Monday, February 21, 2005

Is that a jet landing or just your G5 iMac?

Scienceman Joe Martha has some informative comments about the noise level from his G5 iMac in today's Scienceman.com. While Joe likes the machine, he illustrates his point about fan noise with a QuickTime movie that illustrates the excessive noise level. He writes, "ScienceMan has to come to the conclusion that Apple dropped the ball on this one, and as a result has set a very annoying undertone to an otherwise fantastic piece of engineering."

While talking about noise (and obviously ignoring the fact that this is an education site, not a Mac site), has anyone else experienced excessive fan noise from their G5 tower after the Mac OS X 10.3.8 system update? While the fan noise isn't excessive most of the time, my unit winds up its 9 fans far more often than before the update. Also, the basic fan speed (and noise) seems to be higher now as well.

Homework Suppers

The Boston Globe's Peter Schworm tells of family homework dinners at Andrews Middle School in Schools feed a need. The Medford, Massachusetts, school began the monthly dinners "last fall as a way to give parents pointers on homework help and to encourage greater involvement in their children's schoolwork.

Upward Bound Threatened

A Los Angeles Times column by Fred Alvarez, Is Upward Bound Headed for a Fall, tells success stories and the outcry against President Bush's targeting of the Upward Bound program for elimination in the new education budget. Alvarez writes:

Created as part of President Johnson's "War on Poverty," Upward Bound is one of the largest and longest-running federal education programs. Housed on college campuses, the programs aim to help low-income, first-generation youths enter college and succeed once they get there.

Nationwide, the college prep programs serve nearly half a million high school students at 1,400 sites. In 2000, the most recent year available, 92% of the 13,100 Upward Bound students who graduated from high school enrolled in college.

Truancy

A Christian Science Monitor story from last week by Stacy Teicher, Kids skip class - and parents go to jail, tells of efforts to curb truancy across the nation. While the headline for the story is pretty sensational, it gets down to the nitty gritty of truancy prevention efforts. Teicher writes, "Truancy-prevention programs that are considered models tend to have one thing in common - collaboration among schools, parents, and law enforcement to address a range of underlying problems."

Mitch the Knife

The Indianapolis Star's Staci Hupp reveals in Cash-poor schools cut classes, jobs that Indiana school officials and others are beginning to refer to the states new Republican governor as "Mitch the Knife," for his efforts to keep state spending in check. The column is a good review of what Indiana schools may have to do to live under the slashed budgets Daniels and the Republican dominated legislature are proposing. It's not a pretty picture for education in Indiana.

Illinois Education Funding

While Indiana schools are taking their licks from "Mitch the Knife" (see above), Kate Grossman of the Chicago Sun-Times tells the "ins and outs" of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's proposed education budget in Per-pupil spending hike may be smallest of gov's term. It appears that Illinois schools will receive approximately $40-45 per pupil of new money under the Governor's current proposal.

Two Columns Worth Reading

Winding up the day's news, I ran across two opinion pieces that I really think are worth a read. Kristen Houghton takes on President Bush's education budget proposals with a historical perspective in Don’t Take Money From Education! The Frenso Bee's Jim Boren talks about why he thinks education won't get much better soon, with emphasis on the effect of special interest groups on education, in Hopeful about education reform in state? Don't be. While Boren takes a pretty good shot at teachers' unions, he also has a fairly good read on why things don't change much. He misses the point, big-time, however, in not even mentioning accountability for parents!

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