The calendar we use today is something that most people take for granted. It is what it is. The year begins on January 1st and ends on December 31st. The year has 365.25 days and every four years, are leap years, an extra day is added at the end of February. But how many people realize that the Gregorian calendar we use today is just 428 years old?

The Gregorian Calendar

The Gregorian calendar was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in February 1582. The Julian calendar in common use at the time included an error that had caused the calendar to be out of sync with the equinoxes and solstices of the solar calendar by adding an extra day each 128 years.

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The time around the winter solstice has been a time of celebration as far back into antiquity as we can see. Each culture has created its own symbol set and traditions used to celebrate the various holidays of the season. Creative Tutors would like to wish everyone joy during this holiday season while we explore the traditions of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and the New Year.

In the wake of the 1966 Watts riots in Los Angeles Dr. Maulana Karenga, now a professor and chairman of the Black Studies Department at Cal State Long Beach, was searching for a way to heal and bring unity to the black community. His idea was to create a celebration of African American culture. The result was Kwanzaa.

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Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli recently wrote in an opinion that students' cell phones and laptops can be seized and searched if reasonable suspicion of violations are suspected. Wait...what? What violations? How have they been defined? What reasonable suspicion? When did school officials receive law enforcement training to even know what reasonable suspicion is? And when did young people lose protection against unlawful search and seizure under the 4th Amendment?

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Many high school juniors and seniors are beginning to prepare for taking standardized tests required for college admissions. But purchasing prep courses that can run from $1,200 up to $6,000 are out of the question for many of these students. So how can you prepare for these tests on a budget?

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The new Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report has just been released. This report compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world and the results weren't pretty. US students were ranked average. Average...really? What happened to American Exceptionalism? To be honest, this is not a new trend. US students have been consistently lagging behind their peers around the world since the first PISA evaluation in 2000. In 2009, the US ranked 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science and 25th for mathematics.

So, what is really going on? Is the proficiency of US students as dismal as it seems? Well, yes and no.

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Every parent should read 5 Subjects Where Failure is Underrated Cindy Donaldson does a phenomenal job explaining why, sometimes, we need to make a mistake in order to learn. She gives examples of subjects where errors should not be viewed as failure but embraced as a foundation on which to build future success. A classic example might be the infamous “Science Fair Project”. Have you ever noticed that Science Fair winners are often the contestants whose experiments did not work as planned? Because of an error in their experiment’s design or the posing of an incorrect hypothesis the students were forced to think about what went wrong in order to salvage their project. Instead of writing a triumphant but less than pithy analysis of their results, the students whose semester science project has gone terribly wrong must instead use critical thinking skills to analyze what really happened; explore ways in which they could improve their design; and often discuss the fallacy of their hypothesis. In short, they actually had to employ the scientific method. The failure of their experiment resulted in a successful project because they learned.

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In 2007 the US Vaccine Court settled the case of a Georgia girl who developed autism symptoms after receiving nine vaccines in one day. Their report concluded that the “vaccinations she received aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder, which predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, and manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder.” [BALCELLS] Additionally, Giulivi et. al. concluded in an article published in JAMA that "children with autism were more likely to have mitochondrial dysfunction, mtDNA overreplication, and mtDNA deletions than typically developing children." Could reseachers be homing in on an underlying cause of autism?

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