Now a school in California is planning to make major changes into practices that have for so long been the mainstay of most classrooms.

Among the forces behind the school are the findings that over the past 30 years or so, boys have started trailing girls in reading, writing, grades, test scores and overall motivation. In 1966, men earned 61 percent of the college diplomas in the United States, but are expected to earn only 39 percent by 2019.

East Bay School for Boys isn't the only new school to take on boys' education. Public, private and charter schools for boys are blossoming throughout much of the United States, according to the International Boys School Coalition.

The Pacific Boychoir Academy in Oakland, an all-boys school that opened seven years ago, tailored its curriculum to boys. History classes focus on conflicts and action, teachers might cover four lessons instead of two in a 50-minute period in order to keep students interested, and boys get plenty of opportunities to run around.

There is, of course, no reason why girls may also not benefit from changes of this sort. Even though girls may be more accepting of restrictions, sitting quietly and passively at a desk for long stretches of time is probably not the best formula for most children. It seems sensible if the education setting were revamped to maximize the abilities and performance of all children.

If you would like to read more about this topic, go to
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/08/16/BA371ESO38.DTL&type=education#ixzz0wlV35UhB

How is a healthy person like the United States?
They both have good constitutions!

What quacks, has webbed feet, and betrays his country?
Beneduck Arnold!

What kind of tea did the American colonists thirst for?
Liberty

What was General Washington's favorite tree?
The infantry!

What protest by a group of dogs occurred in 1773?
The Boston Flea Party!

What happened as a result of the Stamp Act?
The Americans licked the British!

What ghost haunted King George III?
The spirit of '76!

Did you hear about the cartoonist in the Continental Army?
He was a Yankee doodler!

Why did Paul Revere ride his horse from Boston to Lexington?
Because the horse was too heavy to carry!

What would you get if you crossed a patriot with a small curly-haired dog?
Yankee Poodle!

Did you hear the one about the Liberty Bell?
Yeah, it cracked me up!

What did one flag say to the other flag?
Nothing. It just waved!

What dance was very popular in 1776?
Indepen-dance!

What march would you play at a jungle parade?
"Tarzan Stripes Forever"!

Why is the Liberty Bell like a dropped Easter egg?
Because they're both cracked!

What was the craziest battle of the Revolutionary War?
The Battle of Bonkers Hill.

The study also found that, on average, low-income households spend more than twice as much of their before-tax income than high-income households do. Low-income families -- those who make a before-tax income of less than $56,670 -- spend 25% of their income on raising a child, while high-income households -- those who make a before-tax income of more than $98,120 -- spend just 12% of their income on child-rearing.

For more information, go to http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/expendituresonchildrenbyfamilies.htm

It is generally accepted that more future jobs will require advanced education. For example, in 1973, nine percent of jobs required a bachelor’s degree. By 2018, that figure is expected to be 23 percent. But the report finds that colleges are not doing enough to prepare their students for the projected workforce.

At the same time, it is expected that many positions will require less training than is currently demanded. For example, nearly half of education administrators today have a master's degree, and 13 percent have a doctorate in education. The bureau, however, predicts that education administrators will typically require no more than a bachelor's degree in 2018. Similarly, 43 percent of nuclear technicians have at least a bachelor's degree, and sometimes a more advanced degree. But the prediction is that in 2018 typically there will be no need for anything past an associate's degree.

The changes will also have significant effects on income. The prediction is that as more people obtain post secondary degrees, it will become more difficult for them to join the middle and upper income classes.

The report covers a range of critical questions about the emerging economy, including:
• When will the jobs come back?
• Where will the jobs be? Which states? Which industries? Which occupations?
• What post secondary certificates and degrees will be required?
• Will the education system be able to keep up?
• How much will it cost to fund the post secondary education America needs?

If you would like to access the full report, go to http://cew.georgetown.edu/jobs2018/

That was the happy message in a recent email I received from a parent of an eight year old. The family had come to see me about a range of reading and writing problems that the child had been experiencing since kindergarten. Like so many other families, they were delighted and amazed at how easy it was to achieve smooth handwriting.

Before answering that question, it' s useful to step back and get an overview of the current scene. Unfortunately, it is one where the teaching of handwriting receives almost no attention. To the degree that anything is done, the focus typically is on the shapes (i.e., the letters) that the child has to produce.

There is near-total neglect of another component of the process--namely, the motor skills involved. Since children seem to be effectively doing all kinds of things with their hands (including the dexterous handling of video games), there seems to be no reason to question their ability to produce the movements required for clear, accurate letters.

But handwriting demands the integration of a host of fine motor skills. And the process is usually is called upon when the children are six or under. That is an age when the development of fine motor skills is far from complete. Under these conditions, problems are inevitable. The children do the best they can--but the best is a poorly coordinated series of movements that then continue to plague them their entire lives.

