Bryant quickly noted that his remark about working mothers was "controversial" and would get him "a lot of emails," and attempted to clarify that he meant working parents in general: "In today’s society parents are so challenged. They’re working overtime.”

But, contrary to what Bryant may believe, working mothers don't seem to be a problem in Finland, the top-rated country for education. According to 2013 data, more than 70 percent of mothers in Finland work, which is right on par with numbers in the United States. So the problem may have more to do with, say, the American education system, than with women's increasing role as breadwinners, as a report from Stanford University notes:

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Ramer is a member of the Poarch Creek Band of Indians, and had previously attempted to appeal the school policy banning students from wearing "extraneous items" with the school's headmaster, but her request was denied. "About two months ago, me and the other Indian seniors from the graduating class asked our headmaster if we could wear the feathers on our caps,” Ramer told Indian Country Today Media Network. “She told us ‘no’ and that if we did, she would pull us off the field.”

Ramer wore the feather anyway, saying it was important to her to represent her heritage. "Being honored with a feather for graduation is a wonderful experience. It's a lot more than showing off your culture. It has ties into our spirituality as well," Ramer's former teacher Alex Alvarez told WMPI-TV.

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After noticing the questionnaire dealing with drug and alcohol use had come already printed with each of his student's names, social studies teacher John Dryden delivered a quick lecture on the Fifth Amendment.

"Somebody needs to remind them they have the ability not to incriminate themselves," Dryden told the Daily Herald.

"I made a judgment call. There was no time to ask anyone," he said, adding that he would have taken his concerns directly to school administrators if the survey had been handed out earlier, but that there was no time. Instead, he handed out the survey (and his attendant constitutional warning) to his students and spoke with school officials afterward.

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Critics of Florida State Attorney Bruce Colton's handling of Hunt's case argue that the felony charges against the high school senior over a same-sex relationship with a 14-year-old freshman classmate are based on laws intended to prosecute adult offenders against minor children, not two high school students in a consensual relationship.

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The hacker collective urged Assistant State Attorney Brian Workman to drop the charges and threatened to massive protests, according to a letter released by #OpJustice4Kaitlyn:

This letter is addressed to the Indian River County State Attorney's Office:

You are currently pursuing 2 felony charges against an 18-year-old girl by the name of Kaitlyn Hunt... She was a student at Sebastian River High School before they expelled her...

While in the course of performing your duties we feel that you've lost perspective. Tsk, tsk. The truth is, Kaitlyn Hunt is a bright young girl who was involved in a consensual, same-sex relationship while both she and her partner were minors. She has a big future ahead of her and there are people, thousands of people in fact, that have no intention of allowing you to ruin it with your rotten selective enforcement...

We hope you'll keep all of this in mind because the next petition [for resignation] we put 200,000 signatures on will have your name on it (maybe you Brian Workman), or your bosses name on it, and we will be calling for a resignation.

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From TIME's press release on the picture:

Pictured left to right in the attached photo: Greg Orme (Allman's date and Obama's friend), Allman, Obama and Obama's date Megan Hughes.

TIME is also releasing a note Obama wrote in Allman's yearbook at the end of his senior year that reads, in part, "You are extremely sweet and foxy, I don't know why Greg would want to spend any time with me at all! You really deserve better than clowns like us; you even laugh at my jokes!"

Read the full story here.

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In a reaction that is both shameful and shamefully common in high school and college sexual assault cases, students jumped to the defense of the 18-year-old athletes, accusing the 13-year-olds of "acting like whores" and tweeting comments like “Even if it was all his fault, what was a 13 year old girl doing hanging around 18 year old guys” and “If it takes two then why is only one in trouble?” It wasn't long before news of the allegations and the social media harassment campaign that followed reached parents, who, perhaps owing to lessons learned from failures of accountability in the Steubenville rape case, connected with town officials and school administrators to try to address two major problems: teaching teenagers about consent and stopping the harassment of the alleged victims.

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Was it any coincidence that I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol till my freshman year of college, and underlined my English texts with colored pencils and a ruler? According to a six-year longitudinal study that looks at teenagers’ dating patterns, partying habits, and study skills, the simple answer is: no.

