Links of the Week

20 years ago, a group of lions and cape buffalo were stranded on a 200 KM island in the Okavango Delta. The result: Super-Lions.

From the TED Talk series... Fascinating talk by Sir Ken Robinson on education. The video is about 20 minutes, but Robinson is both incredibly intelligent and very funny...

Drop out of high school, lose your driver's license.

Mississippians killed in Iraq.

David Pogue on Net Etiquette.

Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America, on recruiting.

The Mississippi Teacher Corps deadline is December 22nd. Apply online here.

Meet one of our first acceptees for next year's class: Chimaobi Amutah.

The N word...

The N Word Part Two...

Chaos Theory, a simple, yet completely addicting game. My high score is 123.

Best World Music of 2006. Toure's album is outstanding.

A Bi-Partisan commission has released a report on education with some fairly radical (for the U.S.) suggestions. Here's a quote from the NYT: Among other things, the report proposes starting school for most children at age 3, and requiring all students to pass board exams to graduate from high school, which for many would end after 10th grade. Students could then go to a community or technical college, or spend two years preparing for selective colleges and universities.

For you education policy wonks, here is a paper on certification. The study includes TFA. I hope to do a similar study about MTC at some point. Thanks to alum Chris Wilkens for the paper. First sentence: We use six years of data on student test performance to evaluate the effectiveness of certified, uncertified, and alternatively certified teachers in the New York City public schools.

Mississippi's prison population keeps growing, most of it drug related. We've had a thirty year "War on Drugs" and what do we have to show for it?