• What's in your state's interstate compact for military children?;
• Gentlemen (and ladies) start your engines;
• Waxing poetic;
• Credit where credit is due;
• Get your learnin' on;
• Tobacco bans change social norms for kids;
• The Super Bowl of science.

Pre-Kindergarten is where kids start learning vocabulary, shapes and colors, and the big sell for voluntary pre-K is that it's free. Florida leads the country in voluntary pre-K with nearly two-thirds of 4-year-olds in the program last year. Experts say they need more students to get the money they need. "The benefits are really an investment. It's good for kids, but it's also good for communities because that investment pays off," said Patte Barth, the director of the Center for Public Education. According to the Center for Public Education, every dollar spent for pre-K can save up to $16 in public education because fewer students need to be placed in special education classes, and that means fewer students are held back. Also, studies show pre-kindergarten education increases test scores and graduation rates. "We're not putting little children in desks, giving them worksheets, giving them a strong academic program. No, play is important," Barth said.

Florida's prison population is expected to soar from about 96,000 inmates today, to 120,000 inmates by 2012. Experts say the best way to slow the need for prisons is to put your money into cheaper, more humane efforts at prevention, starting with education. This year, Florida sounded a retreat in the battle. By doing so, lawmakers failed our children.

The Attorney General of Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, is about to make an announcement at noon ET that he and the attorneys general from 48 other states have negotiated a deal with Facebook to implement new safety and privacy rules, according to sources with knowledge of the deal. Facebook will be making its own announcement later on today.

Once the school board heard his presentation on modernizing the computer system, the position was his! "He calls it geek speak and he talks like that. I have to remind him to say it in English," explains Jon’s mom Paula Penn. She’s the school librarian and says Jon's been a computer guru since age 3.

Truthiness is a word that U.S. television comedian Stephen Colbert popularized in 2005 as a satirical term to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Colbert popularized this definition of the word during the inaugural (pilot) episode (October 17, 2005) of his satirical television program The Colbert Report, as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd". It was named Word of the Year for 2005 by the American Dialect Society and for 2006 by Merriam-Webster.

Google bombing, in case you're unfamiliar, is a method of directing mass links that contain a particular line of text to a certain site, which then bolsters that site's ranking on Google when that line of text is used as a search query. The most famous Google bomb was probably "miserable failure," which directed to George W. Bush's presidential biography for quite some time before Google switched a few algorithms around in order to eliminate the verbal pranks.

DonorsChoose.org is dedicated to addressing the scarcity and inequitable distribution of learning materials and experiences in our public schools. We believe this inequity is rooted in the following factors:

1. Shortages of learning materials prevent thorough, engaging instruction;
2. Top-down distribution of materials stifles our best teachers and discourages them from developing targeted solutions for their students; and
3. Small, directed contributions have gone un-tapped as a source of funding. DonorsChoose.org will improve public education by engaging citizens in an online marketplace where teachers describe and individuals can fund specific student projects. We envision a nation where students in every community have the resources they need to learn.

"They did not crack under pressure," said Coach Ingo Gaida, a science teacher at the school. "I'd been telling them all year long they had the potential to do this. This was the strongest team we've ever had." The team began preparing for the bowl in September, and since January had been practicing daily in the fields of math, earth science, astronomy, biology, chemistry and geology. The level of difficulty of some questions in the final round was equivalent to graduate school, Gaida said. The question that clinched the win: "For the Maclaurin series of the function e2x, what is the coefficient for the x4, in the simplest form?" Answer: 2/3. "There were some close games, but I always felt like we had a good chance to win," said Dimitry Petrenko, 18, a senior who has been on the team for three years. "I feel satisfied, almost relieved like I've done my job and can graduate." The other team members are Alexandre Boulgakov, 16, Marino Di Franco, 16, and Ian Scheffler, 17. The team won a trip to the International Youth Science Forum in London this summer, $1,000 for the school's science department and a 6-foot-high trophy.

Geisen, a science teacher at Crook County Middle School in Prineville, Oregon, is the 58th National Teacher of the Year. He will begin a year as a full-time national and international spokesperson for education on June 1, 2008. “A great teacher,” he says, “is a unifier of ideas, a unifier of people, and a unifier of ideas with people. In my teaching I strive to bring together creativity and science, to unite my students into a community, and to help each person in this community connect with the big ideas of science.” Working to keep textbooks to, as he describes it, 97 percent colorful wall decoration and 3 percent reference materials, this seventh-grade teacher strives consistently to keep all of his curriculum, labs, assignments, activities and evaluations hand-tailored. As Geisen explains, “By doing so, I’m able to correlate them exactly with the Oregon standards, incorporate multiple levels of cognition, revise them when needed and keep them up to date with emerging science. Some of them are based on ideas that colleagues or students have shared with me, but many of them I simply dream up while in the shower or while driving to work. However they originate, I try to put a bit of myself, a bit of Prineville, and a good dose of humor and creativity into each activity, project or assignment. In fact, students even laugh during tests in our class."