education

What were you doing when you were 4? If you were anything like us, you spent your days trying to keep up with the complex plots of ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.’ Four-year-old Heidi Hankins from Winchester, England, however, taught herself how to read at a rapid pace, complete basic arithmetic and even draw accurate pictures of people. Her latest IQ test gave her a score of 159.

Teen truancy is a real problem for a lot of schools, but especially so for the Dohn Community High School in Cincinnati. It only has a 14% graduation rate and has been deemed an “academic emergency” by the state of Ohio. So the school is trying out a novel approach: it’s paying students to show up and behave themselves.

Although it varies from state to state, the average salary of a public school teacher in the United States is about $50,000 a year. For comparison sake, the average full-time worker in any profession has a median personal income of about $39,000 a year. Are teachers getting the better end of the stick?

While dreams are still largely a mystery, some scientists now believe they may actually help us learn.