Pacific Northwest Ballet has been putting on a terrific series of educational events the last few weeks: there was the Twyla Tharp-narrated rehearsal of her two new works, and then Doug Fullington gave us firsthand foreign policy experience by showing us real Russian choreography. That last was in a rehearsal studio at the Phelps Center and included PNB principals and the corps de ballet doing live excerpts, and if you missed it, you really missed......

WAMU'S KRAUSS PLANT: Tonight's the night: some old dude named Robert Plant is appearing with the angelically voiced Alison Krauss. They're touring for the album Raising Sand, which Rolling Stone praised for its "relaxed, smoky harmonies and reverbed midtempo rockabilly." All ages. Or you could go see Great Big Sea with all these people. 8:00 p.m. // WaMu Theater // $45-$135 GOTVR: Which stands for Get Out the Voter Registration. The 37th District Democrats are......

Most news reports and editorials that reference the striking Bellevue teachers list salary as the primary motivator for the strike, which is the easy play because it's always about money. Except when it isn't. The striking Bellevue teachers we've talked to (full disclosure: Seattlest's wife is a striking Bellevue teacher) list the current implementation of the centralized curriculum as the primary motivation for the strike. In 2006 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded millions......

"A Nightmare Of #2's" by Dr. Mike. Nightmare indeed! Give them two #2 pencils, a standard non-graphing calculator, and a couple hours: Washington seniors will do better on average in the critical reading and math sections of the SAT than seniors in every other state (at least, states in which more than half of the eligible students took the exam). What a crop of young 'uns we have to be proud of! Thanks to......

Last Friday we were at Shorecrest High School after-hours for "Coffeehouse," an open-mic put on by the school's literary journal Tattoo. It was our second time around, so we had a better idea of what to expect: the cafeteria was packed to the rafters. Seriously, Friday night and this is what the kids of today are up to? Near the end of intermission we were looking over the art gallery in the hall when this......

What do you do with hardened, scary misdemeanor criminals when there's no room in the county jail? Create new programs that focus on counseling, job training, and other rehabilitative services? Feed cash to community centers and mentoring programs that help head off the problem before it starts? No, stupid, you build more jails. Says the P-I:Cities [around King County] have responded in a variety of ways -- through adopting alternatives to incarceration, including home......

Get your name on the official list for Experience Music Project's 2008 Pop Conference, taking place in our very own Hendrix-drenched, spring-obsessed city from April 10–13. That's next weekend! This year's theme is "Shake, Rattle: Music, Conflict, and Change," and EMP has gathered over 160 writers, speakers and musicians to expound on the many facets of the subject. (The conference is completely, gloriously free.) The many panels we're excited about include Riotous (featuring presentations......

Sixty University of Washington professors have signed an open letter discussing the trend of unprepared students. Science and Math teachers at the UW have noticed a rising number of their incoming students can't do basic math. Some instructors claim they've had to dumb down their classes because of the increasing lack of math skills. Professor Cliff Mass, from the Atmospheric Science Department, gathered the signatures. He was inspired to write the letter because of......

Spawned by one too many Mary Kay Letourneau-like stories coming out of the state, a new bill is waiting for Senate approval in Olympia. The "Student Protection Bill" would expand the crimes for which Washington State teachers could lose their certification. The proposed bill also seeks to encourage more oversight at the local level, asking school districts to report teachers who have displayed "boundary issues," which would not necessitate legal action. It also hopes to......

Photo by Grundlepuck from the Seattlest Flickr poolWorried about rising material costs, the Seattle school district has sped ahead with construction of new schools without waiting to get input from parents. "I mean, you could drag these things out for another two years...We have to say 'Did we do enough to move forward with the project?' That's what I'm really looking into," School Board member Harium Martin-Morris told the Times' Emily Heffter. Who are......

We all know what happens to kids who attend private school. Their folks buy them 16 years of education, they get a job at Daddy's firm, and eventually they sit in board rooms and devise ways to increase profits--usually by laying off kids who went to public school. The forward-thinking youth at private Kennedy High don't want the hopeless, powerless lives of their public school lessers to come as a shock, so they are preparing......

Last night there were tons of Ron Paul's people outside the Showbox Sodo. Before, during, and after Barack Obama's fundraising event/rally, the Paul supporters waved their signs and interacted with anyone who would give them the time of day. Too bad they couldn't afford tickets to the event due to the current tax structure--if only someone would abolish the IRS and the Federal Reserve.... Meanwhile, inside the venue was a crowd of teens, twenty-somethings,......

The Seattle School District paid some education Ph.Ds to assess the district's gifted program, the Advanced Placement Program (APP). [Full Disclosure: We were in APP (then called "IPP") from 1st-8th grade.] The Ph.Ds produced a report containing a bunch of observations that are incomprehensible to anyone that isn't a Ph.D., such as the need for "socio-emotional counseling" and "overall curricular vision." [Full Disclosure: In IPP we had this goofy slogan that went "You pee-pee, I......

Is a new front opening up in the Culture Wars? Seattle school officials say no, but King 5's producers not-so-subtly imply yes. "A letter from the Seattle School District is raising some eyebrows about Thanksgiving and how it should be handled in the classroom," writes King 5 News' Eric Wilkinson. "The letter tells school district staff that the holiday is seen by many Native Americans as a 'time of mourning.'" Specifically, the letter cites this......

Trouble in Tahiti / Rita: Seattle Young Artists Program @ CHAC 8-10pm, Nov. 16-17 // CHAC // Tickets $20 in advance Friday and Saturday, Seattle Opera's Young Artists Program perform at CHAC with an unusual double-feature. We buttonholed our friend Jonathan Dean, the Education Department's Artistic Administrator, and peppered him with hard-hitting questions to get to the bottom of all this. MvB: You're doing two shows, one by Leonard Bernstein, one by Gaetano Donizetti. What's......

