Informáte

scienceyoucanlove: Sad news from Mozambique: Illegal poachers...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 19:47:43 -0400

Sad news from Mozambique: Illegal poachers have killed all the rhinos in Limpopo National Park, a large wildlife reserve in the southeast African country, according to news reports.

Park director António Abacar was quoted as saying this week that no rhinos had been seen since January, “which means that the ones that lived in the park are probably dead,” according to the Portugal News.

With all the rhinos gone, poachers are now turning to elephants for their tusks. The horns and tusks are valued for their supposed medicinal value, despite the fact that horns are made of the same basic material as fingernails, with no healing properties. The park spans 4,247 square miles (11,000 square kilometers), an area more than twice the size of the U.S. state of Rhode Island.

Meanwhile, Scientific American reports that for the first time in 33 years, a hunter has been allowed to import a trophy into the United States from a black rhino he shot in Namibia, outraging conservationists.

source

Jose was a top math scholar and dreamt of being a mechanical...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 19:30:19 -0400

Jose was a top math scholar and dreamt of being a mechanical engineer.

He was awarded a full scholarship to Arizona State University. When Jose graduated in 2011, there was a shortage of mechanical engineers in his state, but he could not apply for the jobs his other classmates were seeking because he was, and is, undocumented.

The Dream is Now.

ajuliettetlalli: nlarva: ROSENDO LÓPEZ ARTISTA MEXICANO...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 13:57:31 -0400

ajuliettetlalli:

nlarva:

ROSENDO LÓPEZ ARTISTA MEXICANO HUICHOL

FOTO: NIÑA LARVA

Arte es vida <3

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Sat, 20 Apr 2013 13:57:24 -0400

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Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:14:36 -0400

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Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:14:07 -0400

I see that I am a little piece of a big, big universe, and that...

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 19:07:49 -0500

I see that I am a little piece of a big, big universe, and that makes it right.

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Tue, 22 Jan 2013 17:35:01 -0500

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Tue, 22 Jan 2013 17:34:22 -0500

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Fri, 18 Jan 2013 20:37:28 -0500

"Education in the broadest sense [means] exposure to all aspects of our history and culture."

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 20:37:03 -0500

“Education in the broadest sense [means] exposure to all aspects of our history and culture.”

- Iconic designer Seymour Chwast in How To Think Like a Great Graphic Designer, which has also given us wisdom from design icons like Massimo Vignelli and Paula Scher, Chwast’s spouse. (via explore-blog)

monasequedaisstillinhiding: I gotta say- this really sums up...

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 20:24:02 -0500

monasequedaisstillinhiding:

I gotta say- this really sums up what the problems with bilingual education materials are in the United States.

I was going to use this mini book as a support in our 5 senses unit- but this page.

Oh this page.

las tacos?

Also, as my kids (who have cognitive impairments) pointed out to me, tacos do not crunch when you eat them. At least not the (authentic) tacos they eat. We did talk about how tacos dorados/flautas crunch when eaten, but even then the kids didn’t make this book due to the grammatical error.

At least Scholastic tried to be culturally relevant? But seriously, things like this appear all the time in US bilingual education materials, which are usually just translations of the English materials. You can’t afford to proofread your Spanish materials? Really?

UChicago’s bookstore? Looks vaguely familiar…

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:26:43 -0500

UChicago’s bookstore? Looks vaguely familiar…

onlyshallow: Group project for my Borderlands class this...

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:19:28 -0500

onlyshallow:

Group project for my Borderlands class this semester. We also created essays to accompany each individual card, one of which I posted earlier in my tumblr.

"Hagiographic media coverage of certain charter schools leads the public to believe that the battle..."

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:55:48 -0500

“

Hagiographic media coverage of certain charter schools leads the public to believe that the battle over how to educate poor and struggling Black and Latino students has even won. With the low numbers of Blacks and Latinos graduating from college, this is far from the case.

…To be clear, the high-flying numbers achieved by schools like the Success Academy Charter Schools in Harlem, for example — where between 94 to 97 percent of all Black and Latino students pass state achievement tests — should be lauded.

… But we have to want even more for our kids. Students in top schools with equivalent test scores tend to graduate college upwards of 70 percent of the time. Why isn’t the same true for the Black and Latino students within highly touted and publicized charter schools? It is time to focus on the educational models that have an answer to that question, and the long history of proof to back it up — not the ones with the flashiest press kits or the most charismatic communications representatives.

”

- Nowile Rooks is the associate director of the Center for African American studies at Princeton University and the founding coordinator of the Center’s urban education reform initiative

a favorite movie

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 19:36:14 -0500

a favorite movie

“Nubia Baptiste had spent some 665 days at her Washington,...

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 11:45:00 -0500

“Nubia Baptiste had spent some 665 days at her Washington, D.C., public school by the time she walked into second period on March 27, 2012. She was an authority on McKinley Technology High School. She knew which security guards to befriend and where to hide out to skip class (try the bleachers). She knew which teachers stayed late to write college recommendation letters for students; she knew which ones patrolled the halls like guards in a prison yard, barking at kids to disperse.

If someone had asked, she could have revealed things about her school that no adult could have known. Once Nubia got talking, she had plenty to say. But until that morning of her senior spring, no one had ever asked.

She sat down at her desk and pulled her long, neat dreadlocks behind her shoulders. Then her teacher passed out a form. Must be another standardized test, Nubia figured, to be finished and forgotten. She picked up her pencil. By senior year, it was a reflex. The only sound was the hum of the air conditioning.

Teachers in the hallway treat me with respect, even if they don’t know me.

Well, this was different. She chose an answer from a list: Sometimes.

This class feels like a happy family.

She arched an eyebrow. Was this a joke? Totally untrue.

In towns around the country this past school year, a quarter-million students took a special survey designed to capture what they thought of their teachers and their classroom culture. Unlike the vast majority of surveys in human history, this one had been carefully field-tested. That research had shown something remarkable: if you asked kids the right questions, they could identify, with uncanny accuracy, their most—and least—effective teachers.”

- Amanda Ripley, Why Kids Should Grade Teachers

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Sun, 09 Dec 2012 23:36:04 -0500

“Hispanic students now make up nearly a quarter of the...

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 23:01:00 -0500

“Hispanic students now make up nearly a quarter of the nation’s public school enrollment, according to an analysis of census data by the Pew Hispanic Center, and are the fastest-growing segment of the school population. Yet nonwhite Latino children seldom see themselves in books written for young readers. (Dora the Explorer, who began as a cartoon character, is an outlier.)

[Why does this matter? Well consider this: a] new study being released next week by pediatricians and sociologists at the University of California shows that Latino children start school seven months behind their white peers, on average, in oral language and preliteracy skills.

‘Their oral language use is going to be quite different from what they encounter in their books,’ said Catherine E. Snow, a professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. ‘So what might seem like simple and accessible text for a standard English speaker might be puzzling for such kids.’”

- Motoko Rich, For Young Latino Readers, an Image Is Missing

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Sun, 09 Dec 2012 22:58:32 -0500