American School

It wasn't the kind of letter teachers usually send home to parents. It didn't contain details about problem children or requests for lunch money. Instead, this letter talked about war. "I would like to review for you our preparations in the event that a war in the Middle East commences," read a letter to parents of children at the American School in London. "There will be increased security, entrances to the school will be limited, visitors will be screened and must sign in, all after-school programs will be canceled, and an emergency evacuation plan will be set up in the event of an attack.

The painting was instantly seen in Europe as so profound, so dignified, so good , that the French government, eager to purchase, practically tore it off the walls of the Salon du Champs-Élysées. That was in 1897. Henry Ossawa Tanner's The Resurrection of Lazarus immediately entered the collection of the Musée du Luxembourg and then the Musée d'Orsay - a treasure belonging to the French people. But the painting never appeared in Tanner's homeland, never crossed the Atlantic to the United States, never traveled to Philadelphia, where the artist studied intermittently at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the tough gaze of Thomas Eakins.

From their bedroom on the campus of the American School in Kinshasa, Nelson and Lisa File could hear the sounds of guns and mortar fire from the uprising that shook Zaire's capital last month. And before they were forced to leave, they watched looters in the business district carry off refrigerators, pieces of corrugated tin roofs and even the frames for windows and doors. This week, the former teachers at the Friends Central School returned to the campus off City Avenue and told of their close-up view of an armed rebellion in the Central African country.

Holding the bowling ball firmly in his small hands, 8-year-old Lyonya Petukhov walked slowly to the foul line, bent down and rolled the ball down the alley. "Good, good, Lyonya," said a crowd of friends surrounding him at the alley's edge. Knocking down six pins brought his score to 24, not quite high enough for serious competition but a good first attempt. And for Petukhov, of Perm, Russia, Thursday's visit to Sproul Lanes in Springfield was his first to an American bowling alley.

As children marched in a circle, excitedly singing in French, Josette J. Smith was realizing a dream. "Roulez, roulez chemin de fer," the youngsters sang, as the teachers prodded them along, singing the words, clapping their hands and jumping up and down. Until this year, most of the children probably had no idea what roulez (run) meant. But after attending the French International School of Philadelphia, 16 children, ages 2 1/2 to 7, can speak and do classwork in French. In September, the school population will nearly double and add a third grade.

As children marched in a circle, excitedly singing in French, Josette J. Smith was realizing a dream. "Roulez roulez chemin de fer," the youngsters sang, as the teachers prodded them along, singing the words, clapping their hands and jumping up and down. Until this year, most of the children probably had no idea what roulez (run) meant. But after attending the French International School of Philadelphia, 16 children ages 3 to 8 can speak and do classwork in French. In September, the school population will nearly double and a third grade will be added.

The nation's economy was crashing all about him in 1929 when Froelich Gladstone Rainey boarded a commercial steamer in San Francisco to seek a wealth of experiences that he was sure would be useful for his first great American novel. He got the experiences, and they read like an adventure novel: selling 10- gallon tins of kerosene along roadsides in the Philippines, spending a night in a Cairo jail for carrying a gun, being stranded penniless in Shanghai during the Depression and supporting himself for a time as a Monte Carlo gambler.

When West Chester University officials discuss the school's new educational center in Japan, they sound a little like the rider trying to hold back a fine new horse straining at the bit. The experience may be scary, but the potential is exhilarating. Especially if it's a gift horse. In April administrators expected 75 students at this first overseas branch of the university in Fukuoka, an international port city of 1.2 million. One hundred and forty showed up, all with six years of English-language training behind them, eager to polish their skills, especially in speaking.

Chaela McCormick and Kyoko Shimokobe have been writing letters and exchanging pictures of themselves for the last year and a half. Chaela has written that she is 10 years old, plays the violin and does gymnastics. Kyoko has stated that she is 12, plays the piano and enjoys tennis. And although Chaela lives in Drexel Hill and Kyoko comes from Kure City, Japan, the two girls finally got to meet each other Friday, at the Walden School. Kyoko and her 12-year-old friend Yoko Niimi traveled to Delaware County with teacher Hiroshi Iwasa in order to spend a week touring the area and visiting some of the children with whom they had corresponded for more than a year.

