My Virtual Reading Room

Let us have something entertaining and/or optimistic...
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A church faced a £50,000 bill to fix its historic clock. Two guys did it with two cans of WD-40.

Perfectly unique toddler is bringing joy across social media with his 'uncombable hair'

People recall 21 instances of unexpected kindness throughout history

Teachers are sharing their students' wildest excuses that actually turned out to be true

Suburban Myths

(such as, "We only use 10% of our brain")

(thanks to elenbarathi for the link!)

An 8-year-old slid his handwritten book onto a library shelf. It now has a years-long waitlist.

Dillon Helbig, a second-grader who lives in Idaho, wrote about a Christmas adventure on the pages of a red-cover notebook and illustrated it with colored pencils.

When he finished it in mid-December, he decided he wanted to share it with other people. So much, in fact, that he hatched a plan and waited for just the right moment to pull it off.

Days later, during a visit to the Ada Community Library’s Lake Hazel Branch in Boise with his grandmother, he held the 81-page book to his chest and passed by the librarians. Then, unbeknown to his grandmother, Dillon slipped the book onto a children’s picture-book shelf. Nobody saw him do it....

Former NFL lineman now cooks at his kids’ school cafeteria: ‘Kindergartners are my toughest critics’

Retired NFL offensive lineman Jared Veldheer was looking for a new challenge in Grand Rapids, Mich., last summer when he heard about a job opening. It was at his kids’ school, in the cafeteria.

The Catholic school needed someone to oversee cooking and serving lunch for about 260 students from preschool to eighth grade. The previous manager had quit, and the school wanted to line up somebody quickly because classes were to start in two weeks.

“I wasn’t looking to become the school lunch lady, but I figured this was something I could handle,” said Veldheer, 34, who was once named one of the NFL’s “most indispensable players.”

Veldheer, who played for several teams, including the Green Bay Packers, Denver Broncos and Oakland Raiders, said he was intrigued by the job in part because he loves cooking, and as a professional athlete, he spent a lot of time focused on nutrition.

“I’d eaten meticulously for more than a decade and I thought, ‘There is value in being able to cook and provide kids with a good, nutritious lunch,’” said Veldheer, whose two children, Eva, 6, and Edwin, 4, attend Saint Paul the Apostle Catholic School....


More than half of her class had never seen snow. So a Florida teacher got her sister to ship her a snowman.

In November, a classroom of kindergartners listened attentively as their teacher, Robin Hughes, read them a book about snow.

But as the Riverview, Fla., special education teacher flipped through its pages and showed them photos of children sledding and making snow angels, Hughes, 60, noticed some students looked puzzled.

“How many [of you] have seen snow?” Hughes asked her class at SouthShore Charter Academy. Only a couple of kids raised their hands.

“I was shocked that they had not seen snow,” Hughes, who grew up in Louisa, Ky., told The Washington Post. “It’s hard for kids to understand the concept because they don’t have the relevant knowledge.”

So Hughes called in a favor to someone she knew might be able to help: her sister in Danville, Ky.

“Do you want to build a snowman?” Hughes texted her sister, Amber Estes, in January. Estes recalled her sister’s request when her town was hit with about 10 inches of snow....


A school district yanked chocolate milk off the menu. A 9-year-old got his entire class to protest.

The powers that be took something precious from Jordan Reed, but he vowed to fight back.

His chosen tools: well-researched arguments, protest signs and the backing of dozens of others who had also been robbed.

Together, they would try to bring back chocolate milk.

Jordan, a 9-year-old fourth-grader at Sierra Vista K-8 School in Northern California, took to heart last week’s lesson about opinion writing, unleashing what he had learned of Vacaville Unified School District’s 2020 decision to remove chocolate milk from the lunch menu. Within roughly 24 hours, Jordan turned the classroom instruction into a protest with his 26 classmates — and one sixth-grader — that drew the school district’s nutrition department to Sierra Vista for an impromptu, on-the-spot negotiation with Jordan and his comrades.

...aka, "you finished your report to the next shift an hour ago, what are you still doing here?!" "...charting..."
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Here you are, acelightning and browngirl

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A condensed version of the discussion we have in class:

( Read more... )Can share other stories and videos about medical errors, btw, if anybody's interested, let me know...
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I found this bit especially interesting:

"Underemployment — the barista problem — is also overstated. When researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York looked at that issue, they found that the share of recent college graduates in low-wage jobs rose from 15 percent in 1990 to 20 percent in 2012, the latest year in the report — hardly an epidemic.

They also found that over the years, about one-third of recent graduates have always worked jobs that don’t require college degrees but pay decent wages nonetheless — and that has been as true for science and business majors as for those with degrees in humanities and social sciences.

Even in good times, it’s quite typical for recent college grads to take several years to find jobs that make use of their education."
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Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature: Forcing college kids to ignore the liberal arts won't help them in a competitive economy., from The Washington Post

Today we remember teacher and Space Shuttle Challenger crew member Christa McAuliffe, who would have celebrated her 68th birthday on this day. McAuliffe was selected by NASA from more than 11,000 applicants to be part of the Teachers in Space program. Tragically, she and the Challenger's six other crew members were killed when it exploded during takeoff on January 28, 1986.

( Read more... )

Today in Mighty Girl history, Maria Montessori, the Italian educator and physician who created the Montessori Method, was born in 1870. Montessori's educational philosophy of encouraging children's learning through discovery is now used in an estimated 30,000 schools worldwide.

Montessori grew up in Italy and enrolled in the University of Rome's school of medicine in 1893. As a woman, she faced hostility from both fellow students and professors, even being forced to perform dissections alone after hours as it was deemed inappropriate for her to attend classes with men in the presence of a naked cadaver. Despite the obstacles, she graduated in 1896 and set up a private practice.

Montessori rapidly became an advocate for both women's rights and the rights of children with disabilities. She regularly worked with children facing these challenges, and she was a major supporter of their right to access education. In 1901, she left her practice to engage in further study in psychology and educational philosophy, and began considering how to adapt the methods she used for general classroom use.

( Read more... )

...or background info, anyone? What exactly is this "safe space" in other colleges?

U. of Chicago to frosh: no safe spaces here

UChicago dean warns students: if you want safe spaces, stay away

Just a variety of things I've come across in the last couple weeks...hopefully, something for everyone here :)
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26 Pictures Will Make You Re-Evaluate Your Entire Existence (a sense of perspective through astronomy diagrams)

33 Teachers who got the last laugh

Detective Caminada and the Quack Doctors

(The real-life Sherlock Holmes and his debunking of quack medicine)

Sherlock Holmes in Russia

(an extensive overview of Russian SH adaptations, among other things)

Delightful 17th-Century Traveling Library Packs 40 Volumes Into One

(how one could have a portable library in the pre-electronic times--if one could afford it, of course...)

Napoleon's Traveling Library

(and here's another famous portable library)
[browngirl--you must see the two links above ;))

Some of the best rare natural phenomena that occur on Earth

Cool mathematical things to do on the back of a notebook

(doodling elevated to an entirely new level)

At 9 am on a weekday, Abdul Mallik is busy wading through neck-high water, a tyre-tube around his waist, his tiffin box and shoes held in one hand above the muddy river.  

It's hardly the average morning commute, but for this 40-year-old teacher, it's all in a day's work.

http://www.ndtv.com/article/south/a-teacher-who-swims-through-a-river-everyday-to-get-to-his-students-414727

http://arbroath.blogspot.com/2013/09/indian-teacher-wades-across-river-every.html

( On medical school, medical practice, and politics: )

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