Word: rods
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sparing the rod may spoil the child, but wielding it can bring a world of trouble. French schoolteacher José Laboureur, 49, learned that lesson Wednesday when a criminal court in northern France convicted him of "aggravated violence" and fined him $750 for slapping a student who had insulted him with an unprintable word. Yet the real surprise is that French public opinion has come down resoundingly in favor of Laboureur's corporal approach towards imposing discipline in France's increasingly unruly classrooms...
...number of students reporting physical punishment from teachers fell by 42% between 1994 and 2004. During that same period, the percentage of American educators claiming they'd be verbally or physically abused by students halved, from 13% to 7%. That data is difficult for French supporters of the rod to dismiss as more weak-willed American PC - suggesting as it does that clashes in classrooms generally decrease when both sides show a willingness to give one another a break, rather than a whack...
...important. In famines, it is the poor that die, not the rich. In practice, good development combines those approaches and more. Raise food production. Reduce population growth. (And do both as equitably as possible.) Give a starving man a fish, sure. But when he's recovered, give him a rod and have a chat about contraception...
...more cautious figure than Warren might have passed on the opportunity to become a political lightning rod. But he has spent the past few years positioning himself for just such a role as a suprapolitical, supracreedal arbiter of public virtues and religious responsibilities. Unlike some other conservative religious leaders during this long election season, he has remained conspicuously neutral on candidates. When he pushed to "unstick" an earlier stalled attempt to get John McCain and Barack Obama together, he did so by sending a personal "Let's do it" e-mail to each of them. The payoff...
...father's neighborhood declaring, "We're not going to stand for this violence that's taking our young people," and bearing black-and-red placards reading "Stop. Killing. People." The city's murder rate has climbed 13% so far this year. As pressure mounted on city authorities, Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich declared that crime in Chicago had gotten "out of control" - the city of 3 million has a gang population officially estimated at 70,000 - and offered to send state troopers into its most crime-ridden neighborhoods...