North Korea's development of nuclear weapons and, more recently, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) has added a grave threat to world order. The threat presented by these weapons depends critically on missile range, i.e., the ability to reach North America or Europe while carrying a nuclear warhead. Using the limited information available…

As a communication educator, the author's goal is to help students examine and understand how communication addresses--or, in this case, fails to address--public problems such as gun violence. Communication concepts can provide insight about America's bewildering debates about gun violence, and in turn, these debates can help illustrate and refine…

The death of a student, especially to gun violence, is a life-changing experience that occurs with more and more frequency in America's schools. For each of these tragedies, there is a classroom and there is a teacher. Yet student death is often a forbidden subject, removed from teacher education and professional development classes where the…

Any teacher of elementary physics can attest to the waning interest of students when all they are exposed to are boxes sliding down planes. In an effort to motivate interest, it is often useful to borrow examples from the real world. This way the students find it easy to identify the relevance of the subject matter. In addition, high-tech…

At a small rural middle school in the southern United States, two students murdered a teacher, four students, and injured 10 during a shooting spree. This case represents the lived experiences of a school principal, counselor, and community that survived the deadly rampage. The case highlights the challenges that school leaders may face such as…

This case provides the opportunity for students to explore marketing and value/supply-chain dynamics in a unique historical context. The West Point Foundry (WPF), located in Cold Spring, New York, was one of the most important manufacturing ventures in the United States from 1817 to 1911. The case outlines the supply-chain details of the WPF as…

This article presents a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) activity, building an air cannon, in a mathematics classroom. It describes an investigation grounded in STEM concepts that elementary and middle school teachers carried out to think about ways of implementing STEM activities into their instruction. This particular…

The internal ballistics of a firearm or artillery piece considers the pellet, bullet, or shell motion while it is still inside the barrel. In general, deriving the muzzle speed of a gunpowder firearm from first principles is difficult because powder combustion is fast and it very rapidly raises the temperature of gas (generated by gunpowder…

On March 28-29, 2009, FPRI's Wachman Center hosted 43 teachers from across the country for a weekend of discussion on teaching the nuclear age. In his opening remarks, Walter A. McDougall observed that although students today are not made to crawl under their desks in air raid drills, that atomic power remains, and it is still necessary to raise a…

Threats of violence are not uncommon to counselors, faculty, or teachers. Each must be taken seriously, quickly analyzed, and safety procedures implemented. Yet, there exists a paucity of brief, face-to-face, assessments designed to aid threat assessment. To address this paucity, the author created The DANGERTOME Personal Risk Threat Assessment…

This essay is based on the author's talk at the FPRI Wachman Center's History Institute for Teachers on "What Students Need to Know about America's Wars, Part 2: 1920-Present," held May 2-3, 2009. Observing that the Vietnam War was the longest and most contested conflict in American history and that it called into question many…

Ensuring safer schools requires establishing good indicators of the current state of school crime and safety across the nation and regularly updating and monitoring these indicators. This is the aim of this report. This report is the thirteenth in a series of annual publications produced jointly by the National Center for Education Statistics…

"MCPS School Safety and Security at a Glance" provides, in a single document, information about the reporting of incidents related to school safety and security, school climate, local school safety program descriptions, and serious incidents in all Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools. The information is presented for each school.…

A joint effort by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and National Center for Education Statistics, this annual report examines crime occurring in school as well as on the way to and from school. It provides the most current detailed statistical information to inform the Nation on the nature of crime in schools. This report presents data on crime at…

"MCPS School Safety and Security at a Glance" provides, in a single document, information about the reporting of incidents related to school safety and security, school climate, local school safety program descriptions, and serious incidents in all Montgomery County (Maryland) public schools. The information is presented for each school.…