The Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Revd John Pritchard, has written to the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, about how the marking of GCSE English this summer has caused “great distress to some of our most vulnerable pupils”. He has also asked for reassurances that proposed changes to GCSEs generally will enable students from poorer backgrounds to continue to flourish.

In a letter which covered a range of subjects Bishop John, chair of the Church of England’s Board of Education, said: “I also need to reflect the great distress to some of our most vulnerable pupils caused by the debacle over GCSE English grades this year. This is a considerable affront to natural justice and efforts to raise the aspirations of pupils from less favoured backgrounds are not made any easier. I would very much like to hear how the changes you propose to GCSE examinations will enable students from the same demographic to achieve and move on to the next stage of their education.”

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A black helicopter hovering overhead can lead those below to become worried, scared or suspicious. But when a large aircraft positioned itself over a Prince William County high school’s football field last Wednesday afternoon, students who had just been released for the day excitedly watched as a stuffed bulldog with a red-bandanna parachute emerged.

The big-eyed pup drifted to the turf, delivering a message from a junior boy to a senior girl: “Fall Fest?”

As students look to one-up their classmates for the most outrageous way to ask a girl on a date ”” in this case Patriot High School’s version of a homecoming dance ”” this boy’s approach might have set a new standard. The helicopter flew in low over the school’s grounds, stunning students and setting off a flurry of Twitter messages and photographs before its covert mission was complete….

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The comedian Stephen Colbert and Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York bantered onstage Friday night before 3,000 cheering, stomping, chanting students at Fordham University, in what might have been the most successful Roman Catholic youth evangelization event since Pope John Paul II last appeared at World Youth Day.

The evening was billed as an opportunity to hear two Catholic celebrities discuss how joy and humor infuse their spiritual lives. They both delivered, with surprises and zingers that began the moment the two walked onstage. Mr. Colbert went to shake Cardinal Dolan’s hand, but the cardinal took Mr. Colbert’s hand and kissed it ”” a disarming role reversal for a big prelate with a big job and a big ring.

Cardinal Dolan was introduced as a man who might one day be elected pope, to which he said, “If I am elected pope, which is probably the greatest gag all evening, I’ll be Stephen III.”

The event would not have happened without its moderator, the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and prolific author who has made it his mission to remind Catholics that there is no contradiction between faithful and funny. His latest book is “Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life.”

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Ten years ago, I was nearly 30 and over $90,000 in debt. I had spent my twenties trying to build an interesting life; I had two degrees; I had lived in New York and the Bay Area; I had worked in a series of interesting jobs; I spent a lot of time traveling overseas. But I had also made a couple of critically stupid and shortsighted decisions. I had invested tens of thousands of dollars in a master’s degree in landscape architecture that I realized I didn’t want halfway through. While maxing out my student loans, I had also collected a toxic mix of maxed-out credit cards, personal loans, and $2,000 I had borrowed from my father for a crisis long since forgotten. My life consisted of loan deferments and minimum payments.

Like so many other lost children, I had fallen into a career in IT. The work was boring, but led to jobs with cool organizations””a lot of jobs, because I kept quitting them. As soon as I had any money in the bank, I’d quit and go backpacking in Southeast Asia. My adventures were life-changing experiences, but I was eventually left with a CV that was pretty scattershot.

My luck securing interesting jobs dried up. In 2001, I ended up living with my dad for four months and working at a banking infrastructure company in suburban Pittsburgh. I should have taken that as a warning that I needed to get it together, but I thought it was just an aberration. It was not.

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When New York City announced last spring it intended to evict religious groups from public school facilities they rented for weekend services, churches fought back with a very public campaign. In June they won a court injunction against the city allowing the churches to stay, for now.

Meeting space is nearly as tight in Toronto as New York, but the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) in late August informed churches renting public school space that, beginning Sept. 1, faith-based organizations no longer qualified for reduced rates available to other charitable non-religious organizations, such as the Girl Guides. With only a couple of days’ notice these churches saw their rent doubled, quadrupled, or worse, with another 44 percent hike for all renters scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, 2013.

The rent increases could drive out many of the hundreds of churches now meeting in Toronto public schools. And Canadian churches lack the experience, inclination, and legal advocacy groups that the New York churches had to duke it out in the public square over what strikes many as religious discrimination.

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We need to consider that for students, the social and professional circles vastly overlap, which makes it more difficult to separate what’s permissible and what isn’t. This is not to absolve students who cheat, but it’s something to consider. Students often live in the same place they go to class, which is essentially their workplace. Their friends are also their colleagues, and their “bosses” (professors and TAs) are often their friends. All this blending makes can make lines of conduct a bit more indistinct.

