With art, students express unspeakable anxieties – Remedial courses a creative outlet for social issues
By June Q. Wu – Globe Correspondent / August 4, 2010

Ask a classroom full of summer school students to open up about violence, sex, and drugs, and they will likely revert to second grade shyness, school officials say.

But sub in a 20-something instructor for the veteran teacher, blast music from The All-American Rejects from a laptop, give the students glitter, glue, and blank postcards, and the secrets might just come out.

This summer, some Boston public school ninth-graders have been asked to write their innermost thoughts and offer them to PostSecret, a group art project that publishes anonymous secrets sent on postcards online and in print.

Of the nearly 370 ninth-graders in summer school, 125 are wrapping up a new arts-centric curriculum the city piloted this year to help students grapple with social issues through creative outlets.

For five weeks, the students have spent Fridays at the Boston Arts Academy, where recent graduates led group discussions and encouraged the ninth-graders to express themselves through such disciplines as music, theater, and martial arts.

2007 sodium drop lawsuit against TEPs is dismissed, probably settled
By Jessica Liu/TECH STAFF REPORTER – August 4, 2010

The Tau Epsilon Phi sodium drop case, a civil suit filed by two river clean-up volunteers against two MIT graduate students and a former undergraduate, has been dismissed.

The court received notice of a settlement this past May, and therefore acted to close the case after 60 days. The case was dismissed without prejudice, meaning the plaintiffs could sue again for the same cause.

In September of 2007, Thomas Soisson and Katherine Nardin, volunteers for Charles River Cleanup Boat (a non-profit organization that removes floating debris from the Charles River), suffered chemical and thermal burns after a piece of sodium they retrieved from the Charles exploded. Three paramedics sent to treat them also received chemical burns.

After it became increasingly clear that the East Campus sodium drop was not the source of the sodium, the focus of the investigation shifted to another sodium drop held by Tau Epsilon Phi, an MIT fraternity, several days before this block of sodium was found.

1892 – The parents of Lizzie Borden are found murdered in their Fall River, Massachusetts home.  More anniversaries.