Courtesy of the wags at The Onion, a plea in verse from the late Theodor Geisel, beloved by millions (but not by Hollywood) as Dr. Seuss:
Did you learn all but squat from The Cat In The Hat?
Please tell me you fired the p—- who made that.
I would have stopped writing, maybe sold Goodyear tires.
If I knew one dark day I’d costar with Mike Myers.
And Oh!
Oh, dear! Oh!
My poor Grinch, what they’ve done!
They crammed in live-action and snuffed out all the fun!
It’s icky, it’s tacky, it’s awkward, it’s wrong.
The Whos look like ferrets, it’s an hour too long.
What a rotten idea to spend millions destroying
This masterful tale kids spent decades enjoying!
There’s more, but this is a family blog.
A fascinating piece of research reportedly shows dyslexia affects different parts of the brain depending on whether a child is raised learning English or Chinese.
“This finding was very surprising to us. We had not ever thought that dyslexics’ brains are different for children who read in English and Chinese,” said lead author Li-Hai Tan, a professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Hong Kong. “Our finding yields neurobiological clues to the cause of dyslexia.” The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was the first to report the study.
The researchers note that reading an alphabetic language like English requires different skills than reading Chinese. English readers turn letters into sounds, while Chinese uses symbols to represent words. “Becoming a reader is a fairly dramatic process for the brain,” says Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University in Washington, who was not associated with the study. For children, learning to read is culturally important but is not really natural, Eden said, so when the brain orients toward a different writing system it copes with it differently.
Researchers have identified a risk factor in U.S. teenagers that is associated with poorer diet and exercise habits and lower grades in school. Among black teens, 82 percent have it, compared to 66 percent of Hispanics, 60 percent of whites and 39 percent of Asian Americans. Higher income children are much less likely to have it than lower income kids.
First there was the Washington Post story about elementary school kids getting tagged as sexual harassers. Yesterday, Joanne Jacobs posted a story about an 8-year old in Colorado suspended for sniffing a Sharpie marker. It made us wonder what else students are getting in trouble for these days. A quick survey of suspension-worthy offenses making in news in the last week range from serious offenses to seriously strange.
Two girls were suspended from a Pennsylvania high school for writing a “murder list” with the names of 48 students and teachers on it; a boy in Palm Beach, Florida did something similar. A South Carolina 8th grader was suspended for wearing a KKK t-shirt, while a couple of Cleveland area middle schoolers were sent home for putting racially inflammatory posts on You Tube. A Chattanooga 7th grader hid a gun (real) in his locker, while three teenagers in Ontario, Canada were suspended for pointing a machine gun (fake) out of a car window in their school parking lot. A 8th grader in Phoenix realized he had left a knife in his knapsack over Spring Break and, mindful of the school’s strict weapon policy, reported himself to school officials. He was suspended anyway. A 7-year old in Maryland may be expelled for bringing his uncle’s gun to school, thinking it was a toy. In Florida, a 15-year old was charged with a felony for poisoning a teacher’s water with Visine because “he didn’t like the class or her.” Six Florida baseball players were suspended from the team after an alleged hazing incident. A large group of middle school students in James City, Virginia were caught texting each other to plan a cafeteria food fight. School officials thwarted the plot, suspending 15 miscreants. Meanwhile an even larger group of West Virginia high school students got ten days each for breaking into the school and moving about 600 desks into the hallways. They also hid thousands of dollars worth of telephones and calculators, but didn’t damage any of them, and ignited a book in a microwave.
A female high school student in Massachusetts wore the wrong color sweater to school and refused to take it off. A St. Louis freshman wore shorts on a recent 70-degree day and was suspended for violating a rule that prohibits them between November 1 and April 31. A Haverhill, Massachusetts 11-year old accused of sexually harrassing two girls claimed he was only quoting the TV show South Park. A case of suspended animation in Alaska, where a fifth-grade boy got in trouble for drawing Anime-style pictures of nude females. His parents say it’s artwork. Finally, a first grader in Brockton, Mass was suspended for three days after school officials said he sexually harassed a girl in his class by allegedly putting two fingers inside the girl’s waistband while she sat on the floor in front of him.
For the record, it’s not just the kids. A Santa Ana, California elementary school teacher was busted for having a gun in school, and the coach of the Marblehead (Mass.) High School football team drew a two-game suspension for chewing tobacco while coaching.
A Wisconsin elementary school raised the ire of a national Christian radio network over what they thought was a harmless bit of fun. Students in Pineview Elementary in Reedsburg had been dressing in costume all week as part of “Wacky Week,” an annual tradition at the school. On Friday students voted to come to school dressed either as senior citizens or members of the opposite sex. The Voice of Christian Youth America heard about it from a local resident and issued a call to general quarters.
“This is tax-funded. This is not a dress-up party in somebody’s house,” said Jim Schneider, the host “Crosstalk,” the network’s ironically titled program. ”There are parents, taxpayers…who do not appreciate the imposition of a particular lifestyle being portrayed as a normal lifestyle for the kids.” The show’s listeners flooded the school district with protest calls. District Administrator Tom Benson said the district was not attempting to promote cross-dressing, homosexuality or alternative gender roles with the dress-up day.
“The promotion of transgenderism — that was not our purpose,” Benson told the local paper. “Our purpose was to have a Wacky Week mixing in a bit of silliness with our reading, writing and arithmetic.”
Update: If they were upset about Wacky Week, wait until they hear about this.
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