Sunday, December 21, 2014



From just two hours a week to a relentless 14, after-school workloads across the globe

A new study reveals just how much time teenagers spend on their homework across the globe.

According to a brief from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, homework varies drastically from country to country, with the average 15-year-old American spending six hours a week on it in 2012 and those in Korea and Finland spending less than three.

In Shanghai, students tend to be burdened with the most time-consuming assignments, with the average teen spending about 14 hours a week on them - or two hours every single night.

Also on the high end of the spectrum is Russia, where students spend about ten hours a week on homework.

According to the study, the amount of time teens spend on homework has decreased since 2003 in most countries - apart from in Austria, where it has increased slightly.

In the U.S., the average amount of time spent on homework has remained roughly the same at six hours for the past ten years.

'The decline in time spent doing homework might be the result of changing patterns in how students use their free time, reflecting, for example, the growing importance of the Internet and computers in adolescents’ lives,' reads the study.

'It might also be the result of changes in teachers’ ideas about whether to assign homework, and how much is enough or too much.'

The report found that students from socio-economically advantaged backgrounds and those who attend socio-economically advantaged schools tend to spend more time doing homework.

This led researchers to question whether homework reinforces the existing performance gap between students from differing backgrounds.

The study reads: 'The bottom line: Homework is another opportunity for learning; but it may also reinforce disparities in student achievement.

'Schools and teachers should look for ways to encourage struggling and disadvantaged students to complete their homework.'

SOURCE






High School: Islamic Vocabulary Lesson Part of Common Core Standards

Parents in Farmville, North Carolina want to know why their children were given a Common Core vocabulary assignment in an English class that promoted the Prophet Muhammad and the Islamic faith.

“It really caught me off guard,” a Farmville Central High School student who was in the class told me. “If we are not allowed to talk about any other religions in school – how is this appropriate?”

The Islamic vocabulary worksheet was assigned to seniors.

“I was reading it and it caught me off guard,” the student told me. “I just looked at it and knew something was not right – so I emailed the pages to my mom.”

“In the following exercises, you will have the opportunity to expand your vocabulary by reading about Muhammad and the Islamic word,” the worksheet read.

The lesson used words like astute, conducive, erratic, mosque, pastoral, and zenith in sentences about the Islamic faith.

“The zenith of any Muslim’s life is a trip to Mecca,” one sentence read. For “erratic,” the lesson included this statement: “The responses to Muhammad’s teachings were at first erratic. Some people responded favorably, while other resisted his claim that ‘there is no God but Allah and Muhammad his Prophet.”

Another section required students to complete a sentence:  “There are such vast numbers of people who are anxious to spread the Muslim faith that it would be impossible to give a(n)___ amount.”

I spoke to one parent who asked not to be identified. She was extremely troubled by what her child was exposed to in the classroom.

“What if right after Pearl Harbor our educational system was talking about how great the Japanese emperor was?” the parent asked. “What if during the Cold War our educational system was telling students how wonderful Russia was?”

The parent said the material was classwork disguised as Islamic propaganda.  “It’s very shocking,” she said. “I just told my daughter to read it as if it’s fiction. It’s no different than another of fictional book you’ve read.”

A spokesman for Pitt County Schools defended the lesson – noting that it came from a state-adopted supplemental workbook and met the “Common Core standards for English Language Arts.”

“The course is designed to accompany the world literature text, which emphasizes culture in literature,” the statement read.

The problem is it’s emphasizing a specific culture and religion – and the school district acknowledged there were concerns “related to the religious nature of sentences providing vocabulary words in context.”

“Our school system understands all concerns related to proselytizing, and there is no place for it in our instruction,” the statement goes on to say. “However, this particular lesson was one of many the students in this class have had and will have that expose them to the various religions and how they shape cultures throughout the world.”

I asked the school district to provide me with a copy of vocabulary worksheets that promoted the Jewish, Hindu and Christian faiths.  The school district did not reply.

I also asked for the past or future dates when the students would be given those vocabulary worksheets.  The school district has yet to reply.

The student I spoke with told me they have not had any other assignments dealing with religion – other than the one about Islam.  Why is that not surprising?

Based on its official statement, Pitt County Schools seems confident that the vocabulary lessons are in compliance with three Common Core standards related to literary. If you want to look up those standards, reference CCSSELA-Literary L11-12.4.A, 12.4.D and 12.6.

