Academics

The University of Pennsylvania had 20 sports teams singled out by the NCAA for outstanding academic performance, it was announced yesterday. Penn's teams were included among 712 squads nationwide recognized by the NCAA. Yale produced the most impressive classroom performance for the second year in a row. Of the 29 men's and women's sports offered by the school and measured by the NCAA, the Bulldogs made the list in 28 sports. Villanova's football team also was recognized. The grades are calculated over a 4-year period but not including 2007-08.

Penncrest's Kiernan Conn is not your prototypical wrestler. "I think I break the average stereotype for wrestlers," he said. "Even my own teammates joke about me because I often am reading or doing homework while waiting for my match to begin. " Reading? At a wrestling match? Sure, when you are taking seven accelerated college preparatory classes; captaining the school's Hi-Q team, which competes academically in quizzes against other schools; teaching a Saturday morning karate class for grade schoolers, and preparing for the weekend's science olympics, you need all the time you can get. "I have always done a lot of things at the same time, especially in academics," Conn said.

Bishop Eustace centerfielder Tom Cuneo, one of the fastest outfielders in South Jersey, has made an oral commitment to attend the University of Pennsylvania. Cuneo, who has scored 1,400 on the Scholastic Assessment Test, said his decision was made Saturday after he received early acceptance to the Ivy League school. "I really wanted to go to Penn because of the academics, and I also like the baseball program," Cuneo said yesterday. "They have a couple of seniors graduating, and I was told I will have a chance to play right away.

Penn Wood wrestling coach Steve Palis says he's seen his share of athletes who decide they want to pursue athletics in college but let their academics suffer at the expense of an extra five minutes in the weight room. "Some of those kids think a school won't care what their grades are or their test scores are as long as they're good athletes," Palis said. "When they finally realize the mistake they've made, sometimes it's too late. Those kids go about doing things the wrong way. " Based on that, David Wood, a team captain and one of the best all-round athletes in Delaware County, is going about things the right way. In addition to his status as an all-Del Val league performer in wrestling, football and baseball, Wood has a 3.7 grade-point average, which gives him a class rank of 11 out of 349, a spot on Penn Wood's honor roll and membership in the National Honor Society.

Cabrini College's Donna Schaeffer has three majors, two sports and a schedule as congested as New York City traffic at rush hour. But Schaeffer isn't complaining. "I'm concentrating on academics," she said. "But I'm glad I have tennis and softball. They help me keep my sanity. " Schaeffer, a Phoenixville High graduate, has been cracking books and forehands with equal success lately. She majors in English, communications and history, and carries a 3.1 grade-point average.

If someone attacks you in the groves of academe, you can't very well swing a machete at them. Therefore, words are our weapons, and we academics are all avid quoters of the wisdom of others. Rudyard Kipling got it right when he said, "Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. " That means words can also be misused or abused. Some of us are more likely than others to overdose on words. Worst of all, for those of us on college campuses, it's too easy to say the right words and skip the actions that should go with them.

Carson Puriefoy III gets it. As an undersize point guard, the Bishop Eustace junior realizes his future probably won't include a lucrative NBA contract. That's why the 6-foot, 165-pound speedster is interested in schools with high academic reputations over basketball factories. "My dad went to Bucknell. So academics are really important," said Puriefoy, whose father, Carson Puriefoy Jr., was a three-year starting point guard for the Bison in the early 1980s. Puriefoy also wants to go somewhere where he'll play as a freshman and that has a stable coaching situation.

On a sprawling tract of wooded farmland in rural Chester County, kindergarten pupils at a private school slice apples, bananas and oranges for a fruit salad they will eat later in the day; use their fingers to knit strands of yarn; dress up to play make-believe; and listen to stories told by their teacher. At Avery D. Harrington Elementary in West Philadelphia and William Dick Elementary in North Philadelphia - and at all other city public schools - 5- year-olds are recognizing letters of the alphabet and making up sentences to show they understand the days of the week.

As University of Maryland officials attempt to make academics a priority for their athletes in the wake of the Len Bias tragedy, some former Terrapin basketball players have told The Baltimore Sun how difficult it was to maintain a high grade-point average and a high scoring average at the same time. "It's only my opinion, but I don't think many people can do both well," said Lawrence Boston, 30, who starred for Maryland in the late 1970s and now plays professionally in Europe.

I am going to make a statement. You tell me if it is racist. Black athletes appear to be able to jump higher and sprint faster than white athletes. I base that statement on two things: What I see with my own eyes. I see collegiate and professional basketball dominated by black players with great leaping and sprinting ability. In football, I see almost all positions requiring bursts of speed dominated by black players. In track, I see black runners dominating the shorter distances.

