My Boarding School Blog
Archive for May, 2008
05 23rd, 2008 Presidential Frat Boys
It’s hard to picture a President of the United States as a stereotypical drunken college frat boy, but that’s not to say they weren’t in fraternities! Here’s a collection of Presidents that may have indulged in a kegger or two during their college days.
George W. Bush
Following in his father’s footsteps, Bush attended Yale University, where he received a Bachelor’s degree in history and was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity. As a college senior, Bush became a member of the secretive Skull and Bones society
Bill Clinton
While in college, Clinton became a brother of Alpha Phi Omega and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He is a member of Kappa Kappa Psi’s National Honorary Band Fraternity, Inc.
George H.W. Bush
While at Yale, he was enrolled in an accelerated program that allowed him to graduate in two and a half years, rather than four. He was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and was elected president.
Ronald Reagan
Reagan attended Eureka College, where he was a member of the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity, majored in economics and sociology, and was very active in sports
Gerald Ford
At University of Michigan, Ford became a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and washed dishes at his fraternity house to earn money for college expenses.
John F. Kennedy
JFK attended Harvard College, residing in Winthrop House during his sophomore through senior years as a member of Phi Kappa Theta
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Roosevelt went to Harvard, where he lived in luxurious quarters and was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity
Calvin Coolidge
At Amherst College, Coolidge became a member of the Fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta and joined the College Republicans in 1892
Woodrow Wilson
In 1873, Wilson spent a year at Davidson College in North Carolina, then transferred to Princeton as a freshman, graduating in 1879, becoming a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity
William Howard Taft
At Yale, he was a member of the Linonian Society, a literary and debate society; Skull and Bones, the secret society co-founded by his father in 1832; and the Beta chapter of the Psi Upsilon fraternity
Theodore Roosevelt
Teddy Roosevelt graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Harvard in 1880
William McKinley
McKinley attended Allegheny College for one term in 1860, where he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.
Benjamin Harris
Harrison Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, where he was a member of the fraternity Phi Delta Theta and graduated in 1852.
Chester Arthur
Chester Arthur was a member of Psi Upsilon while he attended Union College in Schenectady, New York
James Garfield
The next President in line after Hayes was also a frat boy in college. James Garfield belonged to Delta Upsilon way back in 1856 while attending Williams College in Massachusetts
Rutherford B. Hayes
The nineteenth president of the United States, Hayes was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon back when he was at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.
read comments (0)05 19th, 2008 Autistic students progress
Like other graduation ceremonies, there were caps and gowns, emotional parents and applause from the audience.
All such ceremonies are poignant, but this one stood out.
Two high school seniors with severe autism received certificates to mark the completion of their 12th year of school Thursday. They attend an alternative program called Step-Up, at the Stepping Stones Center in Indian Hill. The program for autistic teens is the only one of its kind in Greater Cincinnati.
Frank Tolliver couldn’t stop smiling as he held his certificate and posed for photos. Eric Cain was more reserved and probably wondered if people would ever stop snapping pictures.
“It’s good!” Frank said of his moment in the spotlight. He wore his mother’s cap and gown.
“I am so proud of him,” said his mother, Sandra Tolliver. “We are looking for nothing but good things from him.”
Eric’s mom, Dorothy Payne, was proud, too: “I’m not a crier, but I might cry later.”
It was the first such ceremony for the Step-Up program, which is about 4 years old. Technically, it wasn’t a graduation but a completion ceremony. The two will continue at Stepping Stones because school districts are obligated to educate special needs students until age 22.
Those in the Step-Up program for teens have classic autism, which is the most severe form. Among their characteristics: hypersensitivity to their environment, including noises, touches and other stimuli; non-verbal; aggressive or violent behavior.
Those who run the Step-Up program see progress in all eight students currently enrolled.
Read the news article here.
05 18th, 2008 Gadgets for cheating
It wasn’t so long ago when cheating was something you’d at least lower your voice while discussing. There was a taboo, a sense of shame associated with it. Not so today. With cheating splashed all over YouTube, there’s definitely a “C’mon, everybody’s doing it” attitude to it and students are responding to the call with great enthusiasm and skill.
Using innocent looking gadgets such as cellphones, ipods and even soda bottles, students are finding more clever ways to deceive their teachers and cheat on their exams. Using a cell phone to text answers to friends has become popular, even in schools that don’t allow phones. Many teens have learned how to conceal the fact that they’re texting in class. An iPod provides another handy way to cheat. The teacher would find it hard to know that the students are listening to their own self-recorded audio file about the topic of test they are taking.
Schools have banned the use of of these gadgets in classrooms but it doesn’t seem to deter students from doing so.
05 17th, 2008 Violence in L.A high school
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A fight at a troubled South Los Angeles high school escalated into a campuswide brawl involving as many as 600 students before it was quelled by police officers in riot gear.
