The ongoing (but maybe soon to end?) teachers' strike in Chicago is being viewed by many as an early skirmish in a coming war over the crisis in public education—stagnant or declining graduation rates, substandard educations, dilapidated schools, angry teachers, underserved students. There is one simple step that…
That back-to-school chill is in the air, except in Chicago, where 26,000 public school teachers and support staff are on strike and more than 350,000 students are just fucking off all day instead of learning. Even though Chicago is a dull provincial city of little national import, everybody is talking about the strike…
The trial of former Texas high school teacher Brittni Colleps took a turn for the weird and uncomfortable today, when jurors were shown a tape of Colleps allegedly having sex with four of her students at the same time. In other words, a tape of just your average after-school Texas study session.
Teachers have been responding to our request yesterday for more examples of queer questions from New York's English Language Arts test, which was administered last week to third- through eighth-graders across the state. As a follow-up to the infamous talking pineapple, we have a gardening dog.
On Friday, we heard about the nonsensical question involving a talking pineapple that was featured on the New York State English Language Arts test, which was recently administered to grades three through eight. But according to a letter that one angry New York City principal sent to the state education commissioner…
Add up all the time you spent doing homework. What would you say: a million billion hours? Roughly a trillion bazillion hours doing homework, over the course of your life? Well, as it turns out, it was a complete waste of your time:
One of the most delightful products of our industrial farming system is "pink slime," aka "lean, finely textured beef," a slurry of ammonia-treated cow byproducts mixed into ground beef as a filler. It's widely used in school lunches because growing children should get three servings of slime-based food per day. But…
It's a great time to sell regular-sized furniture and label it "kid-sized," according to a recent CNN.com report.
If your parents like to pull the annoying ol' "when I was a kid, we trudged five miles in the snow to get to school because we were tough (unlike you kids nowadays)" act, this video of Chinese schoolkids braving icy rivers and risking fatal falls just to make it to class will put them in their place.
In hindsight, it's regrettable that nobody believed 15-year-old Julio Artuz when he told them he was being bullied and humiliated by one of his teachers. People believe him now, though, because Artuz used his cellphone-video machine to catch his orange-shirted teacher in the act.
Artuz, who attends Bankbridge…
Fourteen-year-old Brian Thompson was handcuffed, placed in a cop car, and suspended from school for 10 days, all because he ran down the sidelines at half-time during a football game while wearing a banana costume. At least he wasn't arrested!
Since this is Back to School time, we asked for all of your horror stories from those school days, school days, good old golden rule days. We were shocked by the number of gross, embarrassing, depressing, and hilarious tales that we got. But there can only be one winner.
Oh, the day after Labor Day is such torture. Work gets busy again, the weather starts to get crappy, and you can't even wear your favorite white shoes anymore. But at least you aren't back in school like all the kids in America! Let's celebrate by sharing our worst stories of those school daze.
Today we laughed at all the chumps and suckers (chuckers? sumps?) who waste their time at film school. But wait, is that unfair? Is it a waste of time? Well, that depends, reasoned one commenter.
A freak bolt of lightning hit a school in northwest Uganda, killing a teacher and 22 students and injuring 51 more, all between the ages of 7 and 16. The building had no lightning rod to ground strikes.
A public preschool in a liberal part of Stockholm has created an environment where gendered pronouns are not used, the children are referred to as "friends" instead of "boys and girls," and toys are deliberately gender neutral. Sounds crazy!
Big Bear High School in California has recalled all of its students' yearbooks after it was discovered that photos of child porn were published in the yearbook by mistake. If students don't return the book, they'll be in danger of being arrested for possessing kiddie porn. Zoinks!
A school employee from New Jersey promised students that Lady Gaga would give the kids a talk about bullying via the internet. So she did what any reasonable person with absolutely no access to Lady Gaga would do after making a promise she could not keep: She hired a Lady Gaga impersonator!
Maybe the "don't try to force students to sell drugs for you" page had been torn out of Anthony Davis' "How to Be a Successful Student Aide" handbook, because that's what he allegedly went ahead and did.
There are ways to summon magical beings: A tooth under the pillow summons the tooth fairy. Clapping saves Tinkerbell. And a gymnasium full of school children line dancing to "Move Your Body" guarantees that Beyoncé shows up. Here's another video of stiletto-clad Beyoncé materializing during a "Move Your Body"…
