In 2016, an academic revolution will take place with the College Board’s implementation of a reformed SAT. The College Board asserts that the changed test puts a “continued emphasis on reasoning alongside a clearer, stronger focus on the knowledge, skills and understandings most important for college and career readiness and success.” Students, teachers and parents alike are wondering what these new changes will entail [...]
Why do we go see action movies? Is it for excellent story lines that just so happen to be supplemented by spectacular explosions? Given that the American Chemical Society (ACS), in a video from their online Reactions series, calls explosions “Hollywood’s go-to distraction from a bad plot,” the answer is probably no. Critics like to poke fun at producer Michael Bay for his reliance on pyrotechnics in [...]
When I say dictionary, what comes to mind? Perhaps you think of the stuffy, outdated tomes pushed into the back corners of a bookshelf in the local library. But did you know that dictionaries are constantly changing, adapting, and adding new words and phrases to their vast word lists? The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is one such publication. The OED makes regular quarterly updates to its dictionaries, and [...]
“It may seem crazy what I’m about to say,” but Pharrell Williams will be releasing a children’s book in September. Williams is working with G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of the Penguin Group USA, to create a series of four books. The first is inspired by his platinum hit song “Happy.” The book will feature photos of children all around the world and what they feel [...]
New efforts are always being forged to bridge the education gap between developed and developing countries—including the idea of a digital library. While helping to rebuild Haiti after a major earthquake in 2010, Rebecca McDonald noticed a palpable lack of access to books in schools all over the country. She decided there and then that something had to be done, and thus the [...]
Traveling is a hassle no matter how you do it, but trust me, it could be so much worse. You could be traveling with an instrument. Throughout middle school, I played a cello nearly my size that I lugged back and forth to school, often by school bus. It was unwieldy and obtrusive and could never decide if it wanted to fit in [...]
Like many kids in my generation, I grew up on Harry Potter. My mom read the first few books to me at bedtime until I started reading them on my own. She continued reading the books too, and we talked about them together as I grew up. Until I came to college and heard criticism from writing professors for citing the series as [...]
It’s no secret that college graduates are entering a competitive workforce. Seniors spend their last semester polishing resumes, scouring the internet for job listings and preparing for interviews. However, many employers are beginning to notice a substantial gap between the knowledge with which graduates leave college and the skills that are required for entry-level positions. A new slew of programs offering nanodegrees, a [...]
For the fall of 2014, 49.8 million students were predicted to have attended public elementary and secondary schools in the United States. Of these students, all were expected to be absent on the same day: Thanksgiving. In other countries, of course, this was to be a normal school day. But different holidays aren’t the only variances that can be seen between school days [...]
I owe a lot of who I am to Maplewood, New Jersey, the small town where I grew up. A 30-minute drive from New York City, this diverse, artistic and socially conscious community fostered my passions for creative writing and social activism. I loved to read at the library a short distance from my house, listened when friends with different experiences of race [...]