Since the Common Core folks seem to be infatuated with sentence completion – let me try one out on them.  Use “Islamic” and “proselytizing” in the following sentence: Somebody got their ____ hand caught in the ____ cookie jar.

SOURCE






More 'Tolerance' From Stalinist Universities

Honestly, sometimes leftist thought police surprise even me, not so much with their unreasonableness, extremism and tyrannical tactics but with their brazenness in openly showing who they are. Each new day's headlines trump yesterday's.

A few weeks ago, Fox News' Todd Starnes reported on a Marquette University student's encounter with his ethics instructor. The professor, Cheryl Abbate, was leading her "Theory of Ethics" class in a discussion about the application of philosophical theories to controversial political issues.

Among the issues listed on the blackboard were gay rights, gun rights and the death penalty. Professor Abbate removed gay rights from the list before the discussion began, with the summary explanation, "We all agree on this."

This puzzled the student, as he certainly did not agree with his instructor's view on the issue and believed it should have been open for discussion along with the other issues. He approached Abbate after class and expressed his opinion that the class should have been allowed to discuss gay rights.

The student recorded his conversation with Abbate without her permission or knowledge. Questions concerning the impropriety of that secret recording aside, the substance of the recorded exchange is illuminating.

The student asked, "Are you saying if I don't agree with gays not being allowed to get married that I'm homophobic?"  The teacher said, "I'm saying it would come off as a homophobic comment in this class."  After further discussion, Abbate said, "You don't have a right in this class (an ethics class) especially to make homophobic comments."

When the student persisted that he is not homophobic and that the professor was restricting his rights and individual liberties, Abbate shot back: "You can have whatever opinions you want, but I will tell you right now, in this class homophobic comments, racist comments, sexist comments will not be tolerated. If you don't like it, you are more than free to drop this class."

The student took her up on the offer and dropped the class. His complaint with university officials went nowhere.

As totalitarian and censorial as Abbate's behavior was, what followed was arguably worse.

Marquette professor John McAdams learned about the incident and expressed his strong disapproval on his blog, Marquette Warrior. McAdams wrote: "Like the rest of academia, Marquette is less and less a real university. And when gay marriage cannot be discussed, certainly not a Catholic university."

Boy, did McAdams step in it. It's not just university students whose speech is suppressed there. On Dec. 16, McAdams received a letter from the dean relieving him of his teaching duties, saying he was under investigation and banned from campus.

To get a flavor of the terse three-paragraph letter, take a look at the first sentence of the final paragraph from Dean Richard C. Holz: "You are to remain off campus during this time, and should you need to come to campus, you are to contact me in writing beforehand to explain the purpose of your visit, to obtain my consent and to make appropriate arrangements for that visit."

In its letter to McAdams, the university did not specify the charges against him, but President Michael R. Lovell wrote a letter to the campus community and said: "This is a matter of official policy, but it's also a matter of our values. Respect is at the heart of our commitment to the Jesuit tradition and Catholic social teaching. ... The university will not tolerate personal attacks or harassment of or by students, faculty and staff. ... We deplore hatred and abuse directed at a member of our community in any format."

There you have it. We have a professor at a university (a Catholic one, no less) — an institution ostensibly dedicated to intellectual and academic inquiry and the free flow of ideas and expression — prohibiting certain relevant views from even being discussed in the classroom, encouraging a dissenting student to drop the class if he doesn't approve of the Stalinist tactics, and casting opposing views as "hatred."

Then we have another professor who expresses his strong dissent of such Stalinist practices and is consequently subjected to worse Stalinist practices in the form of being summarily suspended from his duties and banned from the campus as if he were a serial felon or known terrorist.

Do leftists even pretend to be intellectually open and behaviorally tolerant anymore? If they do, will anyone take them seriously?

Defenders of these abominably indefensible actions will tell you, indignantly, that they give no quarter to those who are intolerant. But what they mean is that they are militantly intolerant of people who express views different from their own, even if the people expressing those views are highly respectful of everyone concerned.

What scares me more than the left's deliberate muzzling of people's expression is that it's doing so with an air of moral superiority, coupled with a perfect blindness to the perniciousness of its actions, its overt hypocrisy and its moral bankruptcy.

The enemies of liberty and tolerance continue their scorched-earth oppression of their political opponents under the fraudulent banners of tolerance and liberty — and it is truly sickening and highly disturbing.

SOURCE



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