The study, published online last week by the Journal of Research on Adolescence, followed 620 students—half male, half female—from sixth grade through their senior year of high school. Once a year, researchers from the University of Georgia’s School of Public Health interviewed the students, asking them about their romantic lives, as well as their drug and alcohol use. From teachers, researchers collected academic evaluations — how organized and hard-working was the student? How often did they turn in their homework and complete the assigned reading?

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Two months ago my brothers and I reconnected with our 17-year-old half-brother via Facebook.  None of us have seen him since he was a little baby.

He's in high school in Idaho and he plans on going into the military and then to be a police officer after that. Recent FB posts of his scare THE CRAP OUT OF ME. He's started posting pictures of drawings he's done of people and animals with bloody eye sockets. Drawings of children with bloody stumps and eye sockets. Pictures of himself holding a shotgun and an assault rifle that apparently his mom or his stepdad bought for him. A picture of a police officer beating somebody with a caption saying, "I will protect and serve THE SHIT OUT OF YOU," and him saying that's the cop he wants to be.

At first I wanted to comment about how I'm a liberal activist and police brutality and blah-blah-blah. Then I just felt fear, and I stopped and didn't write anything. I haven't blocked him yet because I want to talk it over with my full brothers, and I don't want to call attention to myself just yet. UGH. SO SCARY. What if he's one of those kids who's going to shoot up his school? What if he's going to be a creepy cop who abuses his power? What do I do? Take screen caps and send them to his school? So scary.  So, so scary.

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I'm a high school student in China. I'm deeply troubled by my early decision to go to America for college. You see, in my country, most students will take the college entrance exam, aka gaokao in my country, to go to college. Yet it's not so easy as anyone who have no idea what it is expected.

I am now in the 11th  grade and most of the students the same age as me will have to work really hard to get better grades in the exam, even sometimes stay up late to 3 in the morning. It's not hard to imagine what we will be like in the 12th grade.

For me, or for anyone who chooses to study for the SAT and TOEFL in order to go to America for higher education, it means to abandon gaokao. But I chose this path a little late so I'm really worried that I may not be admitted to go to any colleges in America or in China. What can I do?

A Little Worrying Student

Dear Little Worrying Student,

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I'm a 20-something person who's been in a relationship with a great 20-something guy for about 16 months; it's a good bond, we are there for each other, we have plans for our future together, we can say we love each other, and in general I can honestly say, at least on my end, that I'm really happy with him and that I think he feels the same way about me.

But there is a "third wheel on our bike": his first real significant other, a girl he dated in high school for two years. Their relationship, from what he has told me, was the typical sort of young, immature love that led to broken hearts, and they haven't even spoken in more than three years. But, Cary, it seems that he can't let this girl go (or at least the memory of her). He dreams about her, tries to send her messages, he talks about her in a way I've never heard a man talk about an ex-girlfriend; I've come upon him talking fondly about her to other people, and during our worst fights he has said that the desirable traits that I lack were ones that she had. I try and try to just drop her from my mind, but she keeps coming up between us. If I ask him why he thinks she is such a fixture in his mind, he says it's only because she was the first person he loved. When I ask him if I'll ever be like that for him, he can only say "in time."

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The move sparked national outrage, and now officials at the high school are trying to distance themselves from those planning the gay-free fête.

In an interview with local NBC affiliate WTWO, principal David Springer made clear that the "traditional" prom committee was an independent group and that the school had no involvement. He also said that all students will be welcome at the official prom in the Spring: "Anybody can go to the prom... Of course, a girl could go out with another girl if they didn't have a date or that was their choice."

The church that hosted the anti-gay prom organizers has also come under fire for their involvement: "Our church has no involvement in this whatsoever. It's a community thing where people have met here," Pastor Dale Wise at Sullivan First Christian Church told Indiana's WTHR.

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My own 15-year-old son, who not too long ago had his iPod Touch confiscated for the day when it somehow "accidentally" started playing music during class, happened to be getting ready for school as I read the thoroughly reported Albany Times-Union story. I recounted the details to him.

