A Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, and then to football as a walk on–my goodness. Watch it all (about 5 3/4 minutes). I caught this by happenstance this morning while exercizing–deeply moving; KSH.

Caught this over the weekend, really worth the time. If you do not know the story, you need to–KSH.

The English professor, historian, author of 18 books and holder of a doctorate in American studies from the nearby College of William & Mary is one of the forces behind America’s burgeoning home-schooling movement, which is growing about 7 percent each year. The National Home Education Research Institute estimates that there were 2.04 million home-schooled children in the United States as of 2010, about 4 percent of the nation’s school-age population. That’s almost double the 1.2 million home-schooled children in 2000. A June article in U.S. News & World Report said that home-schooled children graduate from college at higher rates than their peers, earn higher GPAs and are better socialized than most high school students.

[Susan] Bauer is best known among home-schoolers for “The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home” ”” writtenwith her mother, Jessie Wise, a former teacher ”” which has sold more than half a million copies since its first publication in 1999. Classical education focuses on the great books of Western civilization, Latin, and lessons about morality and virtue, and is based on the medieval European curriculum that divided learning into the “trivium”: grammar, logic and rhetoric. The concept of fusing classical education into modern teaching was popularized by a 1947 essay by British author Dorothy Sayers called “The Lost Tools of Learning.” But it was Bauer and her mother who provided parents with a template.

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Being a pastor is bad for your health. Pastors have little time for exercise. They often eat meals in the car or at potluck dinners not known for their fresh green salads. The demands on their time are unpredictable and never ending, and their days involve an enormous amount of emotional investment and energy. Family time is intruded upon. When a pastor announces a vacation, the congregation frowns. Pastors tend to move too frequently to maintain relationships with doctors who might hold them accountable for their health. The profession discourages them from making close friends. All of this translates, studies show, into clergy having higher than normal rates of obesity, arthritis, depression, heart problems, high blood pressure, diabetes and stress.

But research also says that pastors’ lives are rich in spiritual vitality and meaning. Pastors say that they have a profound calling and are willing to sacrifice to fulfill it.

Is there a way for pastors to be both physically and spiritually healthy? What would enable clergy to become physically healthier? What effect does physical health have on spiritual well-being, if any? The Clergy Health Initiative is trying to find out the answers to these questions. Funded by the Duke Endowment, the CHI is the largest and most comprehensive effort ever made to study clergy health and to improve it.

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New Haven is home to the first and only American patent of a pedal-driven bicycle, and it’s now home to the first “Bicycle Friendly University” in Connecticut.

The League of American Bicyclists has awarded Yale a spot on its list of Bicycle Friendly Universities. The bronze-level designation extends over four years. Currently, there are 44 universities on the list, including Princeton, Cornell, and Stanford.

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Very blessed to see my alma mater at the top of the list. Good for Bowdoin.

The silence has perhaps never been more deafening at Williams-Brice Stadium than it was around 1:30 Saturday afternoon. The South Carolina and Tennessee football teams and a stadium full of fans swallowed hard and experienced a heavy heart.

Marcus Lattimore again went down with a crippling knee injury.

“When you lose a guy like Marcus, he’s such a leader on the team. Everybody loves him. He gets the guys going,” USC quarterback Connor Shaw said. “It’s so unfortunate. No one wishes that on anybody. Prayers are out for him. I know he’ll be mentally strong, and hopefully he can get back.”

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John McKissick began at Summerville High School as football coach in 1952–what was his salary that year. No fair peaking or googling, etc.

Find the answer and all the other articles after you have made your guess there.

“It feels good,” McKissick said. “It’s another win, and if it totals up to 600, that’s great. I feel good for the kids. I feel good for the boys. They can tell everyone they were part of the 600th. I think they will be proud of that.”

McKissick’s success is unmatched at any level. The all-time winningest college football coach is 86-year-old John Gagliardi of St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., who enters this weekend with 487 wins in 64 years.

Don Shula is the winningest coach in NFL history with 347.

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At school No. 20 in Russia’s troubled region of Chechnya, boys sit on one side of the classroom and girls in headscarves on the other. All are silent as the new teacher rises to speak.

“Do you say your morning prayers?” Islam Dzhabrailov, 21, asks, wearing a green prayer cap and a plain tunic, religious dress that is increasingly popular in the mountainous province in southern Russia’s mostly Muslim Caucasus region.

