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The International Schools Review has issued a travel and work advisory for teachers intending to visit or work in Kuwait, after a middle school administrator reported a powerful parent was harassing her.
Katherine Phillips of the Al Bayan Bilingual School has been unable to leave the country after an angry, influential parent filed charges of “unlawful imprisonment” against her. Phillips had assigned three fifth graders to in-school suspension last year, after the three were caught fighting in school.
Saying that such harassment is not unusual for teachers in Kuwait, the ISR posted the travel/work advisory on its website, saying in part:
We encourage all teachers/administrators to contact their Kuwaiti Schools, calling for an immediate resolution of Katherine Phillips’ situation, one that will lift her travel ban and allow her to return home to her family.
We further encourage all teachers/administrators in Kuwaiti Schools to consider not returning to Kuwait or honoring their contracts in Kuwait until this situation has been resolved.
The advisory includes Phillips’ original email to ISR, a supporting letter from another teacher who has taught in Kuwait, and a message apparently from a Kuwaiti supporting the charges against Phillips.
ISR sent an email to its subscribers containing letters from Dr. Barbara Spilchuk, a teacher placement advisor at ISR, and from Phillip’s parents in Bahrain. It is reproduced here.
While her plight has not yet made the world mainstream media, both the print versions of the Arab Times and Kuwait Times have covered the story. Meanwhile bloggers like 2:48am, an expat living in Kuwait, are publicizing her situation. Commenters at 2:48am are conducting a lively debate about the issue.
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Newspaper editorials rarely give advice to competing newspapers, but the family-owned The New York Times today urged family-owned Dow Jones Inc. and The Wall Street Journal to rebuff media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s bids to buy the organization.
Speaking of Murdoch’s courting of the owners of Dow Jones, the Bancrofts, the Times editors wrote:
Mr. Murdoch has dangled a hefty $5 billion before the family that has controlled The Journal for more than 100 years. Frankly, we hope the Bancrofts will find a way to continue producing their fine newspaper, or, failing that, find a buyer who is a safer bet to protect the newspaper for its readers.
Murdoch lords over a global media empire that includes outlets as diverse as Fox News Network, MySpace and The Times of London. Murdoch wants his media outlets to make money, so many observers — including the NYT — fear he will emasculate the fiercely independent journalism of the WSJ. Despite earlier promises to stay out of the prestigious London Times‘ news operations, Murdoch has quashed some news stories that might impinge on his bottom line.
Family-owned media outfits are a dying breed. It’s a rule of thumb that family-run enterprises rarely survive the third generation. We know all about this in Louisville, when the Bingham family sold The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times to the Gannett Corp. in 1986, after controlling the C-J/T for almost 70 years.
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We teachers have a bias against Wikipedia as reference material for students. While many entries are well written and accurate, there are many that are plain junk. It might be hard for a student to tell the good from the bad, so we typically advise either avoiding Wikipedia for formal research papers or supplementing it with more traditional sources.Enter Conservapedia, a so-called “trustworthy,” wiki-based encyclopedia. Founded by conservatives who believe Wikipedia has a liberal bias, Conservapedia endeavors to provide a more palatable online source to students, scholars and the idly curious.
Some of the science blogs I read have been dumping on Conservapedia lately, so I thought I would take a peek. I started with something I know pretty well, physics.
Now, Conservapedia is still being developed, so I was not expecting as an elaborate entry on physics as Wikipedia has. I was mortified, however, to read this entry, which I will reproduce here in its entirety to save you a click.
Physics is the study of nature, and is the science of studying the laws of God’s universe. Galileo was the first to discover and propose some of the fundamental laws of physics that we still realize today. He began by studying how a ball rolled down an incline and showed that its speed would be proportional to the height it started at. A scientist that studies physics is called a physicist.
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As a former newspaperman, I have been following the news of Newscorp’s bid to buy the venerable Wall Street Journal with interest and trepidation. By all accounts, Newscorp wants to use the WSJ as a gateway to the Far East, where Newscorp is weakest.
Newscorp, headed by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is not exactly renowned as the purveyor of high quality journalism. Murdoch’s papers, which include the tabloids The New York Post and The Sun of London, among many others, pander to the lowest common denominator of readers. [The Sun's page 3 features topless models, for example. It's popular enough to have its own web address.] While he does own the more reputable The Times of London, as well as other less flashy papers, Murdoch is about selling papers to make money, not necessarily furthering the public good.
Meanwhile, the Journal, which has remained a steadfast (and staid) pillar of journalistic integrity and quality, has built its own (albeit smaller) media empire by being quick to recognize the power of electronic storage and retrieval. While other major newspapers were still delivering newspapers by truck to points outside their hometowns, WSJ’s parent company, Dow Jones, was sending the paper electronically to printing plants scattered across the country (and overseas) for quick delivery to its subscribers.
It wasn’t the Internet, but it was better than waiting on a truck delivery.
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Science fact is crossing over into science fiction today.
First, astronomers have located an earth-like planet orbiting close to a star some 20 light-years away. This planet is a little larger than Earth, so we’d feel heavier than normal if we could walk on its surface. Sounds mighty like the conditions on Kal-El’s homeworld, if you ask me, though of course it supposedly blew up.
Second, geologists have discovered a mineral with nearly the same chemical composition as the fictional kryptonite in Superman Returns. It’s not radioactive and it’s not green, but it’s the next best thing.
Now, if we can determine that the mineral came from the distant planet, that’ll clinch it. Somewhere on some farm on Earth is a boy learning that he can leap tall buildings in a single bound and run faster than a locomotive.
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One of my Honors students gave me this link to a YouTube video. It’s pretty funny.
The math jocks doing the rap wear their TI calculators on a cord around their necks. In my day, we wore our calculators on a belt clip. I must have missed that geek fashion tip …
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Like most of my generation, I bought and listened to record albums. That is, until my apartment was burglarized in ’85, and I lost my amp and turntable. For these past 22 years, I have been yearning for a replacement system, but raising kids on a teacher’s salary leaves little room for quality stereo component systems.
My wait is finally over, thanks to the serendipitous gift of a Technics linear tracking turntable from a fellow high school chess coach. The subject came up because in my classroom sidelight I have Isaac Hayes’ album, “Black Moses,” which a former teacher had left me. We got to talking about albums and turntables, and how we missed listening to our old music. Sure, some of the old stuff is now digital, but a lot of the vinyl I have will probably never end up on CD.
Anyway he had just decided to divest himself of his 10,000-album collection, and his turntables, by giving the albums to his university and the turntables to any takers. On the last day of the chess season, he brought me a dusty, but very functional Technics SL-BL3, a nice linear tracking model I probably could never have afforded 20 years ago.
I had to buy a $40 phono preamp from Circuit City, so I could run the phono’s audio into my computer’s sound card. I have started the painstaking, but fun, process of converting fom analog vinyl to digital CD and mp3.
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