What’s The Best Way To Learn? The take away from this video is that pretty much all research pertaining to education is bogus. The studies are poorly constructed and don't prove a darn thing! Rest assured, if you hear someone talk about best practices or research-based methodologies, then it's pretty much a given that they are full of BS.
Clock debate does little to answer question on political correctness & balance It doesn't look like the kid did anything more than take apart an old clock and put it in a briefcase. Not very impressive. I think arresting him was going a little too far, but the three day suspension seems reasonable given all the info that's come out since the initial story.
Ahmed Mohammed Clock is a FRAUD Ahmed made it to the Google science fair, but the question is whether or not the other invites are going to be retracted as a result of his lack of true innovation.
Lavishing gushing praise on undeserved and unremarkable work does nothing to help an aspiring inventor - it also serves to demoralize young people who have achieved considerable accomplishments through hard work learning and building.
In retrospect it does appear that Ahmed was given way more credit than he deserved, but the press was quick to push an anti-Muslim narative and failed to reveal the full story. Pertinent facts eventually found their way to the public and now it's pretty clear that the kid doesn't deserve all the invites that came his way. I'd imagine that the White House and MIT will back out of their offers seeing as Ahmed is not what at first he appeared to be.
cactuspete: I haven't heard anything new about Ahmed the Clockmaker for a few days. You might be right that most of the invites that were extended to him will be dropped. The media definitely made it look like he was more of a true geek than was actually the case. It's probably fair to say that his geek cred has expired!
Education Secretary Arne Duncan steps down This probably won't have much of an effect as far as policy goes since the new guy is just going to carry on the work of the old guy, but it is a change in who occupies the highest spot in our educational system. Not that there is actually a chain of command from this spot to any specific school district, but policies made at the federal level have an impact in all public school classrooms one way or the other.
4 students arrested in Tuolumne County school shooting plot Given the information presented in this brief report it's hard to tell if law enforcement is jumping to conclusions and exaggerating the situation or if the kids actually did what the authorities said they did. It could just be that as a mental exercise the kids drew up plans for how a mass shooting would be executed on their campus with no intention of actually carrying out the plan. Although the law enforcement spokesperson claims that they intended to acquire weapons, the fact is at the time of their arrest they had no weapons. Literal-minded people have a difficult time grasping the idea that some people do things as a mental exercise and they therefore assume that any plan made is a plan that is meant to be carried out. Literal-minded people often wind up in law enforcement and so we often wind up with problems where law enforcement officials jump to erroneous conclusions. Of course, they might be correct in this case, but reading between the lines there's plenty of reason to think that they may be incorrect and may be prosecuting people with no criminal intent.
wildrose: It could go either way. There have been plenty of cases where angst-ridden teens have concocted elaborate plots to terrorize their school or church or whatever. At the same time there are plenty of cases where law enforcement has over-reacted to potential threats that turned out to be completely benign. Sometimes it's better to over-react than to under-react, but sometimes over-reactions go beyond reasonable. You just never know.