Once the motor realm receives the focus it merits, we have the opportunity to expand beyond the sole concentration on shapes and seek ways to ease the motor requirements.

And so now we return to the parent's happy report. She had been carrying out one of the most effective ways to advance handwriting. Specifically, the adult supports the child's hand as the child executes the movements. Ideally, this support should be provided from the outset; that is, when the demand for handwriting first begins around kindergarten time. Depending upon the child's motor skills, the support can be minimal (i.e., placing your hand under the child's wrist and lightly supporting it as the child executes the movements) or it can be more intensive (i.e., placing your hand under the child's palm so that the hand itself is supported).

Generally, the support does not have to be provided for long. If it is available right at the beginning of the process, most children within two to three months can then work effectively on their own. If the child is older so that poor patterns are in place, it may take a while longer.

Ironically, although the solution is simple and effective, the resistance to it is enormous. Parents often respond with an almost visceral rejection, insisting that their child "can do it on his own." The children too often echo the same idea. This changes only when they allow themselves to see the dramatically different handwriting productions achieved with and without hand support. Deep emotional reactions of this sort ought to be studied--since invariably they yield insight into the unconscious forces behind what we do. But having --or not having -- that insight should not keep us from helping our children. Hand support is a simple and effective way of getting past many of the problems that haunt the lives of children as they cope with the handwriting demands of school and homework.

You can read more about handwriting issues in The Reading Remedy.
http://www.phonicsplusfive.com/readingremedy.php

Now it seems appropriate to mention their opposite number who, while not in the auditorium, were nevertheless on the scene. They took the form of a tiny group of activists who gathered outside the National Spelling Bee. Their goal: phonetic spelling.

This is by no means a new battle. Many decades back, George Bernard Shaw, the renowned Irish playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, made the same point--in dramatic fashion--when he took the word fish and justified spelling it as ghoti. He explained that he took the gh sound as f from the word enough, the o sound as i from the word women, and the ti sound as sh from the word nation.

The protesters claim that the cost of clinging to traditional spellings is millions of illiterate English speakers who struggle to read signs or get good jobs, and billions of dollars in lost productivity. Interestingly, technology may do what years of intellectual arguments have failed to do. Specifically, with instant messaging, kids are bringing phonetic spelling center stage. This is in keeping with how language operates.Once people begin to use language in certain ways, those ways take hold--no matter what the "official rules" say. So, It will be interesting to see how this plays out in writing in the years ahead.

This week, these unusual folks had a chance to immerse themselves in their favorite activity via the popular Scripps National Spelling Bee contest. And the winner? Fourteen year-old Anamika Veeramani from Ohio who won by spelling the word "stromuhr" correctly. Wondering what that set of letters might mean?

If you would like to delve a bit more into this arena--and expand your vocabulary at the same time, here are the words that got the ten semi-finalists within reach of the top.

scrannel -- a term fo thin or harsh (probably of Norwegian origin)

matsutake --a type of mushroom

rhabdomyoma - a benign tumor of striated muscle.

brumalia -- an ancient Roman solstice festival honoring Dionysus, generally held on guess what--the 25th of December.

leguleian-- lawyerlike

villicus --a slave who served as the superintendence of a large estate. The word eventually got to describe a person to whom the management of any business was entrusted

bacalao -- a phantom island depicted on several early 16th century maps and nautical charts.

mirin -- a condiment used in Japanese cuisine, consisting of 40%–50% sugar

genethliac--referring to nativities; calculated by astrologers; showing position of stars at one's birth.

Bundestag--the parliament of German, established with Germany's constitution of 1949

Now, the next problem is to figure out how to remember this new information. But that is for another day.

Widow is the only female form in the English language that is shorter than its corresponding male term (widower).

Victor Hugo's Les Miserable contains one of the longest sentences in the French language 823 words without a period.

There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs five times: "indivisibility."

There is a seven letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, "therein": the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein.

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."

There are thirteen languages spoken by more than 100 million people. They are: Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, French, Japanese, German, and Urdu.

There are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today. However, about 2,000 of those languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. The most widely spoken language in the world is Mandarin Chinese. There are 885,000,000 people in China that speak that language.

There are only two sequences of four consecutive letters that can be found in the English language: "rstu" and "mnop." Examples of each are understudy and gynophobia.

There are only 4 words in the English language which end in "duos": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

There are at least two words in the English language that use all of the vowels, in the correct order, and end in the letter Y: abstemiously & facetiously.

There are 41,806 different spoken languages in the world today.

The word "queue" is the only word in the English language that is still pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed.

The word "honcho" comes from a Japanese word meaning "squad leader" and first came into usage in the English language during the American occupation of Japan following World War II.