"Isn't that just wrong?" he asked.

Well, that's the question, isn't it? And the answer appears to be in legal limbo-land. There doesn't seem to be a lot of case law on whether the Fourth Amendment protects smartphones against unreasonable search and seizure in high schools.

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Last year Northside Independent School District began issuing school IDs embedded with RFID chips, which monitor students' movements from when they arrive at school until when they leave. One student, 15-year-old Andrea Hernandez was suspended when she refused to wear the ID badge on (albeit slightly loopy) religious grounds -- her parents believed the RFID chip to be "the Mark of the Beast."

Hernandez sued the school district, who tried to accommodate the girl and her family by saying they would remove the RFID chip from her badge, but that she would still need to wear the badge itself. Wired explained that Hernandez family continued to take issue:

The girl’s father, Steven, wrote the school district explaining why removing the chip wasn’t good enough, that the daughter should be free from displaying the card altogether. “‘We must obey the word of God,” the father said, according to court documents. “By asking my daughter and our family to participate and fall in line like the rest of them is asking us to disobey our Lord and Savior.”

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A teacher at the Life Learning Academy found Courtni Webb's notebook and reported the poem to the principal who suspended the student. The school district is now deciding whether and when Webb can return to the small vocational school. Webb and her mother have reached out to the media to decry the school's actions.

They told NBC's Today that Webb was simply expressing herself and exploring ideas about helplessness and darkness that she believed were behind the Newtown massacre. "Never in my life have I heard that you couldn't mention a tragedy that happened. I didn't say that I agree with it, I said I simply understand it" Webb told Today, noting that the she felt the school was making her look like "a monster." Her mother said that she believes her daughter's free speech is being violated.

Via NBC:

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The students were staging a sit-in protest at the bank headquarters, "demanding full disclosure of the bank’s anonymous political expenditures," reported an announcement from 99Rise, the anti-corruption group of which the three young people are members. "The students, who delivered a petition to the bank over three weeks ago articulating their demand, refused to leave the bank’s premises until the requested information was handed over to the public.  The bank instead chose to shut down the entire 60 floor building have them arrested," the release read. A live Twitter feed from the group reporting on the  small sit-in noted that police set up barricades around the building, closing entrances to the public.

99 Rise describes itself as "a new anti-corruption movement to get Big Money out of American politics." The three students have reportedly been taken to a police station in the Bronx.

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The 25-year-old told the crowd Thursday night that he took a small break from music and "spent some time going back to high school."

"I got my high school diploma," he said with excitement as the crowd roared.

Drake also posted on Twitter late Wednesday that he earned a 97 percent on his final exam and an 88 percent in his last class through work with a private tutor. The Canadian dropped out of high school, ironically, to star in the high school TV series "Degrassi: The Next Generation." He played the role of Jimmy Brooks.

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But when your 15-year-old student interrupts your lesson to tell you that he “hope[s] you die of AIDS,” all that goes out the window. In that moment, if you can think of anything beyond your overwhelming instinct to leave the room and never come back, you certainly don’t think about the ways you can turn the comment into a mature conversation about the value of tolerance. Maybe in next week’s lesson plans. Maybe after you write your assessments and compile your readings. Maybe after you think about strategies for engagement. But not now, not in this moment, not as he spits “faggot” at you from across the room.

And so, feigning calmness, you send him out to the discipline office, pretend not to be affected, and move on with the lesson, quietly counting down the minutes to the end of the day, to the moment of your escape.

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I was 15 years old, in the middle of that aching, interminable era of pent-up urges, when you want to do a lot of things but simply can’t. I wanted to cry then and at plenty of other times, but inhibition always won out. I wanted to spend my days running free and knocking into shit, but instead I sat imprisoned in the classroom. Most cruelly, I wanted to fuck a girl, or at the very least, God willing, perhaps touch a breast. That wasn’t happening either.

All of which goes to say that I relished the frequent spats of roughhousing that would break out in school throughout the day. “Brawling,” we called it, in ironic hyperbole. It was wholesome, thudding contact, hardly “fighting.” Punches were rare, restricted to when somebody was having a really bad day.

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