On Education

A Do-It-Yourself SAT Class, With No Whining, or Parents, Allowed
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: March 26, 2008
A Florida high school student shares his father’s technique for preparing for the SAT with other students, and dropping out is not an option.

Technorati Tags: DIY, Test-Prep, SAT Preparation,

Marketplace: College admission is a marketing game

Flickr Tags: NPR,High School,Skiing,Vail

from the All Things Considered Series: Innovative Trends in High School

Vail High School Teaches on the Slopes

by Larry Abramson

Listen Now [6 min 0 sec]

All Things Considered, December 13, 2007 · One of the toughest challenges faced by many high schools is keeping top athletes interested in academics.

But in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, a new school has developed a way to teach and train promising young ski racers. Students at the Vail Ski and Snowboard Academy (VSSA) spend half of their day on the mountain and the other half in the classroom.

VSSA may be the first public ski academy in the country.

Plans to Go Pro

At 8 a.m., students up and down the Vail Valley in Colorado are entering the doors of the local high school.

But not freshman Abby Ghent. She is standing on the snow at Vail Ski Resort and using a heavy, metal wrench to screw a racing gate into the snow. The gates — the bright poles that skiers race around at the Winter Olympics — have to be screwed in tight so they don’t rip out when the girls come racing down the mountain.

If they want to attend the Vail Ski and Snowboard Academy, these girls have to be willing to do dirty work like this, carry a lot of gear and stay ahead in school.

“You have to be really on top of it. Like, know all your classes, know where you’re standing, keep track of all your homework and stuff,” Abby said.

Abby, like most girls at the school, wants to go pro.

It takes a lot of chutzpah to dream of being a pro skier. The competition is fierce, and the road to the top is often measured in hundredths of seconds.

And first, these students have to graduate from high school.

This school, which enrolls students in grades 8 through 12, leverages students’ powerful desire to keep skiing: If their grades drop too low, athletes can’t race.

Even though VSSA is a free public school, parents must pay the Ski and Snowboard Club Vail for ski training.

Brett Donaldson, a Ski and Snowboard Club Vail coach, says that skiing while in school remains a struggle. Skiers can’t train at night. What’s more, their schedule is often upset by bad weather and equipment problems.

“As opposed to, let’s say, a basketball team. They go to the gym, and it’s the same every day,” Donaldson said. “Ours is drastically different every single day.”

Amped from Skiing

At the top of the run, the girls take turns attacking the course. Their skis fly by the gates and the heavy, plastic poles snap against their shin guards, echoing in the cold air.

They ski like no one else on the mountain — their legs like unbreakable rubber bands, snapping from side to side. Whether they’re racing or not, they seem to go as fast as they can.

But at 1:45 p.m., students pile on to a bus to a local middle school, where the ski academy has been given space to conduct classes. The girls’ intense focus on the mountains has dissolved as they transition from the mountain to the classroom.

English teacher Megan Orvis already has experience starting a new high school. But this school is different, she says. For example, when the students arrive, they’re all amped from skiing.

Orvis said she needs to give the students time to settle down by eating their lunches.

But with only four hours spent in the classroom each day, there isn’t much time.

In exchange for a shorter day in the classroom, students face a longer school year. But their schedules still face a lot of disruption. The week NPR visited the students, there was a World Cup race nearby, and VSSA students helped out.

Nevertheless, Jeff Grimmer, academic director of the school, says it’s a huge improvement over the displacements that students commonly faced before the school opened this year.

“We knew there were going to still be kids joining the national team, no matter what education they got. But we were trying to say, ‘How can we improve a not-so-polished situation?’”

An Experiment

The school’s small size offers many advantages and helps accommodate the athletes’ unpredictable schedules.

But as with many small schools, VSSA can’t always offer the breadth of courses that a big school can. With only three full-time teachers, the school can’t hire specialists for advanced courses.

Student Kristi Waring, who skis freestyle, faces challenges with her advanced French course, which she takes online.

“It’s just hard teaching yourself how to do things when there’s no teacher in front of you lecturing,” Waring said. “It’s just really hard for me.”

Waring’s determination to compete in her sport shows just how deep students’ commitment runs. Until this year, Waring was going to school in Denver and commuting to training sessions in Vail. But her coaches told her that if she wanted to compete, she needed to move closer to Vail. So she did. Her mother rents a duplex in Vail and drives back and forth to Denver on a regular basis.

The family says this is a big experiment for them. The same goes for this school.

Enlarge

Larry Abramson, NPR

Vail Ski and Snowboard Academy (VSSA) is co-ed, but male and female athletes train separately. Academy students also train with students from other area schools. Pictured from left are: Jocelyn Irwin (from Vail Mountain School), Christa Ghent (VSSA), Kaytlyn Samuelson (VSSA), Whitney Setterberg (VSSA), Abby Ghent (VSSA), and Erika Ghent (post-graduate).

Enlarge

Larry Abramson, NPR

VSSA has been given space to conduct classes at a middle school, and students have to be creative with their limited space. Students on the right are doing chemistry while Kristi Waring (left) works on an online French course.

VSSA Goals

• Prepare students for world-class athletic events and for educational endeavors
• Keep classes small and flexible to accommodate students at different levels
• Take advantage of online offerings

Highlight words and then have those words added to your vocab list…and keep the page and the highlighting too.