Now a report from the HealthDay Reporter indicates that exposure to high levels of pesticides, commonly found on berries, celery and other produce, could raise the odds for children developing this condition.

Previous research had shown an association between both prenatal and postnatal pesticide exposure and developmental problems in young children. So the evidence continues to build.

There are, of course, other causes of ADHD including a family history of the condition and other prenatal risks such as tobacco exposure and alcohol exposure.

In terms of the pesticide issue, several actions are possible. They include buying organic, buying at farmers' markets and washing fruits and vegetables thoroughly before consuming them.

For more information on shielding kids from pesticides, you can go to http://www.epa.gov/

Now there is another study from England--but this one represents the "other side of the spectrum." It seems that a fifth of children now have no idea where they live - because they no longer walk to school.

By contrast, in London where driving is less common, schoolchildren were the most savvy about their local area. More than three-quarters (76 per cent) walked to school each day, 86 per cent knew their home address and 61 per cent could say their postcode.

This is one more example of the effects of living in the modern age. The conveniences of life are great. But they must be used with discretion. It's vital that parents monitor what is going on and ensure that the children get the full range of experiences needed to become effective members of the community.

To this end, Kia Motors, which commissioned the survey of 2,000 primary schoolchildren, said: "Just like a proper breakfast, walking to school is a great way for children to start the day. Not only are they more alert when they arrive at school, it is good exercise and improves children's awareness of their local area."

It would be nice if this suggestion were picked up on this side of the Atlantic as well.

And now???

He goes on to say, "In a rare convergence, conservatives and liberals basically agree on how this happened. First, the sexual revolution overturned the old order of single-earner households, early marriages, and strong stigmas against divorce and unwed motherhood. In its aftermath, the professional classes found a new equilibrium. Today, couples with college and (especially) graduate degrees tend to cohabit early and marry late, delaying childbirth and raising smaller families than their parents, while enjoying low divorce rates and bearing relatively few children out of wedlock.

For the rest of the country, this comfortable equilibrium remains out of reach. In the underclass (black, white and Hispanic alike), intact families are now an endangered species. For middle America, the ideal of the two-parent family endures, but the reality is much more chaotic: early marriages coexist with frequent divorces, and the out-of-wedlock birth rate keeps inching upward.

When it comes to drawing lessons from this story, though, the agreement between liberals and conservatives ends. The right tends to emphasize what’s been lost. They argue--using a theme that suggests you CAN go home again, that most Americans — especially the poor and working-class — would benefit from a stronger link between sex, marriage and procreation. The left argues that it’s the right-wing backlash against abortion, contraception and sex education that’s preventing downscale Americans from attaining the new upper-middle-class stability, and reaping its social and economic benefits."

A new book “Red Families v. Blue Families,” by two law professors, Naomi Cahn and June Carbone explores this issue further. They claim that a culturally conservative “red America” is stuck trying to sustain an outdated social model. By insisting--unrealistically--on chastity before marriage, the authors argue that social conservatives guarantee that their children will get pregnant early and often, resulting in teen childbirth, shotgun marriages and high divorce rates. This cycle could explain why socially conservative states have more family instability than the culturally liberal Northeast.

With the many problems facing our nation, this issue has not been receiving the attention it merits. For all of us, the way it plays out is vital to the long-term health and resilience of our nation. For those who would like to read more about the topic, go to http://www.amazon.com/Red-Families-v-Blue-Polarization/dp/0195372174

Actually, many parents who see their children struggling with basic words like "dawg" and "kat" would be delighted if their children were as far along as this child. After all, his mistakes are limited to relatively subtle details. But still, it's dismaying to see a bright, hard-working child struggling for years with spelling inaccuracies.

Some of the difficulties have been written about extensively.

But there is another major factor--and it is one that receives almost no attention. It has to do with visual processing issues in reading. For many years, visual processing dominated the discussion in reading. Indeed, problems in this realm were seen as the basis for dyslexia. Then that view was challenged, resulting in visual processing issues dropping off the radar screen. That's why, if you ask teachers today what their views are in this area, they will generally be stumped. The topic is simply not covered in their training.

As the fourth graders errors above indicated, It's clear that phonics, or sounding out, doesn't work in spelling. The vagaries of English mean that even a simple word like "come" could have several spellings (including com, cum, kum, kom, kome). To deal with this difficulty, rules--hundreds of rules-- are created. There are lots of rules for reading.(ironically the word "come" itself violates one of the most common reading rules--namely the "silent e" rule). The rules for spelling are even more numerous and more cumbersome--because they often involve the context, or placement, of the letters in the word in question. For example, children will be taught that at the start of a word, a "gh" has the "g" sound (as in "ghost") but at the end of a word, it has an "f" sound as in "enough." Except, of course, for the "exceptions" shown in the through and thorough examples above.

