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A wooden tablet discovered on Easter Island may pre-date European colonization of the region, researchers revealed in early February. Less than 30 wooden tablets containing an undeciphered script called “Rongorongo” were found on the island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), four of which were removed in 1869 by Catholic Missionaries, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Those wooden tablets were analyzed using radiocarbon dating, and one of them was found to pre-date European settlement on the island, the study said. Easter Island was “discovered” by Europeans in the 1720s, and absolutely decimated in the years following, the...

Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) signed legislation repealing the basic skills test that had been previously required for college graduates to be certified as teachers in the state's public schools. "Forcing people to prove they are proficient in reading, writing and math in order to be accepted as teachers is out-dated," Murphy said. "In today's world these are no longer essential skills. Tik Tok videos and texting are the main methods of communication used by today's youngsters. This is what our teachers need to be using." Angela Morabito, a spokesperson for the Defense of Freedom Institute and former press secretary for...

Well, I have scoured a half dozen web sites. I confess that I, perhaps, am not good at searching the Internet. But how many key words would one have to know and use to search for a mailing address ??!! So, would anyone like to make fun of me, at least, while you, please provide a valid USPS mailing address for the celebrated talk show and TV personality, Sean Hannity?

Oregon school chiefs have again suspended the need for high schoolers to prove their math, reading and writing skills in order to graduate. The State Board of Education voted last week to continue the suspension for another five years amid claims they are unfair on minority students who don't test well. In order to earn a diploma, graduating students were previously required to earn standardized test scores indicating proficiency in reading, writing and math. But this was put on pause during the pandemic as standardized tests weren't happening amid school closures. Following a unanimous vote by the Oregon State Board...

Oregon high school students won’t have to prove basic mastery of reading, writing or math to graduate from high school until at least 2029, the state Board of Education decided unanimously on Thursday, extending the pause on the controversial graduation requirement that began in 2020.

Oregon high school students won’t have to prove basic mastery of reading, writing or math to graduate from high school until at least 2029, the state Board of Education decided unanimously on Thursday, extending the pause on the controversial graduation requirement that began in 2020. The vote went against the desires of dozens of Oregonians who submitted public comments insisting the standards should be reinstated, including former Republican gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan. Backlash against the lowered standard had already delayed the vote, originally slated to take place in September. Opponents argued that pausing the requirement devalues an Oregon diploma. Giving...

n his rousing keynote address at The Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala last month, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson offered an unexpected piece of advice: “Don’t throw away your hard-copy books.” Unlike digitized books, films, and albums that can be canceled, rewritten, or vanished altogether, physical copies are “the enduring repository that cannot be disappeared.” With their resurrection of poetry recitation requirements, educators in Georgia and Arkansas are protecting that repository in more ways than one, steeping students in a reality they can affirm, trust, and love. Both states’ departments of education recently proposed revised K-12 English language arts standards...

Researchers from Durham University have decoded the meaning of markings found in Ice Age drawings, providing evidence of early writing at least 20,000 years ago.The team were studying cave art, found in at least 400 European caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira, which contains a series of lines and dots found alongside drawings of animals...The team has revealed that the lines and dots indicate the mating and birthing seasons of animals. A "Y" sign formed by adding a diverging line to another has also been determined to mean "giving birth".By using the birth cycles of equivalent animals today as...

I've just finished a rough draft of a book length sci fi story, it's taken me a year and I've still got some rewriting to do but I was starting to think about the next steps in possibly getting it published. I've not been on the internet in any depth for over a year and I don't know what sort help and resources are available these days so any help from published or even aspiring authors would be greatly appreciated.Like I said, it's not finished yet, but the rough draft is good, it has a beginning a middle and an...

Archaeologists have uncovered the largest collection of ancient Egyptian 'notepads' found since the beginning of the 20th century. In the long-lost city of Athribis, in central Egypt, researchers have cataloged more than 18,000 inscribed pieces of pottery, some of which seem to have been written by students. The shards of inked pottery are known as 'ostraca'. Much cheaper and more accessible than papyrus, remnants of broken jars and other vessels were used in ancient Egypt on a daily basis to detail shopping lists, record trades, copy literature and teach students how to write and draw. In fact, a large...

Each year, Dictionary.com reveals a word that often serves as a perfect snapshot of a given year. Maybe you talked about it, texted it, or read a blog about it. No matter how you encountered it, Dictionary.com’s editors say the chosen word was at the forefront of many of our minds in 2021. What is the word of the year for 2021? What is old is indeed new again because Dictionary.com editors proclaim “allyship”—a noun born in the mid-1800s—as the word that dominated the American English vernacular during a year that simmered with racial and political unrest after the rolling...

