Tagged: education

Sam Talkington is cramming. It’s finals week at the University of Washington and he’s got an economics exam soon.

Talkington is majoring in finance at the Foster School of Business and he’s been feeling the crunch. “I have an extremely heavy course load right now,” he said. “I’m taking four courses and some stuff I’m not familiar with but becoming more familiar with as the days progress.”

It's obvious from his interview with The Guardian newspaper that Andrew Snowden knew leaking NSA secrets would get him into hot water. But he seems to have planned for that. Somehow, he's disappeared from his Hong Kong hotel room. Some have suggested he might find refuge in Russia, on mainland China, or on some remote island in the Philippines.

Christopher Pyle knows a thing or two about blowing whistles. In 1970, while in the U.S. Army, he disclosed the extent of the military's surveillance of the protest movement. That led, in part, to the Watergate scandal. Mr. Pyle now teaches politics at Mount Holyoke College and is the author of several books on military surveillance of civilians. The CBC's Carol Off asked him for insight on Snowden's situation.

Other stories on KUOW Presents,  June 11:

This fall, some classes may get harder for public school students — and teachers — across Washington. That's when many districts will roll out new, more rigorous language arts and math standards, known as the Common Core. Washington is one of 45 states that have adopted the same set of K-12 standards.

Some Washington teachers have already started using them. At Sylvester Middle School in Burien, teacher Christy Bowman-White read a poem about a nail-biter basketball shot to her honors language arts class on a recent school day.

In New York, this school year was the first year neighborhood schools were required to accept students with special needs into regular classrooms. They've made the transition with the aid of high-tech gadgets. You can hear that story online.

Michelle Buetow says we could learn something from New York's experiment. She's co-president of Seattle's Special Education PTSA. She says although Seattle is a high-tech city, its approach to special education is decidedly low-tech. She says “it’s borderline criminal that a city built on high-tech resources has chosen not to fund these kinds of gadgets for students with special needs.” But school districts strapped for cash have struggled to find money for these kinds of technologies.

Full list of stories from KUOW Presents, June 5: