Classrooms for all

The New York Times Magazine last week had an interesting piece on new science indicating that physical exercise mitigates anger.  The science here is new only in the sense that this is a study that clearly indicates this link, but as others have written over the years, the link between physical activity (and sleep) and [...]

Hampshire County, MA, home of South Hadley

The DA’s  Office in South Hadley, Massachusetts has returned felony charges against a number of students who, through their campaign of bullying, drove a 15-year-old to commit suicide in January. Elizabeth Scheibel at a press conference yesterday that “the investigation revealed a relentless activity directed toward Phoebe, designed to [...]

While looking for something else on the web, I stumbled across an article from last week in one of the little local free newspapers that cover the region. It seems that one of the three Middle Schools in town had an incident last Monday where someone found some sort of note in a bathroom threatening [...]

Yesterday, Maine voters narrowly repealed our recent law allowing same-sex marriage.
It is a travesty of human rights for some people to define how other families should live, and I am suffering an election hangover this morning. Lots of us are. But, according to poll data, not quite enough of us. It is heart breaking and [...]

Macon, over at Stuff White People Do, picked up on the ABC show “What Would You Do?“, specifically an episode on racism in public settings and how people respond. It is in some ways reminiscent of some early ‘instigation research’ where researchers purposefully instigated some conflict to see how people would respond.

Macon tackles the issues [...]

Well there’s been altogether too much sensationalization about Rihanna and Chris Brown.
But are we now getting some rational thought on it instead off the victim-blaming tripe churned out by the likes of Kanye West?
Other victims of domestic and dating violence are now feeling that they need to publicly tell their stories to set the public [...]

NPR did a short piece on ‘sexting‘ yesterday on All Things Considered. They opened with two 16-year-old girls who took a cell-phone picture of themselves naked together. One girl had erased the pic, the other sent it to a friend and, after one thing led to another, everyone at school had it on their phones, [...]

According to data collected by Hunter College with the Human Rights Campaign, men are 12 when they first think they might be gay or bisexual. Women are 16 when they first think they might be lesbian or bisexual. By the time LGB people hit college age, they have, on average, had sex with someone of [...]

The Rand Corporation, subcontracted to the California Endowment, has released a big study of inequities for boys and young men of color in California. Much of it is statistical evidence of what we already know: compared to white boys, boys of color have much lower educational attainment, grow up around more violence (exposure to violence [...]

So what do our children see and play with in today’s world? On TV, there is a Homeland Security reality program on ABC (yep, Disney owns that one too). Propaganda? The executive producer says it pretty clearly:
“I love investigative journalism, but that’s not what we’re doing,” he told The Reporter. “This show is heartening. It [...]