Knowing VS. Thinking for Yourself

In Tony Wagner's article "Rigor Redefined" ,the point he is trying to get across, is that students need to start thinking for themselves. This gets me into a question for you, the reader,
have you ever sat in a classroom and thought, I know this information, because the teacher taught it to me, but, if she hadn't, would i still be able to figure it out? It will never help students if they are always "spoon fed" the answers. Jobs now don't require you to know, they require you to think and to question. Although,the problem is, we would have to, pretty much recreate the curriculum in schools, to have this plan work out. It would have a lot of benefits, such as, better careers, better lives, and less stress. Also it would force us as students to figure out the problems were given, and not be shown how to solve it by a teacher. Now, since there is a lot more information out in the world, were beginning to know less and less about past and present information. If we knew how to question and solve problems then we would be able to catch up faster with information that's out in the world. I agree with Wagner's beliefs, strongly, because knowing doesn't help anyone but analyzing problems for yourself does. All in all it would make a huge, positive impact on students today, if schools taught classrooms in this way.

Are Dogs Smarter Than We Think They Are?

This week i watched a video called "Meet a Dog who can read" with Lisa Howells which made me wonder how smart dogs will be in the future. Most dogs are thought of as stupid and lazy, but really if there trained the right way they can be smart maybe even as smart as you. This dog could read commands and then actually act them out showing just how smart dogs are. It also reminded me of a video that i watched of dogs talking through there bark.
Yes it may be funny but just think about if dogs were taught to actually talk, and walk and read. Also i think its interesting how certain breeds of dogs are smarter than other breeds, is behavior really important to intelligence? And is it the same for humans.
I think its very interesting that dogs can learn up to 165 words, aware of differences of to five and can calculate that, this is the same for a 2 to 2.5 year old.
In conclusion dogs are not as dumb as you may think they are.

Is More School Better?

President Obama wants students in America to compete better with kids across the world. According to him our test scores are a lot lower than kids in other states he expressed this in the article "Obama would curtail summer vacation" by the Associated Press. How does he want to address this issue? He wants to cut down summer and make school days longer.

First of all, many kids would probably hate going to school longer and I don't believe it would help that much. Just the other day I was listening to the Dom and Jane show and they were talking about how smart kids in Japan are. They said that the reason kids in Japan are way out beating America in test scores is because they only let their best students advance in their education. The other kids have to go to a trade school. If president Obama does decide to do this he will probably be doing more bad then good.

In the article it said that kids need summer. Without it they wouldn't actually retain as much as with it. But as summer wouldn't be too bad to loose, extra time in school like 3 hours would be very bad. All students don't use that time to hang out with their friend some students are doing homework all night. If we had less time then kids would be exhausted from working on homework and not do as well. Some kids even said that if they made school longer they would just walk out.
One question i had while reading was:
What difference would it make to send kids to school longer?
My perspective on this is that making school longer would hurt kids grades more then helping them. Also it would be a lot more expensive and many poor kids would have to drop out of school.