“It’s just as important as doing your homework,” he tells the students aged 14-15.

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Public school students are largely free to exercise their faith on campus and on the field. A player’s personal prayer in the locker room or on the bench is protected by the First Amendment.

The challenges to prayer arise when school employees and resources are involved. A high school football coach can’t lead his team in prayers. Yet a patchwork of inconsistent court decisions boils down to this: Public universities are free to hold prayers before football games as long as they only cite God and do not mention Jesus. A specific nod to Christianity would be viewed as supporting one faith over others. The theory is that a general nod to a deity serves a non-religious purpose, giving fans a moment to reflect, while not advancing a particular faith.

Public high schools, on the other hand, face greater restrictions

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On the Sunday night before his ninth week as a teacher, Daniel Ranschaert sat down to a communal dinner of tortilla casserole with his housemates. All eight of them had come to this desert city after finishing college in the Midwest. They share a rented home, modest paychecks and a commitment to educate the poor, the struggling and the striving in Tucson’s Catholic schools.

Before eating, the young teachers made the sign of the cross, clasped hands and said grace. Then, as they dug into the casserole, they talked about the test on Mesopotamia, the lesson on root words, all the things Monday morning would bring in their various classrooms. Because that day would also be Columbus Day, they slid into a conversation about the Spanish explorers and conquistadors, a tender subject in schools filled with Latino and American Indian children.

For a time, as he was finishing his studies at Wabash College in Indiana, Mr. Ranschaert had thought about going into business. He kept hearing, though, about a program created nearby at the University of Notre Dame called the Alliance for Catholic Education, which put idealistic young teachers in especially needy schools. And he recalled what his own Catholic education had meant as a bulwark in a childhood marked by his parents’ divorce and his brother’s nearly fatal liver disease….

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Talk about courting the youth vote. French President François Hollande has proposed banning homework as part of a series of policies designed to reform the French educational system.

“Education is priority,” Hollande said in a speech at Paris’s Sorbonne University. “An education program is, by definition, a societal program. Work should be done at school, rather than at home.”

The justification for this proposed ban? Inequality….

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On one side, then, we have Lewis as conflicted evangelical bully. On the other, there is the figure that the Episcopal Church in the United States celebrates as “holy C.S. Lewis” (with a feast day on 22 November). In the concomitant hagiography, his connection with Mrs Moore and his odd late marriage (famously sentimentalised in the 1993 film Shadowlands) are either silently elided or eirenically glossed; beer and tobacco fade into mere period colour.

Unsurprisingly, the man himself was more complex than either approach fully allows. Lewis was a supremely bookish man, but also a loud man, and like many loud men annoyed as many as he entertained; that aside, there were formidable, and almost wholly anonymous, practical charities (he gave away most of his income); unquantifiably great personal influence (without Lewis, Tolkien’s imaginative writing would probably have remained unpublished); and a dogged effort to live a Christian life. One non-believing acquaintance described him, after his death, as “a very good man, to whom goodness did not come easily….”

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This one-man show by David Payne gives a good feel for C.S. Lewis as a man and as a thinker.

The setting is 1963 (the last year of Lewis’s life), with Lewis addressing in his home a group of writers from America. It’s an hour and a half in length:

Watch it all and check out the other links as well.

Jeremy Hill capped his breakout game by leaping the fence dividing the field from the stands at Tiger Stadium and embracing a jubilant throng of students as they celebrated LSU’s quick ascendance back into the national title discussion.

Hill highlighted a 124-yard, two-touchdown performance with a 50-yard scoring run, and the ninth-ranked Tigers handed No. 3 South Carolina its first loss of the season, 23-21 on Saturday night.

Hill’s clutch runs, showcasing his tackle-breaking power as well as breakaway speed, were precisely what LSU needed a week after stumbling to its lone loss of the season at Florida, where the offense had been stagnant.

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A very fun game to watch played in very difficult conditions.

Because Dr. Regnerus would not be interviewed, it is impossible to know his latest views about the relationship between his faith and research. But we can still ask if, in principle, belief in the divinity of Jesus could affect one’s social science. Put another way: Is there a Christian way to crunch numbers?

