For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance—not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. So, faced with closure, the school’s principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class. What followed was an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject—one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform.
In 2009, when Monica DiBella entered New Dorp, a notorious public high school on Staten Island, her academic future was cloudy. Monica had struggled to read in early childhood, and had repeated first grade. During her elementary-school years, she got more than 100 hours of tutoring, but by fourth grade, she’d fallen behind her classmates again. In the years that followed, Monica became comfortable with math and learned to read passably well, but never seemed able to express her thoughts in writing. During her freshman year at New Dorp, a ’70s-style brick behemoth near a grimy beach, her history teacher asked her to write an essay on Alexander the Great. At a loss, she jotted down her opinion of the Macedonian ruler: “I think Alexander the Great was one of the best military leaders.” An essay? “Basically, that wasn’t going to happen,” she says, sweeping her blunt-cut brown hair from her brown eyes. “It was like, well, I got a sentence down. What now?” Monica’s mother, Santa, looked over her daughter’s answer—six simple sentences, one of which didn’t make sense—with a mixture of fear and frustration. Even a coherent, well-turned paragraph seemed beyond her daughter’s ability. An essay? “It just didn’t seem like something Monica could ever do.”
For decades, no one at New Dorp seemed to know how to help low-performing students like Monica, and unfortunately, this troubled population made up most of the school, which caters primarily to students from poor and working-class families. In 2006, 82 percent of freshmen entered the school reading below grade level. Students routinely scored poorly on the English and history Regents exams, a New York State graduation requirement: the essay questions were just too difficult. Many would simply write a sentence or two and shut the test booklet. In the spring of 2007, when administrators calculated graduation rates, they found that four out of 10 students who had started New Dorp as freshmen had dropped out, making it one of the 2,000 or so lowest-performing high schools in the nation. City officials, who had been closing comprehensive high schools all over New York and opening smaller, specialized ones in their stead, signaled that New Dorp was in the crosshairs.
Read all HERE.
###
SeatGuru “The ultimate source for airplane seating, in-flight amenities, and airline information.”
Countless excellent phrases, now commonly used, occur first in Shakespeare, including one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, play fast and loose, be in a pickle, foul play, tower of strength, flesh and blood, be cruel to be kind, and with bated breath. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
###
TGIF Everyone: Lady Urinates, Proceeds to Take Shower on Subway [Video]
It’s been a long week: It’s getting colder, the nights are longer and Occupy Wall Street failed to overthrow the government once again. Isn’t it time you just let go, relaxed and thought of pleasant things like the sounds of gentle rain showers, the lapping ocean waves and delicious ice-cold lemonade being poured into a frosty gla—
On second thought, don’t relax. Hold it in.
Go here to watch the video NOW.
###
‘I liked to shoot everything – women, kids… it was kind of sport’: Secret Nazi tapes reveal how ordinary German soldiers were responsible for war crimes and not just SS
Secret recordings made by British intelligence during the Second World War have revealed for the first time the horrific atrocities carried out by everyday German soldiers.For years the blame for horrific war crimes, rape and genocide were laid at the hands of the SS and Hitler’s right hand men but a new book details how widespread the barbarity went.Transcripts taken from hidden microphones on prisoners of war have been collated for the disturbing book Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying: The Secret Second World War Tapes of German POWs.
Revelations: The new book reveals how soldiers like this one callously murdered the innocent and then joked about it with fellow soldiers
MORE.
###
Music festivals: Summer 2012 – The Big Picture
Large or small, these music festivals brought musicians and fans together from around the world in celebration of sound. Collected here are scenes from some of those music festivals held over the past few months. — Lloyd Young ( 42 photos total)
###
###
US auction house to sell the writings of college-age Goebbels, to the anger of survivors’ group
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — The love letters, school papers and dramatic works of college-age Joseph Goebbels reveal a romantic young man beginning to show signs of anti-Semitism and egotistical and controlling behavior, according to a Connecticut auction house selling the pre-war writings of Adolf Hitler’s propaganda chief.
Alexander Historical Auctions plans to sell the collection on Sept. 27 in Stamford, saying it may prove invaluable in providing historical and psychological insights. But the auction has sparked objections from a Holocaust survivors group.
“It sums up the formative years of the number two man in the Third Reich, who was responsible for motivating the masses in Germany to back Hitler,” said Bill Panagopulos, the auction company’s president. “In my opinion, it shows how this rather simple, shy and love-struck college student really just became radicalized.”
MORE.
###
###
SpeechJammer Earns Ig Nobel Prize
If you have ever had the desire to silence a blowhard, you need the SpeechJammer, a device that disrupts a person’s speech by playing it back with a slight delay, confusing the speaker just enough to stop talking. Its inventors were among those honored this year with Ig Nobel Prizes—a parody of the Nobel Prizes—for achievements that “first make people laugh and then make them think.” Other awardees include psychologists who found that leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower seem smaller, physicists who devised an equation that predicts the shape of a ponytail, and a Russian company that converted old ammunition into diamonds.
###
Was Madagascar Settled by a Tiny Group of Refugees From Distant Lands?
A.D. 830: A storm sends an Indonesian trading ship drastically off course. Months later, dozens of ragged survivors make landfall on an island off the southeast coast of Africa, more than 3,000 miles from home. Today, Murray Cox, a computational biologist at New Zealand’s Massey University, says a scenario like this may describe the murky origins of the first permanent settlements on Madagascar, home to about 22 million people today.
