Chinese School Uses Facial Recognition to Monitor Students’ Attention in Class
Students at the No. 11 Middle School in Hangzhou, China, may want to think twice before dozing off or getting distracted in class as a new facial recognition system will be scanning their faces every 30 seconds to make sure they are paying attention. Called a “smart classroom behavior management system”, the new monitoring solution […]
25-Year-Old Man Posed as 17-Year-Old Teen So He Could Play High-School Basketball
A 25-year-old Dallas man posed as a freshman high-school student for nine months so he could once again relive his glory days as a teen basketball player. Sidney Bouvier Gilstrap-Portley enrolled at the Skyline High School last year, claiming to be a Hurricane Harvey refugee named Rashun Richardson. At the time, Dallas high-schools had opened […]
Schools in the UK Are Removing Analog Clocks Because Students Can’t Tell Time
A head-teachers’ union in the UK recently reported that youths have become so accustomed to using digital devices that they are having trouble correctly reading time on analog clocks, forcing schools to replace them. According to Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary at the Association of School and College Leaders, children and young teens aren’t as […]
South-African Teacher Uses Hip-Hop to Make Math Fun for Students
Kurt Minnaar, a 33-year-old math teacher at Cape Town’s Eben Dönges High School uses hip hop beats and rhymes to make math lessons more enjoyable for his students. Singing or listening to music during math class is usually frowned upon, but in Kurt Minnaar’s classroom, it’s actually a pre-requisite. The former choreographer and hip-hop artist is […]
Indian Textbook Encourages Kids to Kill Cats as an Experiment
The authors of a Class IV textbook in India recently came under fire, after it was revealed that in a lesson on the importance of breathing they were literally encouraging the kids to do an experiment involving suffocating a cat. It sounds hard to believe that a school textbook for environmental studies could teach children as […]
Chinese School Creates “Grade Bank” That Lets Students Borrow Grades to Pass Exams
In an effort to ease the intense pressure that its students face in China’s notoriously rigid exam-based education system, a school in Nanjing has created a “grade bank” that lets students “borrow” grades so that they can pass exams, and then repay them in subsequent tests. Oh man, I wish we had something like this when I […]
Chinese Students Are Forced to Take Tests Outdoors in Thick Smog
A school principal in China’s Henan province was recently suspended for making young students take tests outdoors in smog so thick that they could barely see their papers, despite receiving orders to close the school. On December 20th, 480 students from the No. 1 Middle School in Linqi town, Linzhou, were forced to take their […]
Chinese Schools Crack Down on Trendy Haircuts with Barbers at the Gates
Faced with the adoption of trendy foreign hairstyles by a growing number of students, Chinese schools are coming up with desperate measures to enforce their strict haircut policies. The latest of these measures involves posting barbers at the school gates to trim long or dyed hair on the spot. Chinese students returning from their summer […]
Teacher Installs Cycling Machines Under Students’ Desks to Help Them Concentrate
After noticing that her eight grade students had problems focusing during math class, a North Carolina teacher decided to channel their energy in a different way – cycling. It doesn’t sound like the most common thing to do during math class, but Bethany Lambeth, a teacher from Wake County, says that ever since she installed […]
Drink or Fail – Chinese Students Forced to Down Hard Liquor to Pass Exam
A college professor in China has been suspended after giving his students a rather controversial test during their final exam. In a bid to prepare them for real life, he asked his students to gulp down glasses of baijiu, a Chinese liquor, grading them based on how much they were able consume. “You’re all going […]
Roadside Education – Indian Factory Worker Opens Street School to Teach Slum Kids
For the past 15 years, factory owner Kamal Parmar has been running an after-school program for slum kids in Ahmedabad, India, helping them with basic skills like reading and writing and even preparing for their school tests. Parmar’s story begins one afternoon 15 years ago. He was standing outside his metal fabrication workshop, near the […]
Chinese Primary School Replaces Nap Time With Meditation Session
Most people will agree that nap time is one of the best things about kindergarten – which is why a Chinese primary school was severely criticized for trying to replace afternoon naps with meditation. The pilot meditation program at Shishan Shuben Primary School, in China’s Guangdong Province, ran for only two days before it was […]
Deep Springs College – An Exclusive All-Male College in the Middle of a California Desert
One of the most exclusive colleges in the world is located bang in the middle of the remote high California desert. The institution accepts only 12 male students a year, and believe it or not, it consistently tops Harvard’s yield rate! Deep Springs College, founded in 1917, is unusual in every imaginable way. It has […]
Indians Take Exam Cheating to New Heights by Scaling School Walls to Help Friends and Relatives
Cheating at exams is an age-old phenomenon, but the practice literally scaled new heights last week in the eastern Indian state of Bihar. News reports showed how parents and relatives of 10th-grade students climbing the walls of a school building to hand cheat sheets to the students taking their year-end exams inside! Photographs and videos […]
Students Across the Country Are Brokering Deals to Get Out of Exams if They Get Enough Retweets
I never thought I’d live to see the day when Tweets could replace a student’s academic performance. But it’s actually becoming a popular trend. Teachers all over the United States are promising to cancel final exams if their students manage to get a sufficient number of retweets. I’m not sure the teachers always mean it, […]