“The answer, in my personal opinion, is no,” said Mark Chaves, a sociologist of religion at Duke Divinity School. But, he added, religious concerns “can very profoundly shape the kinds of questions we ask, and what we’re interested in, what we think is important and so on.” So while “in the narrowest sense it doesn’t affect his computations,” Dr. Regnerus’s Christian faith may have drawn him to questions about same-sex relationships and family structure.

And a religious worldview, like any worldview, can dispose a researcher toward certain mistakes in thinking….

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If you want to know how University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus’s summer has gone, look no further than The Weekly Standard. On the cover of the conservative magazine’s July 30 issue are two hooded henchmen impishly turning the gears on a medieval torture wheel holding Regnerus, sweating beads as he tries to stay in one piece. The cover copy”””Revenge of the Sociologists: The perils of politically incorrect academic research”””hints at the situation sparked by the publication of Regnerus’s newest research as well as the broader political discourse over same-sex marriage.

The survey, known as the New Family Structures Study (NFSS), is remarkable in its scope. It’s a random national sample, considered “the gold standard” of social science surveys. NFSS measures the economic, relational, political, and psychological effects on adults ages 18 to 39 who grew up in families where the father or mother engaged in homosexual behavior. Despite Regnerus’s repeated caution that the NFSS does not account for stable same-sex marriages (since same-sex marriage as such didn’t exist when the survey participants were children), he has undergone professional censure. Social Science Research conducted an internal audit on the peer-review process of the NFSS, and the University of Texas at Austin investigated Regnerus following allegations of “scientific misconduct.” (The school has since cleared Regnerus of the allegations.)

Regnerus agreed to an e-mail interview with Christianity Today associate editor Katelyn Beaty to set the record straight on the NFSS and its many discontents.

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Detective Doug Galluccio hadn’t finished unpacking his new desk when he got his first call from a school resource officer about a sexting incident.

A seventh-grader at C.E. Williams Middle School had taken nude photos of herself and sent them by cellphone to five male classmates. Those ended up posted online.

That was in 2010 when Galluccio became Charleston’s first full-time police officer dedicated to the Internet Crimes Against Children task force. It was his job to help investigate the incident….

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Unidentified gunmen massacred at least two dozen university students in northern Nigeria Monday night in the city of Mubi near the border with Cameroon. The attacks lasted more than an hour, with gunmen targeting specific students by name rather than indiscriminately firing.

Suspicion fell immediately on Boko Haram, a violent Islamist organization in northern Nigeria that has typically attacked Christian churches and security forces. Student leaders, meanwhile, suggested that the killings may have been tied to internal student political campaigns. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.

Aside from Boko Haram’s history of bloody attacks on civilians, the very name of the group ”“ which means “Western education is a sin” ”“ stokes suspicion of their involvement. But even if the group is found to be involved, the purpose of such an attack would not be part of some global jihad.

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More than one in 10 borrowers defaulted on their federal student loans, intensifying concern about a generation hobbled by $1 trillion in debt and the role of colleges in jacking up costs.

The default rate, for the first three years that students are required to make payments, was 13.4 percent, with for-profit colleges reporting the worst results, the U.S. Education Department said… [late last week]

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Both India and China have intense national testing programs to find the brightest students for their elite universities. The competition, the preparation and the national anxiety about the outcomes make the SAT testing programs in the U.S. seem like the minor leagues. The stakes are higher in China and India. The “chosen ones”””those who rank in the top 1%””get their choice of university, putting them on a path to fast-track careers, higher incomes and all the benefits of an upper-middle-class life.

The system doesn’t work so well for the other 99%. There are nearly 40 million university students in China and India. Most attend institutions that churn out students at low cost. Students complain that their education is “factory style” and “uninspired.” Employers complain that many graduates need remedial training before they are fully employable.

For now, the U.S. university system is still far ahead. But over the next decade, there will be a global competition to educate the next generation, and China and India have the potential to change the balance of power.

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The teenager was walking down the Wando High School hallway when someone grabbed his booksack strap and shoved him into the boys’ bathroom.

He tried to get away, but his classmate used both hands to force his head and neck down into a urinal. Desperate to break loose, he swung his leg backward into his aggressor’s crotch and fled the bathroom.

He’s the kind of kid who is picked on a lot, and it’s the kind of incident that schools and police take seriously.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.

