Stephen's Untold Stories

Hilarious newscast where they re-create a bear sighting with a cardboard cutout of a bear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOKHlWAp4No

Think again.

I wonder how long they practiced this.

Pretty good stuff here.

“Why are you here, soldier?

“I’m here because I’m bored!”

“Don’t you ever forget that.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHY8NKj3RKs

That’s what this 13-year-old did. Very funny observations for those of us who grew up with the walkman.

When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks, a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that made me a little embarrassed.

As I boarded the school bus, where I live in Aberdeenshire, I was greeted with laughter. One boy said: “No-one uses them any more.” Another said: “Groovy.” Yet another one quipped: “That would be hard to lose.”

My friends couldn’t imagine their parents using this monstrous box, but there was interest in what the thing was and how it worked.

In some classes in school they let me listen to music and one teacher recognised it and got nostalgic.

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn’t is “shuffle”, where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly – effective, if a little laboured.

Read the full review here.

Looks pretty accurate to me.

Pretty funny stuff!

http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=7672

I don’t normally read the Huffington Post, but this one made me laugh.

In what many are describing as an upset victory of unprecedented proportions, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated the Pittsburgh Penguins last night to win the 2009 Stanley Cup, Iran’s Interior Ministry announced today.

According to the ministry, which Mr. Ahmadinejad runs, the Iranian hard-liner defeated the Penguins by a score of 6-0, scoring two hat tricks in the victory.

But Penguins star Evgeni Malkin immediately disputed Mr. Ahmadinejad’s claim, arguing that the Iranian president did not even appear in the game.

Mr. Ahmadinejad scoffed at Mr. Malkin’s charge, stating, “He’s just pissed that I was named MVP.”

The Iranian president took time out from celebrating his Stanley Cup win to announce that he had just been named Poet Laureate of England.

Link to article.

Expect to see more and more of this.

Math students in this high-performing school district used to rush through their Algebra I textbooks only to spend the first few months of Algebra II relearning everything they forgot or failed to grasp the first time.

So the district’s frustrated math teachers decided to rewrite the algebra curriculum, limiting it to about half of the 90 concepts typically covered in a high school course in hopes of developing a deeper understanding of key topics. Last year, they began replacing 1,000-plus-page math textbooks with their own custom-designed online curriculum; the lessons are typically written in Westport and then sent to a program in India, called HeyMath!, to jazz up the algorithms and problem sets with animation and sounds.

“In America, we run through chapters like a speeding train,” said John Dodig, the principal of the 1,728-student Staples High School here. “Schools in Singapore and India spend more time on each topic, and their kids do better. We’re boiling down math to the essentials.”

That means Westport students focus only on linear functions in Algebra I, taught in seventh, eighth or ninth grade depending on student ability, and leave quadratics and exponents to Algebra II, eliminating the overlap and repetition typical of most textbooks and curriculum guidelines. Westport has also scaled back exercises like long formal proofs in geometry, revising lessons and homework assignments to teach students to defend their answers to math problems as a matter of routine rather than repeatedly writing them out.

Westport’s curriculum overhaul joins other recent critiques of mile-wide, inch-deep instruction in the long-running math wars within American education. In 2006, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics called for a tighter focus on basic math skills. Two years later, a federal panel appointed by President George W. Bush urged that pre-kindergarten to eighth-grade math curriculums be streamlined after finding that math achievement for American students was at “a mediocre level” compared with that of their peers worldwide.

Westport school officials say their less-is-more approach has already resulted in less review in math classes, higher standardized test scores and more students taking advanced math classes. The percentage of the district’s 10th graders receiving top scores on state exams rose to 86 percent last year from 78 percent in 2006. Advanced Placement calculus and statistics classes enrolled 231 students this year, from 170 in 2006, and a record 44 students will be able to take multivariable calculus this fall, up from four in 2006.

But while Westport’s new approach has attracted interest in the math education world, the vast majority of schools in Connecticut and elsewhere continue to race through dozens of math topics in each grade because of concerns that cutting back could hurt student performance on state assessments and SATs.

Hank Kepner, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, said that most schools choose among prepackaged math curriculums, which have to be expansive enough to meet wide-ranging standards for every state, and that he had not heard of another district trying to write its own.

“I give them kudos for trying it,” he said. “But I’m worried that not many districts will have the amount of support needed to pull off a new curriculum and sustain it.”

Read the rest here.

Hey Hey Hey!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFDBW7Xgagg

Okay, this looks like a lot of fun….NOT!!

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2009/05/25/nat.uk.cheese.rolling.itn

I’ll let you guess which one applies to me!

Very funny video from my Alma Mater, Berry College.

Be careful!

The last frame made me almost jump out of my seat!