This one is for Bess: Too much homework can be counterproductive.

Their findings indicated a frequent lack of positive correlation between the average amount of homework assigned in a nation and corresponding level of academic achievement. For example, many countries with the highest scoring students, such as Japan, the Czech Republic and Denmark, have teachers who give little homework. “At the other end of the spectrum, countries with very low average scores — Thailand, Greece, Iran — have teachers who assign a great deal of homework,” Baker noted.

The perception that rote memorization is useful and that quantity equals quality still exists at many levels. While certain things do need to be memorized, it shouldn’t be at the expense of teaching students how to learn on their own.

The Cothrun family assembled in Lamoille Canyon in the Ruby Mountains near Elko, NV for a small family reunion a couple of weeks ago. I’ve finally got uploaded my pics for everyone. Of interest are the giant mushroom, the brothers, the cousins, the group photo and of course I had to stitch some pictures together to get a panorama.

I tracked down this nice monospaced typewriter style font called Batik, it is a sort of a rough font that duplicates the effect of a coarse, aging ribbon. Anyway, I needed it to emulate someone else’s artwork for a website I’m working on and I found the font on several of the ‘1001 free fonts’ type of sites.

Problem is, none of the copies of Batik I downloaded worked in Windows XP. Not just my computer, but a couple other computers I tried. Then I checked with the old NT4 server at the office and it worked fine. Digging futher, I found a typography program that complained about the font not having some fields filled in, I filled them in and suddenly I had a font that worked and I could go on with my project. So here is a working copy of Batik(might have to right-click, Save As and name properly).

Zlad!

Zlad!

The Marijuana Policy Project, seeking to legalize possession of 1 ounce of marijuana in the state of Nevada, forgot to turn in a box of signatures collected to include the issue on this year’s ballot.

Anyone think there might be a connection here?