Word: todays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...then in the midst of a civil war. Freetown, which sits amid lush rice paddies and rolling green hills, was established in 1787 as a home for freed slaves. The British cut off the slaves' shackles on a block in front of a cottonwood tree that still stands today. But the country is no paradise: the U.N. ranked it the least-developed nation on earth in 1997. The average life expectancy is 34 years...
...Kids today have scant time for such indulgences. Saddled with an out-of-school curriculum chock-full of Taekwondo lessons, ceramics workshops and bassoon practice, America's youngsters barely have time to check their e-mail before hunkering down with homework. On the whole, U.S. students come home with more schoolwork than ever before--and at a younger age. According to researchers at the University of Michigan, 6-to-9-year-olds in 1981 spent 44 min. a week on homework; in 1997 they did more than two hours' worth. The amount of time that 9-to-11-year-olds...
...American parents should worry less about the precise number of minutes their students devote to homework and more about the uneven and poorly conceived way in which it is assigned. "What defines the homework problem in the U.S. today is variation," Cooper says. Less than one-third of U.S. school districts provide any guidelines to parents and teachers on how much homework children should receive and what purpose it's supposed to serve. In places that have instituted formal homework policies, a semblance of sanity has arrived. In Hinsdale, Ill., parents often complained that their children got too much homework...
...comfortable applying the language of adult sexual harassment and sexual discrimination to kids? It's hard to tell if today's children behave much better or much worse than those of the past, since sexual-harassment studies are new to the '90s. Davis supporters believe they can draw a valid parallel to workplace sexual harassment, where once common behavior is now seen as unacceptable. "It's the same behavior, and it comes from the same place," says Martha Davis, legal director of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. But opponents point out that children can be cruel without fully...
...Ratnesar says, "I didn't take homework very seriously. I never won the award for the best science project." He did not lack for ways to occupy his time, however. Ratnesar played three musical instruments, soccer and tennis, and edited his high school paper. He believes that while students today are assigned more homework than he endured, "it's still not very focused, at least not in the way you'd find in schools in Tokyo or Stockholm...