None of this is meant to make light of the problem of cheating, or to imply that it’s excusable. But if we want to prevent such things from happening again, we need to think about not just the students, but also the system in which they live and operate. Thus, professors need to work on being crystal clear in instructions. Telling students, for instance, “speak to no one other than the professor or your TA about any aspect of the exam” leaves no gray areas. All that said, it will be interesting to see how things at Harvard shake out ”¦

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“The average student is functioning with a clinical sleep disorder,” said LeeAnn Hamilton, assistant director of health promotion and preventive services at the University of Arizona.

Hamilton has conducted extensive research on campus and found that students get an average of 6.5 hours per night. Her researchers also found that sleep time and quality measurements declined over the course of the academic year, while anxiety, depression and conflict with family, friends and roommates all rose.

College health officials finally are realizing that healthy sleep habits are a solution for the health and academic struggles that college students face on a regular basis.

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Prudence means practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it. Nowadays most people hardly think of Prudence as one of the “virtues.” In fact, because Christ said we could only get into His world by being like children, many Christians have the idea that, provided you are “good,” it does not matter being a fool. But that is a misunderstanding. In the first place, most children show plenty of “prudence” about doing the things they are really interested in, and think them out quite sensibly. In the second place, as St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary, He told us to be not only “as harmless as doves,” but also “as wise as serpents.” He wants a child’s heart, but a grown-up’s head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate, and teachable, as good children are; but He also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert at its job, and in first-class fighting trim. The fact that you are giving money to a charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. The fact that what you are thinking about is God Himself (for example, when you are praying) does not mean that you can be content with the same babyish ideas which you had when you were a five-year-old. It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any the less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain. He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have. The proper motto is not “Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever,” but “Be good, sweet maid, and don’t forget that this involves being as clever as you can.” God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. But, fortunately, it works the other way round. Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.

–C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (my emphasis)

The conservative movement loves an innocent. Better yet if he has attended an Ivy League college and witnessed the debauchery of the elites firsthand. For this particular position, Nathan Harden, the author of “Sex and God at Yale,” possesses impeccable credentials. He was home-schooled, was already married when he got to college and had worshiped the institution so blindly that he was bound to be disappointed.

Like many home-schoolers, Harden is a true American eccentric. He quit before he finished high school, got a G.E.D. and spent his interim years drifting: loading cow manure for the gardening department at Walmart, working as a baggage handler for United and as a lounge singer in Florida, and volunteering with a medical relief charity. Somewhere in there he found his true love and, almost on a whim, married. Harden’s accounts of his itinerant travels are in some ways the most entertaining parts of the book, although he takes pains to avoid seeming too world-weary so that when he arrives on campus he can be truly, deeply shocked.

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The Saylor Foundation has nearly finished creating a full suite of free, online courses in a dozen popular undergraduate majors. And the foundation is now offering a path to college credit for its offerings by partnering with two nontraditional players in higher education ”“ Excelsior College and StraighterLine.

The project started three years ago, when the foundation began hiring faculty members on a contract basis to build courses within their subject areas. The professors scoured the web for free Open Education Resources (OER), but also created video lectures and tests.

“I was able to develop my own material,” said Kevin Moquin, who created a business law course for Saylor. A former adjunct professor for a technical college and a for-profit institution, Moquin said the foundation gave him the “flexibility to adjust it as I needed.”

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There is bad news for boys in North America: They are being blown out of the water by girls in academic achievement; and psychologists say young men are becoming more socially awkward, making relationships with young women difficult.

Sidney Gale, a medical doctor and author of Unto the Breach, an outdoor adventures book for boys, is concerned…”We need to get boys out of their solitary bedrooms and into the sun,” Gale says. “It’s also a good idea to get them reading something other than tweets, texts and the like. They have intellect, and we should encourage them to use it.”

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A great teacher can have a huge effect on a child’s life. So, unfortunately, can a bad teacher. But in education, job performance has virtually nothing to do with opportunities for advancement. Teachers who are consistently successful with students are not given leadership roles that would allow them to reach students beyond their own classrooms, and if they don’t have enough seniority, they can be let go without anyone seeming to care come layoff time. This is enormously frustrating.

I’ve taught for 11 years at the same high-poverty elementary school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. My fourth- and fifth-grade students arrive in my classroom with varying degrees of preparedness, but they leave with a strong set of skills and a desire to continue learning. Both their intellectual curiosity going forward and their test scores reflect what they get from my class.

