Beautiful Red Roses

My children always remind me how blessed I am to be their mother. What a lovely surprise. I am so grateful!

For as little as $400 a year Harlem Academy offers city kids a very intense education.

Hands on: Vincent Dotoli started his school with one classroom and 12 first graders.

Zina Mingo has lived in Harlem for all her 40 years and now teaches in a Harlem public school. But committed as she is to the community, she wasn’t willing to subject her son, Devon, now 8, to the educational system she works for. “Most of the schools in Harlem are failing schools, and that’s just not an option to me,” she says.

Instead, Mingo is pinning her hopes for Devon on Harlem Academy, a four-year-old not-for-profit school just north of Central Park. With its small classes, focus on rigorous academics, required parental involvement and long school day, the school gets results; 90% of third graders score above the national median in reading and math. Students arrive at 7:30, begin sports at 3:45 and leave at 5 or 6, depending on whether they want homework help after sports. For that, parents pay as little as $400 a year and as much as $16,000, depending on income.

Harlem Academy is the passion of headmaster Vincent Dotoli, 39, whose lawyer father and cpa mother could afford to buy him a private school education at Far Hills Country Day in New Jersey. After college he taught in rural Maine and Rhode Island and then for four years at Buckingham Browne & Nichols, a well-endowed 125-year-old private school in Cambridge, Mass. But he didn’t feel his efforts there made much of a difference. “Those students were going to be successful whether I was there or not,” he says.

So in 2001 Dotoli enrolled at Columbia University to earn a master’s in education administration. His thesis was on a model for a private urban school that could skirt the public school bureaucracy dragging down big city schools, while involving parents, who are too often treated as a nuisance in those same schools. Edmund W. Gordon, director of Columbia’s Institute for Urban & Minority Education, joined Dotoli in meeting with prospective students and parents. Harlem Academy opened in September 2004 with 12 first graders in one room rented from an arts group. In 2005 it moved to bigger quarters and now has 74 first-through-fifth graders.

Country Day In Harlem – Forbes.com.

SAN FRANCISCO – With an upgrade to its mobile maps, Google Inc. hopes to prove it can track people on the go as effectively as it searches for information on the Internet.

The new software to be released Wednesday will enable people with mobile phones and other wireless devices to automatically share their whereabouts with family and friends.

The feature, dubbed “Latitude,” expands upon a tool introduced in 2007 to allow mobile phone users to check their own location on a Google map with the press of a button.

“This adds a social flavor to Google maps and makes it more fun,” said Steve Lee, a Google product manager.

It could also raise privacy concerns, but Google is doing its best to avoid a backlash by requiring each user to manually turn on the tracking software and making it easy to turn off or limit access to the service.

Google also is promising not to retain any information about its users’ movements. Only the last location picked up by the tracking service will be stored on Google’s computers, Lee said.

The software plots a user’s location — marked by a personal picture on Google’s map — by relying on cell phone towers, global positioning systems or a Wi-Fi connection to deduce their location. The system can follow people’s travels in the United States and 26 other countries.

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Know where your kids are? Check Google maps – Tech and gadgets- msnbc.com.

PRETORIA, South Africa (CNN) — Vikas Swarup was far from the poverty of Mumbai when he wrote “Slumdog Millionaire,” the book that has now become an award-winning movie and Academy Award nominee.

Vikas Swarup says he was inspired by the idea of an underdog coming out on top.

As a high-ranking Indian diplomat, his day job requires him to think about international relations, not the grit of survival in a teeming inner city.

But maybe his heart was in his homeland when he took his first stab at writing fiction with the story of an uneducated slum dweller who wins millions of rupees on a television quiz show.

He wrote the novel in 2003, while finishing an overseas posting before heading to New Delhi.

“My wife and children had already left for India. So I was two months alone in London,” Swarup said in an interview at the official residence of his current job as India’s Deputy High Commissioner to South Africa.

“There was no comfort, but more importantly there were no distractions. That’s why I wrote this book, almost in a frenzy. The idea was bubbling in my head.”

Swarup said he was inspired by the idea of an underdog coming out on top.

‘Slumdog’ author was inspired by opportunity, solitude – CNN.com.