News Flash

Rush Limbaugh is STILL a big fat idiot.  He's a freaking racist too.

On a completely different note: 
... excerpt from an art teacher digest forum:


" As an art teacher, it is certainly appropriate to be an advocate for our own discipline and choice in life... While I want to help them understand the pros and cons of being an artist, I am also believe it is crucial to have real passion for what they decide to do. 
Creative art experimentation and discovery learning in art does offer a lot of mind building advantages needed in science. While you can be a good lab assistant in science by being a smart and careful technician, real scientists have to have strong divergent thinking abilities. Without creativity and innovation, they are doomed to be technicians who wash the test tubes and clean up behind the actual scientists. In many labs, the actual scientists are doing the thinking while the assistants are doing all the work.

A scientist at MIT tells me that his grad students are very smart and technically capable, but when they get an unexpected result, they are slow in their ability of figure out what they have discovered. He says their greatest need is to become more creative. A scientist at Rice U. tells me that when her grad students get unexpected results they mistakenly assume that they have made a mistake, so they repeat the lab work only to get the same unexpected result (wasting years of work). She says their science classes in high school and college have not given them practice in making discoveries. They have learned to be careful to avoid mistakes, but not how to learn from mistakes. They lack the imagination and creativity to see their own discoveries when they happen. She says they waste time and energy because they have not learned to actually experiment. Their science classes assigned them lab work where they already knew the answers before they did the lab work. 
It is easy to be critical of science education, but did these science students have enough art teachers that challenged them to be creative, or did their art teachers also show them the examples before they did the project? Did their art teachers require them to learn to observe and express their own experiences, observations, and imaginations; or did their art teachers allow them to copy?"
Marvin Bartel, art educator writer and artist (retired art teacher)