DID YOU HEAR?

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Ants aren't born knowing how to swarm over your picnic basket--these skills must be taught. British biologists Nigel Franks and Tom Richardson have discovered that ants have clearly defined teacher-pupil relationships. Older ants slow their own pace to teach younger ants how to find food. The teacher ant provides information or guidance at a rate suited to the pupil's abilities and the pupil signals to the teacher when the Lesson has been assimilated so that they can move on. "There's sort of a two way-street," notes biologist Franks, "that defines true teaching."

In 1948, an Illinois high school art teacher paid $62.50 for a painting to use as a model in the classroom. For 57 years, Stuart Davis's "Still Life with Flowers" hung nearly forgotten in a hallway of New Trier High School in a suburb of Chicago. After realizing the value of the work, the school placed it up for auction and sold it for a cool $3.152 million. At last report, the New Trier school district is still trying to decide what to do with their unexpected windfall Teachers--any ideas?

Want to show your students the historic 1969 moon landing? Google has digitized hundreds of historic newsclips from the National Archives and they're easy to download. To see the full list, visit http://video.google.com/nara.html.

(SOURCES: NATURE, CHICAGO TRIBUNE GOOGLE)

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