Describes mainstreaming at the Dowling Urban Environment Learning Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota--a fully inclusive, racially mixed, K-6 magnet school that is expensive but well worth the cost. This school has a clear purpose, few signs of emotional exhaustion among staff, and little depersonalization. Dowling's ambience is in marked contrast to…

Debunks various myths related to the adventure experience: rural idyll versus urban squalor, the British character, leadership potential, adventure as substitute for aggression, role models, adventure experience as a route to political and social awareness, adventure is environmentally friendly, economic regeneration, the hills are free, adventure…

Explores the nature of the changes in students' explanations (n=50) of evolutionary scenarios. Teleological and Lamarckian explanations accounted for over half of the students' explanation on the pretest but dropped to less than 20% on the posttest. (ZWH)

Homelessness in rural Iowa is proportionately high but well hidden, obliging the rural homeless to discursively and materially relate their needs to a placeless condition of being defined by agencies, institutions, and academics. Positioning the homeless outside of social space places them in the space of nature, with implications for the meaning…

Presents an analysis of the treatment of Newton's Laws and relativistic mass in the nine most popular college physics textbooks. Concludes that only two textbooks give a correct interpretation of relativistic mass and only a single text gives a correct discussion of Newton's First Law. (JRH)

Max Weber has been unfairly pegged as a detached, impersonal scientist or a structural-functional analyst of bureaucratic design. Today, Weber is garnering respect for his attention to cultural and historical contexts, his "iron-cage" conceptions of bureaucracy, his creative meditations that move across all levels of analysis, his range…

Presents a situation in which differential calculus is used with inverse trigonometric tangent functions to maximize an angle measure. A negative distance measure ultimately results, requiring a reconsideration of assumptions inherent in the initial figure. (Author/MKR)

The (media-induced) aura of failure surrounding schools is so pervasive that even friends of education misinterpret data. Four Bracey reports published in "Phi Delta Kappan" amassed substantial positive evidence, but the media choose to accentuate the negative. Given the severe decline in other social institutions, schools are performing…

Starts with an imaginary conversation between Ella Flagg Young and John Dewey discussing what leadership should be. A more serious critique identifies fallacies in traditional thought about leadership. Leadership theorists must abandon these fallacies and imagine leadership that emphasizes coordinating resources for teaching professionals; creates…

Provides a method to help students understand problem-solving techniques used in introductory physics courses. (MVL)

Identifies 6 types of misleading labels in the drawings of 12 biology textbooks. (Author/MKR)

Notes that when using the screw as a simple machine, the pitch of the screw is important in the amount of force that will be produced. (MVL)

Suggests that physics students always have three questions when using force diagrams: (1) Why do I need one? (2) How do I draw one? and (3) How do I find the forces acting on a body? Provides a method to help students find answers to all three questions and understand force diagrams. (MVL)

While metropolitan school systems are moving toward decentralization and personalized instruction, rural America is still being coerced into consolidations and district mergers. The Annenburg Rural Challenge, a force for nontraditional reform, is sponsoring bold, community-based initiatives aimed at transforming teaching and learning in genuinely…

Argues for the abolition of teacher supervision, drawing on research into teaching realities and complexities; research about teachers' feelings, attitudes, and experiences regarding supervision; and studies on the failure of supervision to effect any improvements in teaching once teachers have been tenured. Supervision as currently practiced will…