Archive for the ‘the future’ Category

Geo catching

This is a good little news item: Goecaching—21st Century treasure hunting using GPS—caused a scare in Peekskill because  the cache, a plastic pipe, looked like, guess what, a pipe bomb. In the game, GPS-using hunters find the chaches and add something to them to show they were there, then hide the thing again. The Peekskill Patch story says the cache was probably washed near train tracks by Hurricane Irene. And a link in it shows this isn’t the first scare the caches have caused.

Is it our games or our fears we should worry about?

Troubled homework

When I wrote about homework in the Pelham Patch in June, I mainly focused on the meaningless minimums set by some school districts, including ours in Pelham. This piece from the Sunday New York Times, by a writer expert in the science of learning, points out how important quality is over quantity. The techniques, developed by studying how “children absorb, retain and apply knowledge,” make homework smarter. I’m for that.

WHEN you think of America’s students, do you picture overworked, stressed-out children bent under backpacks stuffed with textbooks and worksheets? Or do you call to mind glassy-eyed, empty-headed teenagers sitting before computer screens, consumed by video games and social networking sites, even as their counterparts in China prepare to ace yet another round of academic exams?

via Quality Homework – A Smart Idea – NYTimes.com.