TextMarker! :: Firefox Add-ons

TextMarker! 0.3.2

by Simon Shareef

Allows you to highlight text selections via keyboard and context menu. Also allows for the highlighted text to be copied individually or all. 3 highlighter colours are available that can be customised.

Works with:

• Firefox: 1.5 – 2.0.0.*

Install Now

Developer Comments

With this extension you can highlight important text on web pages and copy the highlighted text. Useful when you have several pages open on multiple tabs, while doing online research for instance.
To highlight:
1. Select text to highlight with the mouse
2. Right-click on the selected text OR click b,n or m keys
3. Select Highlight Text! from the context menu
To erase/copy individual highlighted text hover mouse over the text and right-click to reveal the context menu. Then follow "Highlighted Text" sub-menu.
Options Panel to change highlight colours is available via Tools menu -> Extensions -> Right-click on TextMarker!

Version 0.3.2 — October 25, 2006 — 20 KB

See all preview images

Takeaway: Sending a less-than-perfect e-mail to a friend is one thing; mistakes aren’t really a problem. But if you want to craft an error-free message that reflects your professionalism, be on the lookout for these common grammatical slip-ups.

Here’s the first of many…you’ll find the rest on YouTube.

There’s a small test page on http://tools.212panos.com/ that links right back here so we can see and discuss the issues.

Goal: I need to track clicks to remote url’s from locations that are not mine, but which will have content from me. Redirecting thru my site is the obvious solution, but how does this scale?

How can I redirect hundreds or thousands of url’s?

I suspect that using .htaccess will be way too slow.

How much of an impact is shared hosting @ dreamhost, or site5?

What factors determine host performance?

Who is a better host?

Do the Status Codes have any impact?

What happens when there isn’t any Status Code?

Framing?

Forget this.

Other issues?

This file started in my head and then I typed it into gdocs. Would you like an invite to discuss it there? Send me a note: dmeATeldridgeDOTto.

• Beauty
• Money
• Readability
• Direction
• Sublime
• Poetry
• Colors (or not)
• Excitement
• Money, already said that huh?
• Widgets
• Usability
• Fame
• Friends
• Secret Sauce
• Simplicity
• Sweat

There’s a lot more that goes into a theme than comes out, or is there? Humm, well a good theme is a good start. But whoever said they never met a theme they didn’t like was lying. Or was it something they said about how easy it is to find a theme that suits you like a suit off the rack, yeah that’s the one.

Now I’m off to look at some fabrics, I’m particularly, some say peculiarly, possessed of a preference for pocket linings that perform pflawlessly and without imerfections.

Everyone loves Gmail. But not everyone loves email, or the digital era. What ever happened to stamps, filing cabinets, and the mailman? Well, you asked for it, and it’s here. We’re bringing it back.

A New Button Now in Gmail, you can request a physical copy of any message with the click of a button, and we’ll send it to you in the mail.Simplicity Squared Google will print all messages instantly and prepare them for delivery. Allow 2-4 business days for a parcel to arrive via post. Total Control A stack of Gmail Paper arrives in a box at your doorstep, and it’s yours to keep forever. You can read it, sort it, search it, touch it. Or even move it to the trash—the real trash. (Recycling is encouraged.) Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe Google takes privacy very seriously. But once your email is physically in your hands, it’s as secure as you want to make it. Learn more about Gmail Paper

but I don’t.

Carukia barnesi and Irukandji Syndrome

In 3 years of beekeeping, I’ve been stung approximately 30 times. A single sting hurts, but only enough to be mildly annoying. The pain last only around 20 minutes. In my limited experience of stings it’s about equal to a horsefly bite, or a (non-fatal) box jellyfish sting. It’s not nearly as painful as a South African fire ant bite, which I now very studiously avoid. It is the “middle C” of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, scoring a 2. In comparison the Giant Tropical Bullet Ant scores a 4.0: “Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.” There’s some speculation that the jellyfish Carukia barnesi may be more painful, causing a severe whole body pain, lasting up to 48 hours, known as Irukandji Syndrome (after the tribe in Northern Australia who were the first to be stung). The name of the jellyfish and the aetiology of the syndrome come from a Dr Jack Handyside Barnes. He spent many years self-experimenting with different jellyfish stings around Queensland. Finally in 1961, he captured a Carukia barnesi and deliberately stung himself, his 9-year-old son Nick, and a local lifeguard Chilla Ross. The Smithsonian have more details:

“The three returned to the Barnes family home where, 20 minutes after being stung on the beach, they began to feel the venom’s terrifying effects. Chilla Ross began screaming, “Let me die.” Nick remembers vomiting “as Dad carried me upstairs, then I was lying on a bed swallowing painkillers. I felt pretty terrible”—so terrible, in fact, that he found himself “thinking that dying mightn’t be a bad idea.” But he survived, as did Ross and his father. Three years later, Jack Barnes described the ordeal in the Australian Medical Journal, writing that all three of them had been “seized with a remarkable restlessness and were in constant movement, stamping about aimlessly, swinging their arms, flexing and extending their bodies, and generally twisting and writhing.”

Worst. Parenting. Ever? If you are feeling brave, there’s a video of a Discovery researcher writhing in agony having been stung.