This Is What My Life Has Been Life With Chronic Pain

The Beginning of the End of Education

The human being and the computer will soon become inseparable.

IPads to Replace Textbooks for California Students
Year-long trial underway for 400 eighth-graders
By Albert Roman
Epoch Times Staff

The 400 participants are from four school districts throughout California, including Long Beach, Riverside, Fresno, and San Francisco. (Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images)
LOS ANGELES—With the dawn of iBooks in January 2010, it was only a matter of time until Apple and textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) crossed paths.

HMH has created a full curriculum Algebra App for the iPad, called HMH Fuse, and wants to test its effectiveness.

Last week, HMH along with California Secretary of Education Bonnie Reiss, Long Beach Unified School District Superintendent Christopher Steinhauser, and Algebra 1 textbook author Edward Burger, Ph.D., met at Washington Middle School in Long Beach to announce the start of a year-long trial involving eighth-grade Algebra 1 students who have swapped their textbooks for customized iPads.

The 400 participants are from four school districts throughout California, including Long Beach, Riverside, Fresno, and San Francisco.

Participating teachers have one randomly selected class using the iPads while their other classes continue using the textbook version of the same material.

"Students can receive feedback on practice questions, write and save notes, receive guided instruction, access video lessons, and more with the touch of a finger," according to a recent press release.

"As the digital age reaches our classrooms it will transform education allowing for teaching our students in ways not before imagined, and California is poised to lead the way," said Secretary of Education Bonnie Reiss. "This pilot project represents an important step toward embracing a more interactive learning environment that will help our fantastic teachers and school leaders meet the changing needs of California’s students in the 21st-Century economy," said Ms. Reiss in the press release.

Despite the general positivity from the product maker and educators, skeptics wonder if the interactive technology, with all of its features, will be effective or a distraction for teens.

Results of the research findings are expected by fall 2011.

The Tree

"The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree, and it is therefore not surprising that the unconscious of the present-day man, who no longer feels at home in his world and can base his existence neither on the past that is no more nor on the future that is yet to be, should hark back to the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven -- the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible. It seems as if it were only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own "existence' and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger."
-Carl Jung Aspects of the Feminine

David Brooks is a bitch

Just saying, he's an emasculated piece of shit.

David Brooks is a bitch

Just saying, he's an emasculated piece of shit.

On a Park Bench in Roxbury

"The saddest thing I ever did see
Was a woodpecker pecking on a plastic tree
'Friend' said he to me,
Things just ain't as sweet as they used to be"

Saddest Thing I Have Ever Read

"In the 1970s a Japanese photographer, Keiki Haginoya, undertook what was to be a lifelong project to compile a photo documentary of children’s play on the streets of Tokyo. He gave up the project in 1996, noting that the spontaneous play and laughter that once filled the city’s streets, alleys and vacant lots had utterly vanished"

From "Playtime Is Over" by David Elkind
New York Times Op-Ed March 26th, 2010