Word: high
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reagan has often relied on such patriotic appeals to try to win over the American people. Judging by his relatively high ratings in public opinion polls and his reputation as the Great Communicator, he remains successful. But if Reagan really thinks he can pass off his unabashed jingoism as substantive and worthy of a presidential farewell speech, he is gravely mistaken...
...that books are abysmal tools for learning science. "It's impossible to understand an astronomy diagram without using three dimensions at proper scale," says Irwin Shapiro, the irrepressible director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and the man who dreamed up STAR six years ago. "High school science textbooks are impossible. They are dense with concepts and jargon. No one understands what's going on." Adds Kenneth Mirvis, who writes STAR course materials: "This is not a curriculum of vocabulary but of concepts." And, explains Shapiro, "facts are easy; concepts are hard...
Through Project STAR, which received $833,000 in seed money from the National Science Foundation in 1985, Shapiro hopes to correct such misunderstandings. The goal of the program is not merely to teach astronomy to high school students but also to use astronomical examples to instill basic concepts of math and science. Thus students may master the inverse-square law of physics by seeing that when a star doubles its distance from a certain point, it becomes one-quarter as bright. Why choose astronomy for this purpose? "It's not as abstract as chemistry and physics," says Shapiro...
...classes, which are separate from the ordinary high school science curriculum, tend to attract curious students and science buffs. Still, it is often an uphill battle to disabuse kids of fallacies that have become ingrained even by age 17. "You want to defend your old misconceptions, but you can't," says Matthew Liebman, a STAR student at Massachusetts' Framingham North High School. Despite the difficulties, preliminary studies by Shapiro's team suggest that STAR students have a better grasp of basic scientific concepts and mathematics than students in ordinary courses. "We're definitely making headway and in directions we hadn...
...against three conservative Arabian peninsula neighbors and dissipated their power in vicious infighting among tribal and political factions at home. Between 1967 and 1986 the top party leadership changed five times, each regime more radical than the last. For its unflinching march down the socialist road, South Yemen won high ranking among the poorest nations on earth...