Complete Index

This week findingEducation sat down with Patrick Sweeney, a fifth-grade teacher at Boones Ferry Primary School in the West Linn-Wilsonville School District of Oregon. Sweeney teaches all subjects in his mixed-level, self-contained classroom. How does he keep 27 students with different ability levels engaged and excited about learning while covering the necessary curriculum?

Sweeney is a big proponent of project-based learning and teaming, both within and across grade levels. By bringing interests he’s passionate about into the classroom, and combining them with project-based learning principles, he’s come up with some pretty creative ways to get kids excited about coming to school every day.

To his colleagues, he was “Old Iron Pants,” and to everyone else, he was “The Most Trusted Man in America.” For more than half a century, CBS newsman Walter Cronkite reported, and to a certain extent, made the news, announcing Kennedy’s assassination and the first steps on the moon as well as influencing a more rapid end to the Vietnam War.

David Ezra Stein's children’s books celebrate joy and simplicity, eschewing flash in favor of genuine introspection. His subtle interweaving of lessons in self-sufficiency and acceptance of change is neither intimidating nor heavy-handed. Themes of friendship and nature, seen in “Pouch!” and “Leaves” and “Monster Hug!” appeal to an international audience.

Osamu Tezuka has been called the “god of comics” in Japan. After writing his first comic strip in third grade, Tezuka published his first professional manga while studying at medical school. His innovations to the field of Japanese comics and animation are evident through the 700 works he produced, which include more than 150,000 pages of manga.

The most beautiful daughter of the Austrian emperor, Marie Antoinette was guaranteed a life of privilege. But as the teen bride of French King Louis XVI, her free spending, decadent lifestyle angered the working class, who saw her as the embodiment of all that was wrong with the monarchy.

Although he is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Stephen Crane’s life and career were cut short before his 30th birthday. His books, essays and poems—the best known of which was “The Red Badge of Courage”—remain among the most revered and referenced today.

Romualdo Pacheco, born October 31, 1831, was the first Hispanic representative of a state in Congress and to date, California’s only Latino governor.

Legendary bodybuilder Charles Atlas became an icon in the 1920s as the man who transformed himself from a skinny weakling into a muscle-bound celebrity.

FindingDulcinea spoke with Belarusian journalist Iryna Khalip, winner of an IWMF Courage in Journalism Award, about the challenges she has faced writing under a political dictatorship.

In honor of her October 29 birthday, we look at the life and career of longtime politician and economist-in-exile Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who became the first elected female president in Africa when she won the 2006 general election in Liberia.

Modern cuisine owes many of its practices to the great French chef Auguste Escoffier. In addition to inventing the chef’s hat, Escoffier changed public dining in hotels and restaurants worldwide by creating systematized kitchens, serving dishes in a specific order instead of all at once and emphasizing the freshness and flavor of the ingredients used. We celebrate Escoffier’s culinary vision on the anniversary of his birth.

Playing with a skill so dazzling and in so eerie a manner that it was seen as supernatural, violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini is considered to be one of the greatest violin virtuosos of all time.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was Shah of Iran for more than 30 years. His reforms transformed his country into a substantial Middle Eastern economic and military power, but his autocratic rule and corrupt regime eventually led to his downfall.

From his Cubist works to his famous Blue Period, painter Pablo Picasso changed the face of art forever.

A new Amelia Earhart film hits theaters this weekend, highlighting the American flying icon’s intriguing life and conspiracies about her mysterious disappearance.

The “Father of Microbiology,” Anton van Leeuwenhoek was not a trained scientist, yet he made some of the most astounding scientific discoveries of his time. He is credited with being the first to observe bacteria under his microscopes and discovering the cellular processes underlying sexual reproduction in animals.

Pelé turned a childhood of playing soccer in a small Brazilian village into athletic stardom. Known as “The King of Football,” he spent his career breaking records and defying expectations.

A powerful, politically minded and acerbic Nobel Laureate, Britain's Doris Lessing is a treasured social commentator and novelist who has continued her prolific and award-winning career into her 80s.

Robert Rauschenberg, the artist who wanted to work in the “gap between art and life,” influenced the art world not only through his own work but via his relationships with some of the century’s most noted artists.

Novelist, poet and translator Ursula Le Guin is best known for creating worlds of fantasy and of the far future, but that is only part of an acclaimed body of work that incorporates Eastern philosophy, anthropology, linguistics and feminist principles.

Founder of the Favorite Poem Project, former United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky has made waves throughout the literary world as a multifaceted artist: essayist, poet, computer adventure game writer, and one of the most popular translators of Dante’s “Inferno.”

Preeminent secret-agent-turned-spy-novelist, John le Carré depicts the darker side of the lives of secret agents. In honor of his October 19 birthday, findingDulcinea looks at his life and work.

Equally accomplished at jazz and classical music, bandleader and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis was the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Maurice Sendak, whose book, “Where the Wild Things Are,” has just been adapted into a film, is considered a visionary and even an activist for children. He sees himself quite differently, however.

Evel Knievel was one of the world’s most famous daredevils. In honor of his birthday, we explore his rise to fame, his bone-breaking stunts and his darker, more violent side.

To say that Noah Webster liked words would probably be an understatement. He was a pioneering thinker devoted to books and learning. After the American Revolution, he set out to help the United States develop a distinctly American culture and an educational system all its own, and gave the country some of its most popular dictionaries.

“Nietzsche’s actual thought is a … system, at the beginning of which stands the death of God … the ensuing nihilism, and at its end the self-surmounting of nihilism in eternal recurrence,” Nietzsche scholar Karl Lowith once wrote, capturing the intensity, depth and wildly compelling contradictions inherent in the German philosopher’s oeuvre. To this day, Friedrich Nietzsche is considered one of the most influential Western thinkers.

Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her outstanding devotion to the poor in Calcutta’s slums.

Dr. Carol Greider didn’t let her struggle with dyslexia as a young girl stop her from earning her doctorate degree or helping to discover the enzyme telomerase, a key find in the study of cell aging and cancer research.

In 2004, Wangari Muta Maathai became the first African Woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Maathai is known as the founder of the “Green Belt Movement” to reforest Africa.