Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

On Friday, I took a break from doing my taxes and spent one hour monitoring Twitter for the words bored, class and school. I expected to see a few posts; instead I saw a galaxy. All over the world, kids were posting—at the rate of about 1 per second by my guess—about how bored they were in real time.

The sheer volume—and outrage and creativity—of their laments was part awesome, part tragic. I wondered what would happen if we could somehow capture all that energy, all those empty hours?

For now, unsure what else to do, I have documented an hour of grievances, from 2 to 3 pm ET on March 15, 2013, to remind adults what it is like to be made to wait or be silent or do mind-numbing tasks of no import. (Note: This is not even close to a comprehensive list.)

By the time I get out of school today I will be a pro at all the games on my phone! #bored @KenzleyWilson

Watching Big Bang theory in math class #bored #whereareyouspringbreak instagr.am/p/W44gpHl3oU/ @c_partyrocker

When class is pointless.. #shouldnthavecome #bored @Kenzers_96

When I call my mom in math class.. #bored @MerMer_Paige

I hate watching movies in class. #bored @bekkachrist

In English before #Bored #Netherhall #School #Lewis #Southwell pic.twitter.com/Kr4pg9bnjb @Lee_Farish

Survived math test this period…I think. Now gotta live thru next 4 periods til spring break! #OhYeah #Bored @jayna_lei

Been in class for 10 minutes and I already finished the assignment that is supposed to take 60. #bored @KilliynHope

Caught me slippin , #what #i #do #in #school , #texting #bored #bummmmm instagr.am/p/W4z1jxHcOM/ @Ayo_Judayy

Wish my mom could come pick me up from school..#Bored @CaitlinWilkie1

Documenting time passing during class #bored #timegoesbysoslowly instagr.am/p/W4yfi6r65X/ @juliaa_nicole

This class can end anytime now! #Bored @motorgabe707

I haven’t done anything in school all day besides take the [Ohio Graduation Test] #Bored @AnnaReneeSadows

Can we just skip to the part where school is over and it’s summer? #school #summer #bored #hatewinter #iwantsummer #now @jamiestark16

I’m so glad my mom is making me stay at school since I’m not doing anything in any of my classes. #sarcasm #bored #annoyed @amariiee13

At school. #Bored @Raccccheeeel

Bored in class…. #sleepy #bored #tired #school instagr.am/p/W4ws6Axf83/ @Cster_

This is what I do when I’m bored in class #bored #school pic.twitter.com/z9u9suB0An @ChristineLangg

Math class, #bored @rachyboom1234

English Class #Bored #BadLighting #Whatever instagr.am/p/W4xu7wJkLt/ @_TheNamesShania

You get the idea. The bottom line is that if you did a word cloud for kids’ Tweets from school, it would probably look like this.
   

Buried in a NYT story about niche online classes (on sites like CreativeLive) was this line:

“[T]wo of Hollywood’s largest talent agencies, Creative Artists Agency and William Morris Endeavor, have invested small sums in CreativeLive that signal their interest in using the company’s service as a new outlet for their celebrity clients.”

Here’s why this matters: Two of the country’s most unique and potent exports are higher education and Hollywood. Until now, they had little reason to intersect.

But online classes are different than the in-person kind: Not only do they have a huge potential profit upside, given the ability to attract tens of thousands of students worldwide, but they are, at their best, performances. No one likes to say this out loud in academia, but it’s true: the most impactful MOOCs are also entertaining. The teacher does not need to be a singing, dancing, joke-telling maniac, but the teacher does need to be riveting, one way or another. The production quality needs to be high. Or the students will evaporate, clicking off to Facebook or Twitter or one of the many other online classes multiplying on the Internet.

Enter Hollywood.

If these industries combined their talents intelligently, the U.S. could dominate the online learning marketplace for decades to come. But that’s a big If…

Finland’s Core Math Curriculum for 1st & 2nd graders:

“Pupils…will derive satisfaction and pleasure from understanding and solving problems.”

