Friday, May 20, 2011
Thursday, May 19, 2011
and ever more shall be so? where IS the sun???
Viewed From Top of Marine Sciences Building...
(you can move the camera...)
(you can move the camera...)
From the Atlantic: The Failure of American Schools
While America’s students are stuck in a ditch, the rest of the world is moving ahead. The World Economic Forum ranks us 48th in math and science education. On international math tests, the United States is near the bottom of industrialized countries (the 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), and we’re in the middle in science and reading. Similarly, although we used to have one of the top percentages of high-school and college graduates among the OECD countries, we’re now in the basement for high-school and the middle for college graduates. And these figures don’t take into account the leaps in educational attainment in China, Singapore, and many developing countries.
During the first three-quarters of the 20th century, America developed an enormously successful middle class, first by making high school universal, and then, after the Second World War, by making college much more available, through the GI Bill and other scholarship programs. As a result, our educational attainment kept pace with our strong technological advancement. But that’s changed markedly since 1980, and now our technological progress is advancing more rapidly than our educational attainment. From 1960 to 1980, our supply of college graduates increased at almost 4 percent a year; since then, the increase has been about half as fast. The net effect is that we’re rapidly moving toward two Americas—a wealthy elite, and an increasingly large underclass that lacks the skills to succeed.
This division tears at the very fabric of our society. Nevertheless, there’s little national urgency to fix its underlying causes. Unlike a bad economy, poor educational achievement creeps up on us. Right now, if you were running for office, would you be more concerned with unemployment or education? Also, unlike terrorism, an educational crisis has a different impact on the powerful than it does on most of society. Their children, who are in private schools or elite public schools, receive a decent education, so it’s hard to get them fully engaged in the broader national debate. Plus, unlike in health care, for example, where we perceive the quality of care to be good and worry instead about controlling costs and covering the uninsured, in education, despite massive increases in expenditure, we don’t see improved results.
This is what you shall do.......we shall do together.
"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
— Walt Whitman
— Walt Whitman
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Edward Elgar - Nimrod London Symphony Orchetra
Good Morning! Have a NICE day...
Elgar wrote this piece for his friend Augustus Jaeger, who encouraged him to continue when about to give up composing in a fit of depression...
Elgar wrote this piece for his friend Augustus Jaeger, who encouraged him to continue when about to give up composing in a fit of depression...
"We all breathe the same air,
Live in the light of the same Sun,
See the same Moon and Stars,
Such a pity that we can't all live together in Peace,
On this little lifeboat in The Universe we call Earth.
The association of this piece of music and Rememberance Day always brings a lump to my throat when I think of all the souls who gave their lives that we can now listen to it, in freedom.
Yet as wars continue, it just feels like we haven't learnt anything from the past."