Selections from some Google alerts

Google is an amazing company. Their search engine is very useful. They keep looking for more and more features to bring to the web. I heavily use their alert service. Google will constantly search the web, various online news sources, or the usenet postings, depending on your interest. When Google finds a match, it will send you an email. If you aren’t using Google Alert, check it out.

Today Google sent me a number links to homeschool and education related articles.

Public schools have their hands a bit tied in dealing with bullies. Because public school is a right, it is very hard to kick out badly behaved children. If a victim tells on a bully, and the school does very little, then the bully feels empowered to hurt the victim again. The lesson the victim learns is not to tell. Here's an article about a 12 year old boy in Massachusetts who was badly beat up, and his sister was threatened with rape. Two months later the school still has done very little, so the parents pull the boy from school and are going to homeschool him. If a 25 year old man beat up another 25 year old man, we'd throw the aggressive in jail. But for some reason our society seems to think it is OK to let 15 year old young men beat up other 15 year old young men.

We've mentioned a couple other recent incidents, here, and here, on bullies in school. I have added another Google alert search for "bully school" and will monitor the results.

This article is an interesting contrast. An 18 year old boy assaults a police officer and gets put in jail on a bond of $30,000. So maybe the lesson is children can beat up children, but don't mess with the police.

It is stories like this which make some homeschoolers feel a bit paranoid. A homeschool family in Las Vegas had a police man and a social worker knock at their door at 9:30 PM. The social worker demanded that he be let in to the house. The social worker wanted the children waken up so he could interview them. HSLDA was able to get the social worker to leave the family alone.

I am very interested in what Google Alert search patterns others are using. Daryl Cobranchi recently suggested [ student arrest ] as a good search pattern. Do you have any favorite patterns?