Lets clear out a few links.

[conuly]

First, and thanks, Siderea, all fans of dystopian fiction must read this book. Everybody else should at least skim the review.

People are complaining about the new Pearson curriculum materials for kindergarten. Pearson writes the tests, it makes the "optional" test prep books, and now it's providing direct curriculum, and it is all crap.

I saw some of the questions from last year's tests, and some of the math problems were flat out wrong. Much of the ELA test was actually unanswerable to the careful thinker - and ultimately, that is what we want, right? Careful thinkers?

Eva has one of the Pearson ELA texts for third grade, and there has never been a more soul deadening, stultifying collection of "literature" crammed down the throats of little children.

This Ingenious Way to Build Bridges Will Fix Our Crumbling Infrastructure

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/10/abc/

Born deaf, but also born to dance

Nina Falaise has had a brilliant career as a ballerina and teacher - despite being rejected by the Royal Ballet as a child.

http://bit.ly/bWcOP9

A Survey of Women With Broken Bones Shows the Prevalence of Domestic Abuse

http://bit.ly/11wHcpi

Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not

http://econ.st/1cxVU7V

How An Abandoned Skyscraper Became 'The World's Tallest Slum'

http://bit.ly/H0syEr

Comments

[mc776]

Looking at that test a bit more charitably...

1. I think I probably could have done it, if given an example.

2. On that note, that should've been specified - to draw an example of someone or something showing this concept! It's the only way the exercise can possibly make sense, but at the very least any adult who is thinking about definitions rather than heuristics - or worse, instantly thinking it's a game of Pictionary and you can't rely on the reader to know which word you're dealing with - is going to be stumped.

3. The unreasonable space limit would be a great exercise in teaching your kid to write "See Schedule X" and matching numbers.

[conuly]

I think you may be stretching a little, especially for point 3

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Haha, brilliant review! "If you don’t believe that people really exist, any radical call for their emancipation is just sickness at its most annoying.": so true.