Mission U.S., a free online history game created by producers at public television station WNET Thirteen, gives middle schoolers the chance to learn about American History while walking in the shoes of characters who are living it. In Mission 1: “For Crown or Colony?”, which was released in 2010, players take on the role of Nat Wheeler, a printer’s [...]
The New Hampshire Legislature recently voted to give parents more control over the subjects taught in schools and the manner in which they are taught. On January 4, 2012, the legislature voted to allow parents to request an alternative school curriculum for any subject which has course material which they deem "objectionable". If the parent objects to any curriculum [...]
Today’s post comes from Anne Williams-Isom and Jennifer Jones Austin. Anne Williams-Isom, author of the GCP post “Words of Wisdom from a Montessori Mom” (October 4, 2011) is currently the Chief Operating Officer of the Harlem Children's Zone. She and her husband are raising their three children in Harlem. Jennifer Jones Austin is the Senior Vice President of the [...]
Yesterday evening GCP attended "A Conversation with Julian Bond and Anderson Cooper", to hear CNN anchor Cooper interview Bond about his life in the civil rights movement. Bond, who was the co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and more recently the Chairman Emeritus of the NAACP, reminisced about the evolution of his work in the civil rights [...]
You may have already heard the news that MIT has a free online program called "Open Course Wear" which contains course material for roughly 2,100 MIT classes. If you haven't, you can read all about it in the Forbes article, "M.I.T. Game-Changer: Free Online Education For All" found here. What you may not know is that included on MIT's [...]
The Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, a new center at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, has released its inaugural report, "Black Male Student Success in Higher Education: A Report from the National Black Male College Achievement Study, which can be found here. Shaun R. Harper, Director of the Center and an [...]
I'll bet you can easily name your favorite elementary school teacher, no matter how long it has been since your elementary school days. (Mine was Mrs. Portia Patterson, my third grade teacher at P.S. 116.) A good elementary school teacher can encourage you to love school and set you on the path to academic success. A recent study conducted [...]
Here's an inspirational story for you, as reported in Yahoo! Sports: Braylon Edwards, who was a Cleveland Browns rookie in 2005, promised back then to give $10,000 in scholarships to 100 Cleveland area eighth-graders if they could graduate high school with over a 2.5 GPA and 15 hours community service. Of the 100 who were afforded the opportunity, 79 [...]
Today's New York Times has a full-page ad courtesy of Baylor University celebrating Robert Griffin III's winning the 2011 Heisman Trophy. (For those of you without access to a hard copy of the Times, here is a link to a not so great shot of the ad). Above a large picture of Griffin in uniform, smiling as he holds [...]
Here's a "Letter from a Parent to His Son's Teacher" which has made the rounds on the Internet. While it is often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, this attribution has been sufficiently disputed by historians to render it weak at best and probably false. Regardless of its authorship, the thoughtful advice in this passage is worth reprinting here. While it [...]