“Pupils will…learn to justify their solutions and conclusions by means of pictures and concrete models and tools, in writing and orally; and to find similarities, differences, regularities and cause-and-effect relationships between phenomena…”

Enough said.

International education guru Andreas Schleicher has profound affection for data, as I’ve written before. This affection has fueled his quest to find and learn from the world’s top-performing education systems, helping to develop the OECD’s PISA test of 15-year-olds and share the findings far and wide. But his dedication to data can sometimes make it hard for regular humans to understand what he is saying.

Happily, in a TED talk (filmed this summer but posted online this month), Schleicher has distilled his thoughts into points that almost everyone can follow. You still can’t really see the data on his slides, but never mind that. His words get the job done. The data, I think, is really for him, like a security blanket woven by PowerPoint.

If you have 19 minutes for a coffee break, I’d suggest checking it out. If you don’t, here are a few highlights:

On Spending:

“Spending per student explains less than 20% of the performance variation between countries.”

On Cultural Capital:

“I know you won’t believe it, but there are countries in which the most attractive place to be is not the shopping center but the school. Those places exist.”

On Mindset:

“[P]lacing a high value on education is just part of the picture. The other part is to believe that all children are capable of success.”

Jennifer Senior has an entertaining (and deliciously illustrated) piece in New York magazine about the toxic effects of high school. She makes a great point about the tendency of “experts” to focus on childhood (which is critical for academic learning)—and their relative silence about the importance high school, which shapes people’s personalities and neuroses in all kinds of horrible ways.

My one question is: Couldn’t high school be less toxic? Senior doesn’t get into this, suggesting that the problem is endemic to grouping large numbers of strangers together in one building. I don’t know if I buy that; I think there are probably huge degrees of toxicity, just as their are in different families or offices.

I would love to know what makes one high school more sadistic than another…

For the record, Time Magazine printed a correction last week with regards to a graphic that accompanied my story about gunfights.

I had nothing to do with this graphic. It was compiled by Time’s graphics folks.

For what it’s worth: I agree it was a foolish mistake. I am glad Time has acknowledged the error.

The correction appears to be behind a paywall, so I’ll reprint it here: “In a graphic, we listed the price of a 600-round magazine but mischaracterized its use. That magazine is for an airsoft pellet gun, not an actual firearm.”

Embarrassing. Wish I had noticed it. Please stop the hating.

This week, I’ll be moderating a panel in San Francisco on global education and technology. About 61 million elementary-age kids are not enrolled in school at all; another 250 million are not able to read, write or count, even though they’ve been in school for at least four years.

Can technology (finally) disrupt this narrative? I am skeptical but still curious…

For my latest Time Magazine story, I decided to ask this question of people who have actually been in gunfights. Most were police officers or soldiers; virtually all of them believed strongly in gun rights, and many were NRA members. But at the same time, they offered a cautionary warning to school districts considering hiring armed guards or allowing teachers to carry firearms:

“Real gun battles are not Call of Duty,” says Ryan Millbern, who responded to an active-shooter incident and an armed bank robbery among other calls during his decade as a police officer in Colorado.

There’s a reason that NYPD officers only hit their targets 18% of the time in actual gunfights; it is damn hard to do. And it requires highly realistic, simulation training on a regular basis. The kind that most teachers, principals and even security guards will not have the time or money to get.

To understand why it is so hard to perform well in a gunfight, check out the detailed narrative of one veteran police officer’s experience with an active shooter.

Bill Lewinski, a behavioral scientist specializing in law enforcement safety, would prefer we spend our hard-earned money and attention on mental health services—more guidance counselors in schools and better services on the streets, for example. He understands the impulse to put more guns in schools, but he considers it “a band-aid solution” that will do nothing to cure the real problem.

If communities do opt for armed guards or teachers anyway, he says, “We’d better train people well. [Otherwise] mistake-of-fact shootings, accidental shootings, all of those things will occur.”