated to send their children to the schools of their own choice – including private school and homeschooling – and he hits on one of the biggest problems facing this country and the one that politicians seem the least determined to address: illegal immigration.
Thanks to Katy’s Conservative Corner for providing this!
The North Carolina statewide primaries will be next week on May 6th. Eric is running on the Republican ballot....
Longtime readers know already that I’m very hesitant to hand out endorsements of candidates. Someone running for office has to sincerely persuade me that he or she is the right man for the job.
In this case, that wasn’t a hard thing at all…
As of today, I’m announcing that The Knight Shift blog is officially endorsing Eric H. Smith in the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction for the state of North Carolina.
Smith is running as a Republican candidate in the North Carolina primary on May 6.
For disclosure’s sake, I am compelled to notify my readers that in addition to my support of Eric in this way, I am also the treasurer of the Smith For NC Kids campaign committee. That’s already been public record ever since Eric filed the paperwork to run. Eric offered me the position when he first considered “throwing his hat into the ...
A 13-year old schoolboy named Nico Marquardt has found errors in NASA’s calculations about the Apophis asteroid. And NASA has conceded that the lad from Berlin, Germany is correct. Marquardt found that that Earth now stands a much higher chance of getting hit by Apophis than originally determined by NASA. How much was the multi-billion dollar space agency off by? It said that the odds of a collision with Apophis were 1 in 45,000. After Marquardt’s “peer review”, it now turns out that the odds are 1 in 450.
I have to tip my hat to Marquardt. Math was never my big thing, and I tried to calculate the physics of astronomical objects during a class at Elon and didn’t do too well either. He’s probably got a bright future ahead of him… provided that we don’t get hit by any big space rocks anytime soon 🙂...
Students at Wilby High School in Waterbury, Connecticut have a chance to clean up: for each Advanced Placement exam that they pass, the school will pay them $100. It’s part of a plan to increase participation in the school’s AP programs.
For what it’s worth: I’ve never liked “incentive programs” like this. For years school administrators across the country have been attempting to “bribe” students to study harder and make better grades: offering them money, high-tech toys and even cars in return. But there’s never been any evidence that stunts like this actually work to increase scholarship in the long run. And it smacks too much of slapping the proverbial Band-Aid on the festering wound that is so much of what’s wrong with modern public education without addressing the real problems.
But mostly, I guess it bothers me that education for its own sake is something that is no ...