Okay...I haven't posted in some time but just thought this was funny and had to post somewhere. I'm a bereaved father and author of several grief recovery and support books. I'm working on my sixth book now - this one discussing the return to work following the loss of a loved one. Regardless, I was just curious about the proper use of the words "toward" and "towards" and of course went off to the interwebs to research. There I came across the website Learner's Dictionary and got what I wanted (both correct - writer's choice...just use them the same throughout...

Victor Hugo on Gutenberg's Press, "The Invention of Printing ... is the Mother of Revolution." HISTORY OF WRITING The invention of "writing" was around 3300 BC. Richard Overy, editor of The Times Complete History of the World, stated in "The 50 Key Dates of World History" (October 19, 2007): "No date appears before the start of human civilizations about 5,500 years ago and the beginning of a written or pictorial history." Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson stated in the Cosmos TV series (2014, natgeotv.com, episode 10, "The Immortals"): "It was the people who once lived here, around 5,000 years ago, who...

Freshman composition occupies a unique position in a college curriculum. It is the only class required of about 90 percent of enrollees whose diverse aptitudes and prior writing experience present a challenge for instructors every semester. In Why They Can’t Write, instructor John Warner of the College of Charleston proposes a course he says will minimize the challenge for instructors and have students writing “clearly, persuasively, even beautifully” by semester’s end. His “dream” is to have his course “adopted in every classroom across the country,” but this classroom veteran hopes that the Warner model stays just that—a dream. Before I...

Defenders of politically correct language claim that such speech reduces offensive behavior and encourages conscious thinking about individual merits. On the contrary, the drive for politically correct language relegates more and more terms to the exclusive domain of bullies, while requiring unthinking, reflexive adherence to the latest stupid language fashions. [PDF file at source]

The Fox News headline sums up the issue at hand: "No Obama documents in Obama library? Historians puzzled by Chicago center plans." The article continues, "The Obama Foundation is taking an unconventional approach to the presidential center and library being planned in Chicago. It's opting to host a digital archive of President Barack Obama's records, but not keep his hard-copy manuscripts and letters and other documents onsite." The Chicago Tribune broke the story that, to this point, has attracted no major media attention. Its headline raises much the same question Fox News did: "Without archives on site, how will Obama...

Leslie Mancillas believes everyone has a story worth telling. The Santa Rosa Junior College professor and author has worked with her students over the past few years capturing their stories of hardship, hope and triumph in anthologies. Gearing up for her latest student compilation, Mancillas finds herself reflecting about surviving childhood abuse in a memoir she hopes to finish next summer. Her mother beat her and two siblings while hooked on amphetamines and barbiturates, Mancillas said, which had been prescribed for weight loss and sleep. The amphetamines gave her mother — a petite hospital nurse — super strength, she said....

FORT MADISON, IOWA -- Only ghosts and shadows haunt the empty halls of Sheaffer Pens, the onetime giant pen manufacturer on H Street. Its locked doors and worn brick stand like weary sentinels along the banks of the Mississippi in this struggling southeast Iowa river-and-railroad town. Rust weeps through the paint on the window frames; the once magnificent illuminated-letters sign with the trademark white dot that faced Illinois is gone, no longer serving as a gatekeeper for its fortress of employees. At its peak, it employed more than 2,500 people in a town of 14,000; nearly everyone here had someone...

14-year-old on a mission to change perceptions about young ArabsA 14-year-old Emirati girl’s love for books has led her to write novels, a move she hopes will inspire other young Arabs to work towards reaching their full potential and changing the world’s perception of young Arabs’ capabilities. Aisha Al Naqbi’s first book Blue Moon was published in April last year when she was just 13 and she has just finished the draft for her second book and is well on her way to plotting her third novel. At first glance, Al Naqbi seems like every other teenager but it takes...

Alabama and Louisiana passed laws in 2016 mandating cursive proficiency in public schoolsCursive writing is looping back into style in schools across the country after a generation of students raised on keyboarding, texting and printing out letters longhand. Alabama and Louisiana passed laws in 2016 mandating cursive proficiency in public schools, the latest of 14 states to require cursive. And last fall, the 1.1 million-student New York City school system encouraged teaching cursive to students in the third grade. Penmanship proponents contend writing words in a single line is just a faster way of taking notes. Others say students...