I’m just one among many hardworking, high-achieving teachers in L.A. Unified and other districts. But we are at risk. A recent study by the educational nonprofit organization TNTP found that each year urban school districts are losing high-achieving teachers because they make little effort to retain them, or to push out the low achievers.

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Catholic schools have been bleeding enrollment and money for years, and many have been forced to close. But some, like St. Stephen of Hungary, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, have found a way to thrive ”” attracting a more affluent clientele by offering services and classes more commonly found in expensive private schools.

Selling points include small class sizes and extracurricular activities beginning in the youngest grades. And by often charging far less, these schools have been able to stabilize themselves and even grow.

“Our competition or our standard isn’t another good Catholic school,” said the Rev. Angelo Gambatese, the pastor at St. Stephen of Hungary church, which shares a building with the school. “It’s the best independent schools in Manhattan, and we intend to achieve the same level of performance that they do, academically, developmentally.”

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Gunmen in Nigeria’s troubled northeast blew up part of a primary school then attacked a Catholic church and police station before officers fought them off, police said on Monday.

Separately, two gunmen riding on motorcycles opened fire on troops at a military checkpoint in the northern city of Kano on Sunday, injuring a soldier, military spokesperson Iweha Ikedichi said.

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You can read an earlier article about the school here and you may find the school website there. The mission statement of the school reads this way:

The vision of Holy Trinity Classical Christian School is:
1. To equip our students to think critically, reason clearly, and communicate effectively the inerrant Word of God as it applies in all areas of life;
2. To place prayer and worship at the center of their lives as they develop a biblical worldview;
3. To master the tools of grammar, logic, and rhetoric in order to proclaim and defend the Gospel with clarity and commitment; and
4. To send them into the world, prepared to advance the Kingdom of God, viewing life through the lens of Christianity.

Hey parents, here’s a tip. Don’t set off on the back to school shopping trip without first consulting your kids. Looks like your idea of what they want doesn’t quite jibe with what’s on their wish list. A survey conducted by online shopping site Ebates finds 43% of parents think kids want new clothing this time of year. You were headed out to buy clothing, right?

But the 1,100 kids ages 8 to 18 who answered the survey said their top priority was technology.

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“I’m actually not a music major. This is really a hobby that accidentally became a profession,” [Alexis] Dawdy says. “I’m studying linguistics, and I’m 17 credits out from graduation. My goal is to do it debt-free, and this helps a lot. This pays for books and this pays for food.”

Dawdy says she’s encountered nothing but hospitality from her neighbors in Lansing.

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Have teens? Then you’re likely used to seeing them lighted by a cellphone screen glow.

But a study says the hours kids spend tapping notes is killing their grammar skills with every LOL. With “the culture of mobile communication, quick back and forth, inevitably, there are compromises on traditional, cultural writing,” said S. Shyam Sundar of Pennsylvania State University’s Media Effects Research Lab, which did the study.

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With their finances strained, some higher-earning parents are making their children pick up more of the tab. Among families earning $100,000 or more, students paid 23% of their college costs in 2012 through loans, income and savings, according to Sallie Mae, up from 14% in 2009; the share covered by parents fell to 52% from 61%.

“The boomers are the first generation shifting the cost of college to their kids,” both through increased student borrowing and reduced taxpayer support for higher education, says Susan Dynarski, a professor of education and public policy at the University of Michigan.

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To its critics in the church, the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru is not deserving of its name. It has spurned the pontiff, they say. It is far from Roman Catholic orthodoxy, they argue. In their minds, the school ought to be called something else entirely.

“It’s false advertising,” said Fernán Altuve, a conservative legal expert who supports a recent order by the Vatican that the school change its name by eliminating references to the pope and the church. “It’s as if I sell you a bottle that says Coca-Cola but what’s inside is Pepsi.”

The fight over the name of what is considered one of the top universities in South America is part of a fierce battle over academic freedom and the authority of the Vatican that is unfolding here. La Católica, as the school is known, is the alma mater of many of Peru’s elite, including President Ollanta Humala.

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Nigel Warburton: So, if we bring psychology back into economics with the current crisis, what particular light would psychology shed on that? I mean you talked about people’s optimism is it that there’s a kind of herd mentality and the markets mirror that? Or is something else going on?

Robert Shiller: There’s a lot going on. It turns out that the human mind is very complicated. Economic theory likes to reduce human behaviour to a canonical form, the structure has been, ever since Samuelson wrote this a half century ago, that people want to maximise their consumption. All they want to do is consume goods; they don’t care about anyone else. There’s neither benevolence nor malevolence. All they care about is eating or getting goods and they want to smooth it, they described it in terms of so-called utility functions through their lifetime and that’s it. That is such an elegant simple model, but it’s too simple and if you look at what psychology shows, the mind is the product of human evolution and it has lots of different patterns of behaviour. The discoveries that psychologists make to economics are manifold.