Aside from a rare group of children, memorization of hundreds of complex rules are not a path to spelling accuracy. Basically a person can spell (write) accurately only if he or she has the visual patterns of words solidly (and unconsciously) in their memory banks. Because no attention is paid to the visual processes involved and because all the attention goes to rule learning, the instruction typically does nothing to create this bank. It's long been known that spelling tests fail to handle the problem since they do little to achieve accurate spelling--even when the words are accurately written in the tests themselves. Nevertheless, they are a well-established, easy-to-implement technique and so they continue to dominate the scene.

Further, with the introduction of "invented spelling" (where children are encouraged to spell words in any way that seems "right" to them), guarantees were essentially put into place that for many, if not most, children, accurate spelling will not take place. Essentially, invented spelling means that during the first critical formative years of writing, no solid visual patterns are laid down. In their place is a set of "variable, inconsistent" patterns with no solid foundation. Once created, these "patterns" are difficult to dislodge.

That does not mean that the situation is hopeless. Because this issue comes up so frequently, in previous blogs such as http://blog.phonicsplusfive.com/2007/02/duz_ackurit_spelling_matir.html#more I offer exercises to establish accurate spelling. Of course, it is easier and more effective to put these practices in place when a child first starts to read. But, with a bit more diligence, they can also be used with children who are further along in the process.

"A bad habit never disappears miraculously; it's an undo-it-yourself project."
– Abigail Van Buren

"Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
– Steve Jobs

"It's never too late to be who you might have been."
– George Eliot

"Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich."
– Sarah Bernhardt

"Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy."
– Pyotr Tchaikovsky

"If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all."
– Michelangelo

"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg."
– C. S. Lewis

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
– Albert Einstein

"If you change the way you look at things, the way you look at things changes."
- Dahlia

"We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn."
– Mary Catherine Bateson

"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading."
– Lao-Tzu

"When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge."
– Tuli Kupferberg

"I don't think I am getting smarter, I just think I am tired of making the same mistakes over and over!"
- Stephen Herman

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
– Aristotle

"Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know that so it goes on flying anyway."
– Mary Kay Ash

"The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place, but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment."
– Lady Dorothy Nevill

"Courage is very important. Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use."
– Ruth Gordon

"Parties who want milk should not seat themselves on a stool in the middle of the field in hope that the cow will back up to them."
– Elbert Hubbard

"Don't carry a grudge. While you're carrying a grudge, the other guy's out dancing."
– Buddy Hackett

"Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule."
– Samuel Butler

"Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it."
– William C. Durant

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
- Plato

"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."
– Bertrand Russell

"Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision."
– Peter Drucker

"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."
– Beverly Sills

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."
– Eleanor Roosevelt

"Life is not the way it's supposed to be. It's the way it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference."
– Virginia Satir

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."
– Albert Einstein

"Map out your future, but do it in pencil."
– Jon Bon Jovi

"When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this — you haven't."
– Thomas Edison

“You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”
- Jon Kabat-Zinn

"The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas."
– Linus Pauling

"We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn."
– Mary Catherine Bateson

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."
– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"A day of worry is more exhausting than a week of work."
– John Lubbock

"Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing until it gets there."
– Josh Billings

"It may be those who do most, dream most."
– Stephen Leacock

"I always wondered why somebody doesn't do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody."
– Lily Tomlin

"A university professor set an examination question in which he asked what is the difference between ignorance and apathy. The professor had to give an A+ to a student who answered: I don't know and I don't care."
- Richard Pratt

'Don't go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.'
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"How is it that we put man on the moon before we figured out it would be a good idea to put wheels on luggage?"
- Anonymous

"We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same."
– Carlos Castaneda

"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."
– Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Many wise words are spoken in jest, but they don't compare with the number of stupid words spoken in earnest."
- Sam Levinson

"In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock."
– Thomas Jefferson

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." - George Carlin

One of these expanded functions has included nutrition as millions of children each day consume "the school lunch." The original aim was the noble one of decreasing hunger. But now, the constituents of that lunch have seem to have contributed significantly to the rise of obesity in the nation.

As a result, Congress is now considering a bill to make certain that whatever lands on those cafeteria trays is nutritious and safe to eat.

There are several components in the Senate, but a chief one would give the Agriculture Department new powers to set nutritional standards for any food sold on school grounds, particularly junk foods that contribute to obesity. It would expand the use of local farm products, organic food and school gardens, and require the government to notify schools more quickly about tainted foods.

The driving force behind the House bill is Representative George Miller, a California Democrat, who is expected to ask for stronger food safety regulations. He also seeks more money for fighting childhood hunger and obesity, especially in the schools.

Though its focus is on the school, this bill has major health care implications. Better childhood nutrition is essential to one's long term health. A wise bill could improve what millions of young Americans eat every day — and improve their chances of a healthy life.