The painting was instantly seen in Europe as so profound, so dignified, so good , that the French government, eager to purchase, practically tore it off the walls of the Salon du Champs-Élysées. That was in 1897. Henry Ossawa Tanner's The Resurrection of Lazarus immediately entered the collection of the Musée du Luxembourg and then the Musée d'Orsay - a treasure belonging to the French people. But the painting never appeared in Tanner's homeland, never crossed the Atlantic to the United States, never traveled to Philadelphia, where the artist studied intermittently at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the tough gaze of Thomas Eakins.

Despite seeming victories for evolution over creationism in major court battles - most recently in Dover, Pa. - American students are still losing out when it comes to getting a solid biology education. A new report on a 2007 national survey of high school biology teachers found that most still didn't teach evolution adequately. And today, evolution is more than just a chapter in the biology field; it's the backbone of the whole discipline. "Nothing counts in biology except evolution," said Haig Kazazian, former chair of genetics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and now a professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Four boys assault their teacher, who later dies of her injuries. Across the country, newspapers compete to unearth the most lurid details of the episode. It seems the boys were annoyed at being detained after school. So they threw rocks and other debris at the screaming teacher, until she couldn't scream anymore. A modern-day example of inner-city youth violence? Hardly. It happened in the small town of Canton, Mass. - in 1870. I thought of the Canton tragedy as I watched Attorney General Eric Holder at last week's news conference about youth violence in Chicago.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. - There was nothing left for Maalik Wayns to do on this trip to South Florida than have some fun, especially on the basketball court, and that's precisely what the Roman Catholic High senior did last night at the BankUnited Center. Wayns started at point guard for the East team in the 32nd annual McDonald's All American High School Boys Basketball Game, broadcast on ESPN. He helped his team come back from an eight-point deficit at the half to pull out a 113-110 victory, dishing out seven assists to go along with his five points.

Not every boy could go to Valley Forge Military Academy and College, but not every boy would want to. Consider: You begin your day at 5:45 a.m. with reveille; have first mess at 6:30; clean your barracks at 7:15; take your first class at 7:30 a.m. (in mind-benders like Russian history and college calculus); and go straight through to assembly at noon. At 12:30, you have second mess; you return to classes from 1 to about 3; then you take music, play sports or pull duty till 5:30, when there's third mess.

Dwayne Jones would fall a lot on the court, and he had no idea why. Just a freshman at the time at American Christian School, Jones had to adjust to some activities that used to come naturally, such as rebounding and dribbling. What Jones was experiencing was a growth spurt. From eighth grade to ninth grade, Jones grew from 5-foot-10 to 6-3. His shoe size expanded to 16. In the last two years, he has grown another six inches - and he's still growing. Jones has adjusted to his growth spurts.

While headlines show Democrats and Republicans bickering over the budget, they're quietly joining hands to boost education spending. Sounds like we should give three cheers for bipartisanship, except for this awkward fact: School funding at the federal, state and local levels has already tripled in real terms since 1960 - yet test scores are flat, teacher pay remains lousy and schools are crumbling. How can this be? What should we do when too much isn't enough? Start with what causes the excess.

She always hits volleyballs in a straight line. But Helen Brongniart's route to Lower Merion was a bit more circuitous. Lower Merion volleyball coach Russell Loue walked into the gym last fall and met Brongniart and her sister Liz, two skilled players who learned the game in Mexico City and honed it in Hong Kong and Texas. "It was a nice, pleasant surprise to have the two girls standing there and not knowing them, and then seeing them play," Loue said. The Aces went from being near the bottom of the Central League in 1997 to finishing in second place last season as the Brongniart sisters and their teammates developed chemistry on the court.

President Clinton has put education and rigorous national standards and assessments at the top of his list of national priorities. In his State of the Union address, he urged Democrats and Republicans to "stop politics at the schoolhouse door" and work together in education on a bipartisan basis just as they had done with foreign policy during the Cold War because education was an issue of "national security. " He was echoing what 41 governors and 49 top corporate leaders said at the National Education Summit last March.