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…people…are concerned about a persistent gender gap in college degrees in science, technology, engineering and math — STEM, for short. The notion that it might have to do with aptitude has long been dismissed. Yet research shows that girls who enjoy — and excel at — math and science in high school are less likely than boys to pursue a college major in those fields.

And even if they start college majoring in a STEM field, women are more likely than men to change majors, federal data show. Women make up 24% of STEM jobs, which offers some of the most lucrative careers, a Commerce Department report says. More than half of them have degrees in the physical and life sciences.

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[Daniel] Rodriguez served in Iraq during the troop surge of 2007. On his second tour, he found himself in Afghanistan and in the line of fire during one of the war’s bloodiest fights, the battle of Kamdesh in October 2009.

Rodriguez said close to 400 Taliban combatants overwhelmed the U.S. outpost of fewer than 40 soldiers. Eight Americans were killed, including Rodriguez’s friend, Pfc. Kevin Thompson.

Just a few days earlier, the two young men shared their dreams of what they’d do after returning home. Thompson made Rodriguez promise to chase his goal of playing college football.

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The NCAA’s 444-page manual contains no language directly addressing appopriate punishment for concealing information regarding child sexual abuse. But in light of the shameful conduct of Penn State’s leadership, revealed Thursday in the Freeh report, the NCAA must use its authority to do what’s needed now: Shut down the Nittany Lions football program.

If the Freeh report released Thursday is accurate in its assessment of the university’s role in the worst scandal in college sports history, then the engine that enabled longtime child sexual predator Jerry Sandusky must be switched off, at least temporarily.

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An incomparable career narrative that spanned more than six decades now reads like one of the Greek tragedies the late Joe Paterno always loved: Paterno’s legacy has been irreparably stained by findings that the iconic Penn State football coach concealed information for years that could have stopped a sexual predator.

The conclusions of former FBI director Louis Freeh, who drew on more than 400 interviews and 3 million documents over a nearly eight-month independent investigation of Penn State’s sexual assault scandal as requested by the school, have complicated and sullied the image of major-college football’s all-time winningest coach. Freeh found that Paterno was among five Penn State senior leaders who covered up information to avoid bad publicity after they became aware of sexual molestation allegations against Paterno’s former longtime defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted last month of 45 counts of sexual abuse. Freeh said Paterno could have stopped the sexual abuses “if he wished.”

“The facts are the facts,” Freeh said of Paterno. “He was an integral part of the act to conceal.”

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Louis J. Freeh, the former federal judge and director of the F.B.I. who spent the last seven months examining the Sandusky scandal at Penn State, issued a damning conclusion Thursday:

The most senior officials at Penn State had shown a “total and consistent disregard” for the welfare of children, had worked together to actively conceal Mr. Sandusky’s assaults, and had done so for one central reason: fear of bad publicity. That publicity, Mr. Freeh said Thursday, would have hurt the nationally ranked football program, Mr. Paterno’s reputation as a coach of high principles, the Penn State “brand” and the university’s ability to raise money as one of the most respected public institutions in the country.

The fallout from Mr. Freeh’s conclusions was swift, blunt and often emotional….

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You find the the link for the whole June 16th service here; if you are pressed for time the Magnificat starts about 13 minutes in to choose but one piece.

For further information please go here.

South Carolina’s dream of a third consecutive national championship vanished for good Monday night at TD Ameritrade Park when Grayson Greiner’s fly ball fell into the glove of Arizona right fielder Robert Refsnyder.
“As soon as the last out, it sunk in,” USC first baseman Christian Walker said.
There seemed to be a state of disbelief for USC and its fans. This is not the way things have ended for the Gamecocks over the past three seasons. Everyone had come to expect Greiner to deliver a three-run triple, or perhaps a game-winning grand slam.
Not this time.

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Lefty see, lefty do.

Hours after he watched senior left-hander Michael Roth’s two-hitter against Kent State keep South Carolina’s season alive, freshman lefty Jordan Montgomery did his best imitation of the Gamecocks’ undisputed team leader when he got his turn against Arkansas on Thursday night.

Montgomery held the Razorbacks to three singles over eight innings, and the two-time defending national champions won 2-0 to force a rematch Friday night that will decide which team goes to the best-of-three College World Series finals against Arizona.

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