Just went out to stop a kid taller than me from putting his hands on and cussing at an 8 yr old named Zach.

I believe the kid’s name is Coby.  He is about 6’ or 6’1” African American.  He was in the kids face, linging back and forth and taunting him and had his hands on the kid’s shoulders and hat when I came out.

My wife heard him yelling the F word which was why I was asked to go see what was going on.

I could not get the kids attention without yelling.  He wanted to argue so I explained the police would be called and he had committed assault and battery with 4 witnesses.  Also present were Greg, Erik, and one other individual. 

He said I did not know what was going on.  I told him it did not matter.  I saw enough in 2 seconds to know intervention was needed.

I walked Zach home to his dad and told him what happened and asked the he call the police.  I offered to sign a sworn complaint if needed.

No bullying - not even when a kids acts up.

Big kids are supposed to be man enough to walk away.  Macho is stupid.

Occurred 3-30-11 approx 5:30 PM

emth:

I felt a lot less melancholy about the future of U.S. public education after having coffee a few days ago with Joel Rose, the founder of the path-breaking New York City experiment called School of One.

That name conveys the philosophy of the program — now running in a limited form at three Manhattan middle schools — which is to customize learning for each student, so that no one is held back, nor pushed forward. For more than a year, School of One has been winning raves from education experts, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation president Arthur Levine. Its strategy is to make smart use of technology to personalize education, which can make learning more interesting to students while providing teachers with daily information they can use to plan each kid’s day, according to his or her past progress. The theory is that children who need extra support from teachers or mentors will receive it, without feeling the anxiety of falling behind in class. Teachers’ greater flexibility will then allow them to plan more engaging, hands-on projects during time not spent at the computer.

Rose, as he revealed over the coffee, is now taking his winning idea to a national stage. He told me he is leaving NYC’s education department this month to finish raising $30 million so that he can duplicate School of One in hundreds of other U.S. classrooms. An early backer is the New Schools Venture Fund, co-founded by Silicon Valley investor John Doerr, whose sharp eye helped launch Amazon and Netscape.

“President Obama has been saying that this is our Sputnik moment in education,” says Rose, a former Teach for America elementary school teacher. “But where is the goal equivalent to putting a man on the moon?”

Rose has a vision for what that goal should be: transforming a quarter of American classrooms to the School of One model. It’s an objective that may easily win political supporters who’ll appreciate the money it could save at a time when education is so woefully underfunded. Yet it should be undertaken with caution, especially before we start thinking about substituting laptops for teachers. To the degree that technology ramps up in the classrooms, administrators will have to pay quality attention to whether the many students in need of strong relationships with actual people still have them.

Even with these concerns, however, I wish School of One had been around when my kids needed it, or for that matter, when I did. I so clearly remember being bored out of my mind all through grade school — a form of mental torture that I hope we will one day consider as ridiculous as letting principals deliver spankings.

theatlantic:

BP managers presiding over 2010’s devastating gulf oil spill may not be getting off as scot-free as the public once perceived.

According to a Bloomberg report citing anonymous sources, federal prosecutors are considering charging BP managers with involuntary manslaughter or seaman’s manslaughter charges (a “more serious penalty of up to 10 years”) for sacrificing safety for speed prior to the oil rig accident that killed 11 workers last year. Investigators are also combing through the Congressional testimony of the gaffe-prone former BP CEO Tony Hayward and other industry executives “to determine whether their testimony was at odds with what they knew.”

Read more at The Atlantic Wire

theatlantic:

BP managers presiding over 2010’s devastating gulf oil spill may not be getting off as scot-free as the public once perceived.

According to a Bloomberg report citing anonymous sources, federal prosecutors are considering charging BP managers with involuntary manslaughter or seaman’s manslaughter charges (a “more serious penalty of up to 10 years”) for sacrificing safety for speed prior to the oil rig accident that killed 11 workers last year. Investigators are also combing through the Congressional testimony of the gaffe-prone former BP CEO Tony Hayward and other industry executives “to determine whether their testimony was at odds with what they knew.”

Read more at The Atlantic Wire

Testing out tumblr

nationalpost:

Japan Earthquake Graphic: The newly expanded nuclear evacuation zone
With the discovery of radioactive water at a second reactor at the Fukushima nuclear complex, the fear of a possible meltdown and of serious contamination of the countryside northeast of Tokyo has escalated.

Highly radioactive water leaks from Japanese nuclear plant
Highly radioactive water has leaked from a reactor at Japan’s crippled nuclear complex, the plant’s operator said on Monday, while environmental group Greenpeace said it had detected high levels of radiation outside an exclusion zone.

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