Normally, schools offer scholarships to entice students to enroll. This year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s business school handed them money to go away.

The Sloan School of Management’s full-time M.B.A. program, usually about 400 students, was oversubscribed by an unusually high number of students this year. Rather than expand the class size, the school asked for volunteers willing to wait a year to enroll, sending out an e-mail just a couple of weeks before the Aug. 23 kickoff barbecue. By that point, many expectant students had quit jobs and secured housing in the Boston area.

How did the math whizzes at MIT get the numbers so wrong?

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In 1948, his career as scholar and teacher took a leap forward with his election as fellow and tutor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he could exhibit his talents in a more formidable academic setting. He swiftly became known as an inspiring New Testament tutor, forming a tutorial “circus” with JR Porter, the Oriel College Old Testament specialist, and Dennis Nineham, the brilliant young chaplain of the Queen’s College, to teach doctrine. With Nineham, Evans gave a memorable series of lectures on the Gospels and the Jesus of history, while not neglecting his pastoral duties.

It was always likely that Evans would be offered a chair; after 10 years at Corpus, he was appointed to the Lightfoot professorship at Durham. However, despite relishing its historic character, he never really settled in the city and the chance to return south came in 1962 with his becoming professor of New Testament studies at King’s College London, where he remained for the next 15 years, teaching and lecturing and continuing his challenging and questioning approach to the New Testament.

In 1977 he retired to a bungalow in the village of Cuddesdon, Oxfordshire, a stone’s throw from the theological college, where he was a frequent and honoured guest. The death of his wife in 1980 was a grievous blow, but he continued to live positively, tending to the students and staff of the college and keeping a host of friendships from earlier days. To one visitor, at age 98 and over a pub lunch, to the inquiry “What’s it like being 98, Christopher?” he replied: “Part of you feels that you shouldn’t be here.”

Read it all (another from the long queue of should-have-already-been-posted material).

Average national reading scores on the SAT college entrance exam fell to the lowest level in four decades and only 43 percent of 2012 high school seniors who took the test showed they were fully prepared for college, according to new data released on Monday.

College-bound seniors scored an average of 496 points in reading, down one point from 2011 and a 34-point drop since 1972, the College Board, which administers the SAT test, said in a report.

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Last year, an epidemic of cheating was uncovered in the Atlanta public school system. There was strong evidence that teachers in some public schools had erased students’ answers on standardized tests and penciled in the correct ones.

Then there are the less dramatic ways that, in the words of behavioral economist Dan Ariely, “we lie to everyone-especially ourselves.” In his new book, “The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty,” Ariely debunks the notion that a kind of cost-benefit analysis lies behind human dishonesty. On the contrary, his research shows that neither possible rewards nor even the likelihood of getting caught play much of a role in the decision to cheat.

He also disputes the idea that cheating involves a rejection of the idea of right and wrong. In his account, people are caught between two competing goals: They want to see themselves as good and moral people, and they also want stuff.

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Every motivated, high-potential young American deserves a similar opportunity. But the majority of very smart kids lack the wherewithal to enroll in rigorous private schools. They depend on public education to prepare them for life. Yet that system is failing to create enough opportunities for hundreds of thousands of these high-potential girls and boys.

Mostly, the system ignores them, with policies and budget priorities that concentrate on raising the floor under low-achieving students. A good and necessary thing to do, yes, but we’ve failed to raise the ceiling for those already well above the floor.

Public education’s neglect of high-ability students doesn’t just deny individuals opportunities they deserve. It also imperils the country’s future supply of scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs.

Read it all and you can learn more about the author there.

Six months ago, the Harvard men’s basketball team was a source of uncommon athletic pride on campus. The team was ranked among the nation’s top 25 for the first time, and when it earned the program’s first berth to the N.C.A.A. tournament in 66 years, students and players spilled into Harvard Square chanting and celebrating.

The next day, Harvard’s staid campus of red-brick buildings was hardly one big pep rally, but from the Harvard bookstore, which printed commemorative basketball T-shirts, to the college’s president, who called the team “a real community building force,” the university seemed to bask in an atypical glow of sporting achievement.

But last week, days after published reports implicated the co-captains of the basketball team in a widespread academic cheating scandal that may involve dozens of varsity athletes, the mood at Harvard had shifted.

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