Genetic and linguistic studies suggest the island’s native Malagasy people are mainly of Indonesian descent.
MORE.
###
The Millions : The Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far)
[...]we’ve conducted a poll of our regular contributors and 48 of our favorite writers, editors, and critics (listed below), asking a single question: “What are the best books of fiction of the millennium, so far?” The results were robust, diverse, and surprising.>We’ve finished tabulating them, and this week, we’ll be counting down the Top 20 vote-getters, at a rate of five per day. Each book will be introduced by one of the panelists who voted for it. On Friday, we’ll reveal Number One, along with the results of a parallel reader poll conducted via our Facebook group. And next week, we’ll run follow-up posts including Honorable Mention and “Best of the Rest” lists.This page, updated as we post the list, will become an index. You can use it to navigate the series, or can check back at our home page; we also invite you to consider subscribing to The Millions via RSS feed or Kindle. We hope you’ll share your thoughts here or on the entries for the individual books throughout the week as our list is revealed.
The List
MORE.
###
Rethinking Sleep
SOMETIME in the dark stretch of the night it happens. Perhaps it’s the chime of an incoming text message. Or your iPhone screen lights up to alert you to a new e-mail. Or you find yourself staring at the ceiling, replaying the day in your head. Next thing you know, you’re out of bed and engaged with the world, once again ignoring the often quoted fact that eight straight hours of sleep is essential.
Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Thanks in part to technology and its constant pinging and chiming, roughly 41 million people in the United States — nearly a third of all working adults — get six hours or fewer of sleep a night, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And sleep deprivation is an affliction that crosses economic lines. About 42 percent of workers in the mining industry are sleep-deprived, while about 27 percent of financial or insurance industry workers share the same complaint.
MORE.
###
“I Just Really Need to Bathe”: In Which We Interview a College Grad Hired to Wait in Line for an iPhone 5
The iPhone 5, which recently made headlines for its drastic weight loss (immediately followed by the announcement of its new earbud line), will officially go on sale this Friday. In anticipation of its release, several young bespectacled people have flocked to their respective Apple stores, camping out for days until the “jewel” makes its big debut. One such person is Charles Edward Hufnagel-Dvorak, who graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in history and Japanese studies last year. Working through the services-for-hire Web site TaskRabbit, Hufnagel-Dvorak agreed to help someone be among the first owners of the new phone by camping outside an Apple store in San Francisco. He’s been in line since Monday. To fully grasp Hufnagel-Dvorak’s role as an iPhone-5-line waiter, VF Daily caught up with him while he took a break to shower.
[Full disclosure: Hufnagel-Dvorak once sublet this blogger’s Brooklyn apartment for a month and left behind several instant meals that this blogger later consumed.]
VF Daily: Hi, Charles. Thanks for making time in your busy schedule to talk to us. My last memory of you is that empty Red Bull can you left in my shower.
MORE.
###
What a dive! The dusty swimming pools lying empty at abandoned motels across California
Photographer J Bennett Fitts traveled 20,000 miles to complete the series
With the last dregs of murky water stagnating in the bottom, these are the desolate swimming pools dotted around America attached to long-forgotten motels.The bleak scenes were captured as part of a series called No Life Guard On Duty of pools at motels across the American South. The contrast between the beautiful locations from Panama City Beach to Victorville, California and the grimy, empty pools is striking.
###
The Killing Game | Watch Free Documentary Online
A report on serial killer Rodney Alcala’s 40-year odyssey of rape, murder and eluding justice. Rodney Alcala is a convicted rapist and serial killer. He was sentenced to death in California in 2010 for five murders committed in that state between 1977 and 1979, and is under indictment for two additional homicides in New York. His true victim total remains unknown, and could be much higher.He is sometimes labeled the “Dating Game Killer” because of his 1978 appearance on the American television show The Dating Game in the very midst of his murder spree. One police detective called him “a killing machine”, and criminalists have compared him to Ted Bundy. A homicide investigator familiar with the evidence speculated that Alcala could have murdered as many as 50 women, while other estimates have run as high as 130.
MORE.
###
Correction officers at Rikers having ‘rampant’ sex on and off job: lawsuit
A view of the entrance to Rikers Island penitentiary complex where IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn is being held, in New York, May 17, 2011. Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund and a leading French politician tipped as a presidential front-runner for 2012, was charged in the early hours of Sunday morning with sexual assault and attempted rape. AFP PHOTO/Emmanuel Dunand (Photo credit should read EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images)
Jail guards at Rikers Island are turning jails into personal playpens, an officer charges.
They’re screwing around in the slammer.
Correction officers are turning city jails into their personal playpens, engaging in “rampant” sex both on and off the job, an explosive lawsuit claims.
Correction Officer Tomara Bryan charges that male guards face no repercussions for bedding their counterparts — but the frisky females become targets of abuse.
Bryan should know. She was one of them, the suit says.
MORE.
###
Left to right, the Sundance Kid, News Carver, the Tall Texan, Kid Curry, and finally Butch Cassidy, composing Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, 1900 (colorized) (i.minus.com)
###
Naked mole-rats may hold clues to pain relief.
Cancer research yields unexpected new way to produce nylon.
Stratosphere targets deep sea to shape climate | e! Science News.
Climate expert: Record loss of arctic ice could impact Wisconsin – Physorg | e! Science News.
Giving lithium to those who need it | ScienceBlog.com.
Green Solution In Fight Against Greenhouse Gases – Science News – redOrbit.
Nunavut’s mysterious ancient life could return by 2100 as Arctic warms.
###
