Posts tagged with schools
School = books (usually)
There's an interesting article on Hyperalleric about the scaled-back role of actual books in some universities' fine arts libraries, two of which have recently moved to reduce or relocate large portions of their collections...
Wow.
I'm both amused and horrified by this Buzzfeed headline: "An Ivy League Food Scientist Is Retracting Yet Another Paper". According to the article, Cornell University food behavior scientist Brian Wansink has been forced...
Hug a librarian
The Guardian recently posted an article about an open letter to the UK's Education Secretary, written by a bunch of literary bigwigs (Neil Gaiman, Antonia Fraser, and Philip Pullman, among others). The letter was written to protest the decline in support for school libraries...
Ouch.
Whoa: an elementary school librarian named Liz Phipps Soeiro just published an open letter to Melania Trump, responding to Trump's gift of ten Dr. Seuss books. The tone of the letter is civil, and many (though not all) of the author's criticisms are valid, but... but... I just can't get behind responding to a gift with a condescending explanation of where the gift-giver went wrong...
Shh.
I am fascinated by the idea of this suggested writing class, proposed by Basecamp founder and CEO Jason Fried. I'd sign up to take it in a hot second...
An ongoing and uphill battle
According to the recent NPR article "See Priya Cook", gender bias is prevalent in textbooks worldwide. Women are generally portrayed in subservient or domestic roles, while men are depicted as figures of authority and action...
Revisionist history
There has been a lot of absolutely horrifying news coverage of the fallout from Louisiana's new law offering private-school vouchers to poor and middle-class students. Thanks to Gov. Bobby Jindal's voucher program...
Good call, guys.
Hey, all right: according to the Associated Press, the Virginia elementary school textbook we wrote about last week that featured the inaccurate claim that thousands of black troops fought for the...
So very, very wrong
According to the Washington Post, "A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War--a claim rejected by most hi...
DonorsChoose gets $1 Million (with your help)
In honor of Donors Choose's 10th birthday, Townsend Press is donating $1 million to pay down all book donation requests to below $98. However, for the money to go through, donors like us need to ...
Textbooks on the cheap...er
Good news for poor college students (particularly college students who have to pay zillions of dollars for those textbooks that will be out of date about .6 seconds after they pay $95 for 'em): Ba...
Kids + books = recipe for success?
Laura Miller wrote an essay for Salon about two recent studies that link the mere presence of books in a child's home with the number of years of education the child will complete. The first stud...
End of an era
Heh. Apparently, Oxford's All Souls College has decided to scrap their infamous one-word exam, which frequently consisted of a question like this:'Water' (Expound)Admittedly, this will probably s...
Dark times
There was an interesting article in the Seattle Times (via the Tri-City Herald) a few days ago about a potential censorship case in the Richland School District. A 10th grade Honors language-arts...
Popular fiction in the classroom?
There's an article up on the New York Times website about a teacher in Atlanta who allows her students to read whatever they want to* in her middle-school literature class. The students explore th...
Scholastic abandons Bratz
According to an article in The New York Times, children's publisher Scholastic Inc. has decided to stop offering chapter books and spinoff products based on the "Bratz" product line at its popular...