The melee, which students said was between rival black and Hispanic gangs and started around noon on Friday, forced the authorities to shut down the school, Locke High, and keep students in their classrooms. After restoring order, they rounded up those involved and separated them, holding Hispanic students in the gymnasium and black students in another room.
Four people were arrested, three students for fighting and one nonstudent on suspicion of possessing a knife, said Susan Cox, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles school district.
Several students were injured and treated at the scene, officials said.
A music teacher, Reggie Smith, told The Los Angeles Times that it was a chaotic scene and difficult to distinguish between those fighting and those trying to avoid the mayhem.
“The kids were crazy, running from place to place, jumping on other kids,” Mr. Smith said. “Some of my kids were crying because they were walking to class with friends and they got jumped.”
Victor Wong, an 18-year-old senior, told The Times that the brawl grew out of a fight two days earlier between two graffiti gangs. He said Hispanic students who were friends of his asked him to participate in a fight planned for Friday that was to pit 10 Hispanic students against 10 black students.
Read the full story here.
05 16th, 2008 The better teachers for children at-risk
We Have Charts and Graphs. The data is unequivocal: in 1998-1999, 24,000 new teachers have entered teaching through alternative certification routes; in total, nationwide, since about 1985, about 125,000 individuals have been added alternatively. Unlike graduates of traditional routes, these individuals share characteristics that make them a superior choice to teach all children, especially children at risk. They already have degrees, are more likely to have work experience outside professional education; they tend to be older than traditional graduates, they are more likely to be people of color and more are likely to be male. This research is not new; findings like these have held consistent for the last fifteen years and can be verified in scholarly journals and refereed articles from many sources.
Read the full story here.
05 15th, 2008 Standard curriculum is not enough
If you reviewed Dalton Sargent’s report cards, you’d know only half his story. The 15-year-old Altadena junior has lousy grades in many subjects. He has blown off assignments and been dissatisfied with many of his teachers. It would be accurate to call him a problematic student. But he is also gifted.
Dalton is among the sizable number of highly intelligent or talented children in the nation’s classrooms who find little in the standard curriculum to rouse their interest and who often fall by the wayside.
With schools under intense pressure from state and federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind to raise test scores of low-achieving pupils, the educational needs of gifted students — who usually perform well on standardized tests — too often are ignored, advocates say.
Nationally, about 3 million kindergarten through 12th-grade students are identified as gifted, but 80% of them do not receive specialized instruction, experts say. Studies have found that 5% to 20% of students who drop out are gifted.
05 14th, 2008 What is a public school curriculum?
The curriculum is an authoritative prescription for the course of study of a school or system of schools. In their traditional form, such prescriptions set out the content to be covered at a grade level or in a course or sequences of courses, along with recommended or prescribed methods of teaching. In their contemporary form such prescriptions have been re-presented as national and state standards, outlining outcomes to be achieved by schools without prescribing the specific bodies of content to be covered or methods of teaching to be used.
However, most scholars who evaluate these curricula do not believe that direct the work of schools in significant ways. Curricula-as-documents are more often than not developed after the fact, and are based on existing practices of teachers or a simple listing of the content of textbooks being used. Further, many teachers are not familiar with the curriculum their district has mandated.
05 13th, 2008 Career and technical education foundation ( CTE )
The Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE) is the largest national education association dedicated to the advancement of education that prepares youth and adults for careers.
Some of the foundations guiding principles are:
Lifelong Learning
Inclusiveness
Competitiveness
Continuous Improvement
The point of focus for the work of the CTE Foundation it to support the efforts of the Association of Career and Technical Education (ACTE) to provide leadership in preparing an educated, prepared, adaptable and competitive workforce. The CTE Foundation works in close association with the ACTE to develop partnerships that will help to transform the ACTE purpose into reality by providing financial and technical resources to support students, teachers and administrators in career and technical education.
05 12th, 2008 The problem with middle schools
One particularly puzzling problem that plagued junior high schools and continues to plague middle schools is what Samuel H. Popper termed being “a school without teachers”. Because of the lack of teacher education programs and licensure that focus on the middle school level, the majority of young adolescents are taught by teachers who prepared for a career as an elementary or high school teacher. Fewer than one in four middle-grades teachers have received specialized training to teach at the middle level before they begin their careers. As a result, teachers who wind up teaching in middle schools, even those who discover that they enjoy teaching middle school students, find themselves woefully unprepared to work with this age group.
05 7th, 2008 Boarding schools and sex addiction
Sex addiction is one of the disorders that boarding schools are good at managing until it disappears. Sexual addiction and sexual deviance in general involves lust and craving. These feeling are caused by the environment that the teen is at, television shows, magazines and unsupervised used of the internet and probably all media because sex sells.
Boarding schools, almost all of them are non-coed which means that girls only spend time with girls and boys with boys except for supervised activities. This is a good thing, because if they spend most o their time doing positive and constructive activities with the same gender and not being brainwashed by the media, they would surely learn to value themselves more and learn to control their urges.