Fourth-year Michael Baumer is among the 40 American recipients of a Gates Cambridge Scholarship this year. The scholarship, which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation established in 2000, funds graduate study at the University of Cambridge for outstanding students worldwide.
Baumer, 20, a native of St. Louis, is majoring in both physics and mathematics at UChicago. He plans to pursue an MPhil in physics at Cambridge next year.
At Cambridges Cavendish Laboratory, he plans to continue research he conducted as an undergraduate at the Enrico Fermi Institute, working to close in on the Higgs boson. The elusive God particle is a crucialand as yet undiscoveredaspect of the Standard Model, the theory that explains the fundamental building blocks of matter.
Baumers senior thesis will focus on measurements of Standard Model background processes and tests of a technique called Quark/Gluon Tagging, which will help researchers determine whether they have seen hints of the Higgs, he said.
He came to UChicago intent on studying physics, and cultivated his passion for the field with summer internships at the Laboratory for Non-Equilibrium Materials in Chile and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland.
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The New York Times offers up a piece about a New York City school that has put building background knowledge at the heart of its curriculum. P.S. 142, a school in lower Manhattan hard by the Williamsburg Bridge “has made real life experiences the center of academic lessons,” the paper notes, “in hopes of improving reading and math skills by broadening children’s frames of reference.”
“Experiences that are routine in middle-class homes are not for P.S. 142 children. When Dao Krings, a second-grade teacher, asked her students recently how many had never been inside a car, several, including Tyler Rodriguez, raised their hands. ‘I’ve been inside a bus,’ Tyler said. ‘Does that count?’”
This is not a Core Knowledge school, but the teachers and staff clearly understand the critical connection between background knowledge, vocabulary and language proficiency. The Times describes the schools “field trips to the sidewalk,” with children routinely visiting parking garages and auto body shops, or examining features of every day life.
“In early February the second graders went around the block to study Muni-Meters and parking signs. They learned new vocabulary wor
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Want to see who’s lobbying the Broward School Board? Well, now you can.
The board debuted a new searchable database in the last couple months. You can search by board member, lobbyist name and topic discussed. It also will tell the date and time the meeting took place.
For instance, do a search for Vincent Grande, a lobbyist for Moore Stephens Lovelace, P.A., and you’ll see that he met with seven of nine board members over a two-day period in January. (The firm does auditing work for the district.)
The database is part of the board’s efforts to be more transparent in the wake of a scathing grand jury report last year that accused board members and district officials of corruption by contractors, vendors and lobbyists.
Much of the grand jury’s criticism was related to construction projects. Interestingly, the list of registered lobbyists doesn’t seem to have many construction firms on it. And board members haven’t reported many meetings.
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There are many ways in which you can help your child develop before starting school. Working with your child in an attempt to help them develop on an academic and social level prior to starting school can help them immensely.
Preschool development can help to make a child more social and it can help them to gain an academic head start by the time they enter first grade. Daycare can be a great start for children to grow socially and psychologically. Most working parents today do enroll their child in some kind of daycare facility for at least a few hours per day.
Daycare can help the child make friends, share new ideas and thoughts with other children their own age. This kind of interaction can attribute to a child being more academically inclined and can assist them with making new friends more easily as they get older.
In addition to preschool programs, there are a number of things a parent can do to help the child develop more rapidly on many levels.
First, the parent should take the time to read to the child and answer any questions the child may have. Read more…
Kentucky is putting off a change to its state testing program that would have cut back on the use of readers on reading tests for some students with disabilities.
The changes, approved by the state board of education last week, were to have taken effect in time for testing this spring, Rhonda L. Sims, the state director of support and research, said in an email Tuesday.
The changes would have banned the use of readers on state reading
comprehension tests, among other things. A reader can be another person or computer software that reads text aloud, and is an accommodation used by some students with disabilities, who may also use this kind of help in class every day. The switch was due to affect end-of-year state exams.
“Districts need to continue planning for the revised accommodation procedures in the new school year, particularly how districts will support teachers to ensure students become independent readers and are able to perform the required math computations without the aid of a calculator,” Ms.
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