Like Malvern Prep's baseball team, which is closing in on another Inter-Ac League title, Nick Bateman likes to drive in the fast lane. Exhibit A is Bateman's baby, a souped-up 2005 Ford Mustang. "I like the way it sounds, the color [red], the feel of the ride," he said. On Friday, Bateman, a senior centerfielder and four-year fixture in the starting lineup, helped steer the visiting Friars to an 8-2 victory over Inter-Ac rival Penn Charter. The 6-foot, 185-pounder went 1 for 3 with an RBI. He provided a sacrifice fly in the third inning and hit a double-play groundout to second base that resulted in a run in a four-run fifth.

Maddy Lynch didn't get into Princeton, after being recruited for a spot in the Tigers' prestigious women's lacrosse program, without having some serious smarts - on and off the field. But the on-the-field part wasn't always so clear for Lynch, a senior at Springfield (Delaware County) and star midfielder for the Cougars. As of her sophomore season, colleges were hardly sniffing around. Scholarship offers didn't appear on the horizon, her game was still developing, and it wasn't always certain she would get to the next level.

WE ARE in the middle of the Christmas shopping season for college football coaches. This is the time of year when high-school football players sign letters of intent to attend an institution of higher learning and play football for Nick Saban, Urban Meyer and assorted other molders of young men and first-round NFL draft picks. This signing has the ritual of the athlete at a news conference in his high school with a few hats in front of him with various team logos. The next step is for the kid to fake a hat or two and then choose his ultimate destination.

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - In a grainy video clip shown to the thousands who attended his final public memorial Thursday, former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno outlined a philosophy on mentoring that echoed in the words of every speaker that followed. "Kids want someone to tell them how good they can be," he said in his distinctive high-pitched, Brooklyn-kissed voice. And as students, family members, and football stars past and present took the stage to eulogize the longtime coach, who died Sunday at 85, one theme emerged in each of their remarks: They got the message.

IS THERE A COLLEGE basketball player in this city who exudes any more confidence than Temple's Ramone Moore? No matter what the situation, the 6-4, fifth-year senior guard mostly leaves the impression that he has a handle on things. Yet it wasn't too long ago when that was anything but the reality. "My first 2 years here were the hardest," he said. "They were some really tough times for me. I don't know how I got through it. When I look back I always say, 'Wow. Man, I made it this far.' At one point I probably thought I couldn't.

The Occupy movement has spread squalid encampments across the country. The congressional "supercommittee" has left a landfill's worth of wasted time, energy, and cupcake wrappers in Room 200 of the Capitol. And pink slips are littering the national landscape. As former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously observed, democracy is messy. But it's hard to see how we're going to dig our way out of this chaos. Perhaps, then, it would be wise to ask academics to help organize our thoughts, even if they can't clean up the Augean stables of American politics.

SECAUCUS, N.J. - The Christie administration has developed a new system for reviewing and rating school performance for the state's annual report cards. New Jersey's nearly 600 school districts will be classified into one of three categories: "focus schools" for the lowest-performing, "priority schools," and "reward" schools for the best. It's unclear whether the highest-achieving schools will receive any perks for their status. Acting Education Commissioner Chris Cerf said the new system, which he and the governor announced Wednesday, would help education officials concentrate on the bottom 5 percent of failing schools and allow for a "more sensible and nuanced way of talking about schools.

LOS ANGELES - A 19-month civil rights investigation found that the Los Angeles Unified School District failed to provide an equal education to English-learners and black students, resulting in wide academic disparities, the U.S. Department of Education announced Tuesday. The district, the nation's second-largest, agreed to remedy the disparities through various measures, including completely overhauling its English-learning program and improving resources such as computers and library books to schools with predominantly black student bodies.

It's 8:10 a.m. - halfway through first period - and Camden High students continue to trickle into school. "C'mon! You girls walking like you ain't late!" a security guard yells as two stragglers stride slowly toward the entrance. Three weeks into the academic year, Camden High is still getting used to its new early start and late close to the school day. The 7:45 a.m.-3:55 p.m. schedule, which adds 95 minutes of class time, is part of an overhaul designed to improve the chronically underperforming school, where the graduation rate in 2010 was 42 percent, and where attendance and test scores have been well below average.

Robert Benne is director of the Roanoke College Center for Religion and Society and author of Good and Bad Ways to Think About Religion and Politics 'I am not persuaded that the provision of mass entertainment has any place in the life of a great university," said Robert Maynard Hutchins, the late president and chancellor of the University of Chicago. Hutchins took Chicago's football program out of the Big Ten in 1939, several years after its Jay Berwanger became the first Heisman Trophy winner.