Seattlest has found a reason for everyone to welcome bicycles on the city's streets. The origins lie in Virgin Vacations' (has anyone asked The Name Inspector to do a write up on Richard Branson's desire to cater to virgins?) naming of the world's 11 most bike-friendly cities. Unfortunately, Seattle didn't make the list (Portland came in at number 2), which uses five criteria created by The Bicycle Friendly Communities Campaign to judge a community's bike......

Economist and NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman was speaking at Town Hall last night. We were going to do this thing where we pretended to mistake him for Jack Klugman and then complained the whole post about him never mentioning acting with Tony Randall or Quincy. Luckily, we thought better of it. We were inspired by Krugman himself, though, who turned out to be a very droll fellow, or at least acts that way on cold......

Front-page screamer in the P-I today: School crimes under wraps. The P-I (disclosure: I write freelance sports pieces for them) reviewed Seattle School records and found cases of assault that weren't reported to police. Instead, school administrators tried to deal with these incidents on their own. King County prosecuting attorney Tomas Gahan ain't happy about it. Says he: "I don't want the principals or administrators to sort out what is a crime and what isn't.......

Uh-oh. Truly insipid story in this morning's Pee-Eye headlined "College freshmen, profs often befuddled by culture gap." Example: today's 18-year-old freshmen don't know about Apartheid, haven't seen the Godfather movies; their profs have to give mini-history lectures and take in Superbad to learn what the kids are talking about. Within minutes, three dozen or so comments, most of them asking WTF. Seattlest goes in search of answers. Not the reporter's fault, surely. She's just following......

Last month the Husky basketball team went to Greece together. They played some local teams but, also, since they are students too, got some in-depth instruction on Greek history from Dr. James Clauss of the UW Classics department. Dr. Clauss is also head of the UW Honors program, and a winner of the UW's Distinguished Teaching award. The Huskies went 2-3 in basketball on the trip, but we thought it would be interesting to check......

Seattlest got this postcard in the mail a few weeks ago, encouraging us to consider WhySouth.com. It hurt our brain. Look. We may be hip, happening descriptivists. We may read Language Log. We may think Strunk & White should take those sticks out of their asses. But we believe in context, and we believe that an educational institution should send out stuff that isn't just plain wrong. The switch from first person in the......

If there's anything we learned studying literature in college, it's that everything either comes from Shakespeare, Greek mythology or the Bible. Seattlest used to entertain herself by playing "From Whence Did That Allusion Come?" Yeah, we only had two friends in college. The result of our education is an absolute delight for anything that successfully adapts some brilliant Shakespearean masterpiece into a slightly more ribald, contemporary spectacle. And so it is that we perked up......

Alice in Chains’ former lead singer would be blowing out candles today had he not said yes, yes, yes to drugs. The Chains gang would likely still be making both crunchy (Dirt) and beautiful (Sap) music. Jerry Cantrell, who co-founded the band with Layne, probably would have written some lighter lyrics and cut his hair. Seattlest would have had the pleasure of seeing Alice in Chains—or the supergroup Mad Season—live. Even more importantly, had Layne......

This past Friday, Steinbrueck Park was the site of a free, four-hour concert that punctuated Pike Place Market’s Centennial Celebration. It was a great time to be a proud, passionate Seattleite. A wonderful time to be a frugal tourist. And, despite a tiny bit of Pearl Jam-overpromising by Party promoters, a perfect time to be Seattlest. As people started to pour into the area, claiming spots in what little grass was left by the freshly-erected......

We think Chief Gil Kerlikowske said it best:"We want to hold the ground we've taken and maintain the peace here and have real-time information about where the hot spots are..."Right away you get a sense of the high-level strategy involved in taking Seattle back, street by street, from people with very little money, clean clothes, or a complete high school education. Was it necessary to make the announcement in such a dramatic fashion? We......

KEXP is having an auction of some kind where they sell off a lot of crap they have lying around to the highest bidder. Fanboys and girls of the radio station can get a place at the High Dive VIP table, the transmitter, their urinal (those wacky DJs), or an evening with Systems Coordinator Cyrus Despres. Despres is described thusly in the auction listing: While most people strive to be on-air DJs or work......

Kakuta Hamisi, a member of the Maasai tribe of Kenya, is working over the summer at the Woodland Park Zoo, talking to zoo visitors about Maasai culture and conservation. Hamisi, an Evergreen State grad, evidently likes his job--he recruited several members of his tribe to work with him. But Catherine Claiborne, a grad student at UW's Evans School, has a message for Hamisi: You are being exploited. She tells the Times that the exhibit could......

As of this morning, queer couples in the state of Washington have about three new rights, which include, but are not limited to: 1. The right to spend time together. 2. The right to talk to each other's doctor. 3. The right to call each other "partner." Whoopdeedoo. We're not as excited about the new domestic partnership law that goes into effect today, as we are that, when you sign up, you get a......

Remember—or recognize—Silverchair? Chances are the last song you heard from the Australian trio was 1995’s grunge-ish "Tomorrow," which hit #1 on US charts. The band’s mates were 14 when that single, off debut album Frogstomp, made them international stars. American interest in their music may have ebbed since, but Silverchair remains Australia’s biggest act. Young Modern, their new—and decidedly un-grunge—album is their record-breaking 5th Aussie chart-topper. It hits US bins on July 24. The......

Deep breaths, Seattlest. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Again. Good. The University of Washington isn't taking a tire iron to the knees of students over file-sharing, although it seemed that way in the Vice Provost for Student Life's email yesterday. Probably should have run that missive by a few people before hitting the spam button there, Vice Provost. Not that news of the university's compliance with the RIAA's demands wouldn't cause consternation......