The US government granted political asylum to a German homeschooling family yesterday. It’s the first time ‘homeschooling’ has been the main consideration for granting political asylum in the United States.
(Jan. 25) -- Teen binge drinking may do more than just get you grounded. A recent study shows adolescent drinking can cause irreversible brain damage.I'm glad they are promoting the message, but did we really need a neuroscientist to point out the obvious?
The study, published in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, found damaged nerve tissue in the brains of teens who drank. Researchers believe the damage translated to teens' test results, which showed shortened attention spans in boys, difficulty comprehending and interpreting visual information among girls and memory damage in both genders.
Although it may seem alarming that teen binge drinking could permanently affect the brain, the leader of the study, neuroscientist Susan Tapert of the University of California, San Diego, says alcohol is toxic for the still-developing teenage brain.
By the time they graduate from high school, two-thirds (66%) of youth are regular drinkers, and two-fifths (40%) are frequent binge drinkers
A national survey reveals that 42% of college students reported binge drinking.
Oher, who has skimmed the book, said he mostly liked the movie, but added that he thought his football skills were misrepresented and that his character was portrayed as too stupid.
For example, in the movie, Oher finds out his father committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. In actuality, his father was murdered.
A good portion of the movie is devoted to Oher's education and his learning techniques.In dramatic form, he needed a 2.5 GPA (grade point average) to get into an NCAA Division I school. One of the final scenes of the movie has Leigh Anne announcing he received a 2.52 at Oher's high school graduation ceremony.
While this did happen, it's not quite accurate. Oher needed more than a 2.65 GPA and achieved this by taking online classes via a BYU program, which was combined with his already achieved 2.52 GPA.
Some players felt the movie didn’t do Oher justice in terms of his football I.Q. It portrayed him as a guy who didn’t know football, yet former teammates said his football experience went much deeper than portrayed.
"In the movie, they tried to make him too quiet, too illiterate,” Ole Miss safety Kendrick Lewis said. "Michael Oher wasn’t that type of guy. They tried to make like he had no football knowledge, and that wasn’t Michael Oher.”
Said McCluster: "I talked to him about it, and he didn’t really like that part. If you look at him, you can tell he’s been an athlete all is life. You can’t learn that in a couple of years.”
In his first nine years of school, Michael Oher was enrolled in 11 different institutions, and that included a gap of 18 months, around age 10, when he apparently did not attend school at all. Either that or the public schools were so indifferent to his presence that they neglected to register it formally. Not that Oher actually showed up at the schools where he was enrolled. Even when he received credit for attending, he was sensationally absent: 46 days of a single term of his first-grade year, for instance. His first first-grade year, that is; Michael Oher repeated first grade. He repeated second grade, too. And yet the school system presented these early years as the most accomplished of his academic career. They claimed that right through the fourth grade he was performing at “grade level.” How could they know when, according to these transcripts, he hadn’t even attended the third grade?In the end, it was the care of a good family that made the difference. No government program can compete with that.
Simpson, who had spent 30-plus years in area public schools, including 29 in Memphis, knew what everyone who had even a brief brush with the Memphis public schools knew: they passed kids up to the next grade because they found it too much trouble to flunk them. They functioned as an assembly line churning out products never meant to be market-tested. At several schools, Michael Oher had been given F’s in reading his first term and C’s the second term, which allowed him to finish the school year with D’s — they were giving him grades just to get rid of him. And get rid of him they did: seldom did the child return to the school that passed him. The year before Simpson got his file, Michael Oher passed ninth grade at a high school called Westwood. According to his transcripts, he missed 50 days of school that year. Fifty days! At Briarcrest, the rule was that if a student misses 15 days of any class, he has to repeat the class no matter his grade. And yet Westwood had given Michael Oher just enough D’s to move him along. Even when you threw in the B in world geography, clearly a gift from the Westwood basketball coach who taught the class, the grade-point average the student would bring with him to Briarcrest began with a zero: 0.6.
...An analysis of the program in Benin, Ghana and Mali found children in areas where it wasn't in effect had a better chance of surviving past age 5 than children who were covered by it. The study was published online Tuesday in the British medical journal Lancet.It is interesting to note that areas that weren't "helped" by the UN health program did dramatically better than those that were.
It is one of the few studies to evaluate whether U.N. health programs really save lives. Related work published last year found that it wasn't clear what the world had gotten from U.N. initiatives that cost nearly $200 billion over the past two decades, and that some programs may have been counterproductive.
....In Benin, child deaths fell by 13 percent after the UNICEF program started. But in areas of Benin where the program wasn't used, the death rate dropped by nearly double: 25 percent.
....Little effort has gone into finding out if global health initiatives work, yet billions of dollars are poured into them every year.
....UNICEF should have made the grant money dependent on delivering results. "It's hardly surprising the program was a complete flop."
"....I believe that educationalists and egalitarians should fight for an end to private schools and the extension of an Eton standard of education for every child. Why? Because the current system institutionalises and makes acceptable educational inequality."
Compulsory Attendance Ages: 5-16
Legal Status: Homeschooling is legal in England and Wales under the 1944 Education Act, which was consolidated in 1996. Section 7, Education Act 1996 states, "…[E]fficient full-time education, suitable to his age, ability and aptitude and to any special education needs he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise." Under the "or otherwise" phrase in the law, families can legally homeschool.
There are no requirements to inform the authorities when one is home educating, unless the student was previously enrolled in the government school system. At that time, the parent must let the school official know they are withdrawing their student to home educate him. No other requirements for home education exist.
Number of Homeschoolers: Between 20,000 and 100,000 children.
