Word: focal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...adapting, yeah, but rewording Shakespeare? No, all it is is trying to take this enormous, fantastic play and fit it into our purposes. Mead: We’re not losing anything from the storyline, and, with 10 characters, I think it makes it more intimate. The focal points are the characters, and everything else acts as a funnel to center that focus on the characters. We’re not professionally trained, and a lot of people have packed schedules, so having 10 characters gives us more time to help people develop their language and also develop their characters...
Shaped somewhat like a very large bean?an organic form that has turned up more than once in Future Systems designs?the store gave the jumble of downtown Birmingham a glamorous new focal point. For one thing, it's pillowy. Not a word you typically get to use when describing a building; but Future Systems doesn't make typical buildings. And its mostly windowless exterior is covered by 15,000 anodized aluminum disks packed in rows against a field of stucco painted "Yves Klein blue," the dark blue patented by the French artist. Depending on how you think about...
...began like a carnival day. Thousands of people thronged Budapest's old cobblestoned streets wearing red, white and green boutonnieres, tossing red, white and green ribbons into passing cars. Then gradually the crowd began to gather at focal points and to express its will, and then to march. A scared Communist official told an American businessman: 'The earth is moving.' The earth moved to the tread of a million feet in Hungary last week, and a satellite which had been blindly spinning in the Soviet orbit for eleven years suddenly swung out of its gravitational course into a still unsteady...
...N.C.T.M. itself has come riding to the rescue. In a notably slim document, it has identified just three essential goals, or "focal points," for each grade from pre-K to eighth, none of them fuzzy, all of them building blocks for higher math. In fourth grade, for instance, the group recommends focusing on the quick recall of multiplication facts, a deep understanding of decimals and the ability to measure and compute the area of rectangles, circles and other shapes. "Our objective," says Fennell, "is to get conversations going at the state level about what really is important." In recent weeks...
...have a solution to the national math problem? We certainly have the correct formula. The question is, Can we apply it? Already the N.C.T.M.'s focal points are being called a back-to-basics movement, another swing of the ideological pendulum rather than a fresh look at what it would take to get more kids to calculus by 12th grade. If the script follows that of the Reading Wars, what comes next will be dreary times-tables recitals in unison, dull new books that fail to inspire understanding, and drill, drill, drill, much like the unhappy scenes in many...