"Northern Lights" is the Thursday's Classroom for May 18, 2000. Thursday's Classroom, a service of Bishop Web Works, aims to provide a connection between NASA's latest research and the classroom by offering lesson plans, activities, articles, and other resources for students in the second through eighth grades. This Thursday's Classroom is based on the study of the Northern Lights, or aurora borealis.

The second book in Isabelle Picard’s bestselling coming-of-age series about Innu twins, Leon and Eloise. Leon and Eloise are 13-year-old twins from Matimekush, an Innu community in Northern Quebec. The entire Mckenzie family has moved to Wendake, near Quebec City. Leaving Matimekush, nature, their friends and their school is quite a challenge for Eloise and Leon. Between the adapting to a different world, their desire to make new friends and the need to keep their bond with the old ones, everything goes too fast. At school, a student bullies Eloise, and she has to deal with this difficult situation. As for Leon, he starts doubting his hockey skills: Is he really talented or was he the best in Matimekush only because the competition simply wasn’t as strong? In the midst of this storm, Leon and Eloise can always count on each other as well as their family and friends. The Mystery unfolds on every page as we get to see the twins in a different light. What if, ultimately, life in the South isn’t that different from life in the North?

This book demonstrates the many ways classroom walkthroughs can be used for continuous, systemic, long-range school improvement. Woven throughout the book are eighteen different models of walkthroughs that have been successfully implemented in schools across the country. An effective tool for improving teaching and learning, this book demonstrates that there is no "one-size-fits-all" walkthrough model. It shows you how to use classroom walkthroughs to meet the specific needs of your school.

The opening of the story vividly follows the author's relocation to Detroit, Michigan from Seattle, Washington. Munson crosses the plains in his Volvo, pulling his sailboat to his new home in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. He, a teacher, is moving there because his wife, a pathologist has found a new job at Detroit Medical Center. As he drives he reflects on the land he crosses and the experiences he had in school in rural South Dakota and how it shaped his outlook. As he drives, he has great doubts about moving to Michigan and questions his future there. Yet, he is on the road with no way to turn back. Finally, he arrives in Detroit, entering the rustbelt city that looks like a new planet to him -- poverty stricken, destroyed and hopeless. The scene shifts to his experiences while moving in and getting settled and the adjustments he has to make to live in a large, crime-ridden Midwestern city. After a discouraging job hunt he is suddenly employed by Detroit Public Schools as a chemistry teacher and enters the classroom. The experience is so incredibly different than anything else that he has previously seen in education that he decides to start keeping a diary of relevant day-to-day activities. Months lead to years and he describes the dynamics of teaching in a inner-city school. Corruption, abysmal administrative incompetence and even great, but not-to-numerous, educational triumphs go down in print. His journal is that of an observer from the outside looking in. The diary becomes the stream of consciousness of a hard-working, dedicated teacher who is tormented by what he sees and cannot change. There are successes, but the climb is constantly uphill due to administrative bungling, a pathetic lack of supplies and low expectations placed on students by the system. As the years go by, the school is engifted with a huge grant from the Kellogg Foundation. It is supposed to reform the school and result in a turn-around that never happens. Funds disappear, not very much appears in the classrooms and nobody seems to notice any appreciable difference in the quality of education. After all is spent, there is only disillusionment and anger in the school over the project. A new principal takes over and the school further declines into violence and chaos. Yet, through all of this, Munson finds that education can and does take place in his classroom if he works hard with what he has available and does the best he can under the worsening circumstances. In the end, his main positive experience is the students themselves, those who could be changed and enabled. After thirteen years in Northern High School, the environment becomes so violent, dangerous, and hopeless that Munson seriously contemplates transferring out to another school. In this last year, he describes a crumbling, lawless school so vividly that you can smell the smoke from the fires and hear the screams of students beating and being beaten. August 2004 finds Munson in Finney High School, just a bit over a mile from his home. He finds more of the same there, but the commute is at least short. He surprisingly teaches quite successfully there for three years and then on June 22, 2007, he retires from thirty years of public school teaching. On that very same day, Northern High closes its doors due to lack of enrollment. At the end of the day the lights were turned out.

An acclaimed novel by the author of The Mistress of Spices, and Before We Visit the Goddess. Jhumpa Lahiri praises: "One Amazing Thing collapses the walls dividing characters and cultures; what endures is a chorus of voices in one single room." Late afternoon sun sneaks through the windows of a passport and visa office in an unnamed American city. Most customers and even most office workers have come and gone, but nine people remain. A punky teenager with an unexpected gift. An upper-class Caucasian couple whose relationship is disintegrating. A young Muslim-American man struggling with the fallout of 9/11. A graduate student haunted by a question about love. An African-American ex-soldier searching for redemption. A Chinese grandmother with a secret past. And two visa office workers on the verge of an adulterous affair. When an earthquake rips through the afternoon lull, trapping these nine characters together, their focus first jolts to their collective struggle to survive. There's little food. The office begins to flood. Then, at a moment when the psychological and emotional stress seems nearly too much for them to bear, the young graduate student suggests that each tell a personal tale, "one amazing thing" from their lives, which they have never told anyone before. And as their surprising stories of romance, marriage, family, political upheaval, and self-discovery unfold against the urgency of their life-or-death circumstances, the novel proves the transcendent power of stories and the meaningfulness of human expression itself. From Chitra Divakaruni, author of such finely wrought, bestselling novels as Sister of My Heart, The Palace of Illusions, and The Mistress of Spices, comes her most compelling and transporting story to date. One Amazing Thing is a passionate creation about survival -- and about the reasons to survive.