"Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them."

Excellent, so by playing Farmville I'm not only reducing my taxes (because they'd build the database anyway), but also contributing to the safety and counter terrorism efforts of my country.

It's not only addictive, but patriotic.

Go EASY on your EBE's

..Class size? As a science teacher, I fully agree with all the comments about the difficulty of firing teachers, and the effect of teachers of pupils performance, BUT in terms of my own teaching - if the school cannot afford enough teachers and class sizes are made larger - not even the best teacher in the world can make that much of a difference. On the other hand, fewer students with even a bad teacher will do better. Also, the government (UK in this case) should stop changing the sylabus or current faddy pedagogy and let teachers teach the same thing for more than 3 years. Just when you start achieving results with whatever they have decided is the 'next best thing'(TM) they change it.

That there has been a sharp decline in our morality since the development of culture?

I know he's not a scientist per se, but David Attenborough had a huge influence on me as a child, along with BBC nature as a whole. As a child I'd watch them over and over and that interest passed over to the other sciences as a whole. He's the perfect person to get your kids into science as a whole. (I teach physics now).

As a teacher (11-18) I actually encourage the use of wikipedia as a first stop for information gathering. It gives me a really good way into explaining words such as 'bias' and 'reliable' to students. As long as you explain the things wrong with the website I don't understand the fuss. To be fair, information found on wikipedia is a lot more accurate than the majority on information on the internet. Most pupil's don't even bother reading the information they find, they just copy and paste it (leading to post-grad level work in year 7 student homework). You pretty much have to spend an entire lesson explaining how to gather information and the pitfalls. Wikipedia isn't banned because it's a bad website, it's banned because teachers don't explain how to use it properly.