educational

I'm thinking of renaming this blog Technically HighSchoolWrecked.

No sooner does one odd controversy erupt in our teen education centers than another appears like a tardy bus.

The latest is a tale from Georgia. Please sit back. You may enjoy this.

An enterprising young man named Keandre Varner thought he'd discover whether his high school principal was, or ever had been, a criminal.

What joy, perhaps, for him to discover that there existed a mugshot of Jamille Miller Brown, principal of Riverdale High School, in Georgia.

If you were a mere teen and discovered your school principal's … Read more

Billionaire investor and philanthropist Peter Thiel plans to announce Thursday the next group of 20 young men and women who will receive $100,000 each to work as tech entrepreneurs instead of spending that time on a college campus.

The group, dubbed the "20 Under 20" Thiel Fellows, is the third group of entrepreneurs the Thiel Foundation has funded. It includes Christopher Walker, who dropped out of college to form a software company, and Zach Hamed, a junior at Harvard who's leaving to work on education software.

Jonathan Cain, president of the Thiel Foundation, said in a … Read more

I am writing this with a cold compress on my head and a milk chocolate digestive biscuit in my mouth.

Both are to soothe my furrowed thoughts.

For this is another tale of peculiarity from the antiseptic-smelling hallways of America's high schools.

It has been well-established that strange things happen in the nation's places of youth education.

You can get expelled and arrested for putting toilet cleaner and foil in a water bottle on school premises.

You can also get suspended for tweeting that you don't think your high school has very good sports teams.

Wesley Teague, … Read more

People like to claim that education is in crisis.

But it's surely no more in crisis than humanity itself, as it veers toward an unknown future while leering into screens for its solution.

However, Bartow High School in Florida garlanded itself in a particularly educative spirit this week by expelling a 16-year-old girl for putting a couple of chemicals into an 8-ounce water bottle and watching it go bang.

Should this tale not have exploded before your eyes this week, Kiera Wilmot wasn't merely expelled for this misdeed on school premises, she was also charged with felony possession … Read more

Who among us hasn't -- just once in our lives -- put a couple of things in a test tube, a bottle, or our mouths and wondered what might happen?

Occasionally, this might have difficult consequences. But rarely does someone try to arrest us for it.

16-year-old Kiera Wilmot wasn't so lucky.

This student at Bartow High School in Florida allegedly thought she'd put a couple of household chemicals in an 8-ounce water bottle, just to see the reaction.

The reaction was that she was expelled and marched off in handcuffs, accused of felony possession/discharge of a dangerous weapon.… Read more

Fetch for iOS is a touch adventure game that plays like an animated movie, letting you explore a strange world as a young boy in search of his lost dog.

Made for children, but fun for adults, too, Fetch combines a great-looking artistic style, rich sounds, and mysterious environments with tons of touch-screen interaction as you set off on your adventure. The story revolves around the disappearance of a little boy's dog named Bear and the lengths he must go through to get him back. Quickly, he finds out that dogs are being stolen around the world, and he … Read more

Facebook and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have joined forces again to help develop more tech tools for education and learning. It's time for HackEd 2.0.

The tech giants will be hosting two all-day hackathons this month, a Facebook spokesperson told CNET. More than 20 teams of tech education enthusiasts, education experts, and top-notch developers will spend April 9 at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters brainstorming, coding, and building apps. A similar event will take place on April 24 in Facebook's London office.

Those apps then will be judged by a panel of experts -- including … Read more

I am sure there are several 11-year-old boys who are terribly proficient at handling a gun.

But, given that I wouldn't trust an 11-year-old boy with a popsicle, I would just as well not be anywhere near them.

This, however, doesn't appear to have been the policy of the authorities in New Jersey. They were allegedly alarmed by a Facebook photo of Josh Moore, aged 11, holding a .22 rifle, and they allegedly wanted to get very near him.

The photo had been posted by his father, Shawn, to Facebook. It showed Josh, in his camouflage outfit and … Read more

What's the point of communicating privately, when you can whine and humiliate publicly?

This seems to be the motto du jour of the socially networked classes.

It is simultaneously vacuous and powerful.

Consider, please, the case of a young gentleman who was rather cross at his high school teacher. He didn't tell the teacher why he was cross. No, he told Twitter.

"I hate you, Mr. Torrence," he screeched. "You said the test was in (sic) Wednesday, so give it to us on (sic) Wednesday, not Tuesday. #YouNeedACalendar #ScrewYou."

Mr. Torrence doesn't, apparently, follow every word of this lyrical student. Instead, as the Daily Dot reports, one of the student's own friends exposed him to the teacher. … Read more