All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Cynthia Bowers is a CBS News correspondent based in Chicago.

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I went back to the Chicago suburb of North Lawndale today to do my “on camera,” for tonight’s story. All our equipment caught the eye of two young boys, soon to be 7th graders. One was shy, but curious. The other was openly eager to see what we were doing, how we did it, but mostly when would it come on TV. I kept hearing the words I was saying to the camera through the ears of these kids. About “how in this community of 45,000, 1 in 4 is unemployed, 6 in 10 people have had run-ins with the law.” Many of those have served time and end up right back in North Lawndale and unemployable, which often leads to more crime and the cycle continues. And I wondered what effect does that have on impressionable 12- and 13-year-olds growing up here.

When Brenda Palms-Barber came to head the North Lawndale Employment Network seven years ago she wanted to break the cycle. She needed to find a way to give men and women coming out of jail a job history. But it wasn’t easy. It’s hard enough to find work in a depressed neighborhood, but especially for people “with a past,” and no real job skills.

Her first few ideas didn’t fly. One plan called for getting ex-cons jobs as delivery men, but she then realized no one would want these guys coming to their door. Then, over lunch one day, a friend of hers mentioned beekeeping as a hobby, and a light bulb went off in Brenda’s head...

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A long time ago in a school district far, far away (okay, it was a tiny Catholic school in Maryland), I entered the local spelling bee and didn't make it past the first round. So, of course, I now make a living in a job that requires better-than-average spelling skills. Or, at least, the ability to know how to use spell-check.

Now comes word that maybe bees, despite their buzz, also sting.

To wit:

Don't expect to find a spelling bee in Sue Ann Gleason's first-grade classroom at Cedar Grove Elementary School in Loudoun County. She doesn't think much of them.

"They honor the children who already know how to spell, but they do little to support those who need explicit instruction," she said.

As popular as spelling bees have become, academic researchers say many schools are giving spelling short shrift. That, they say, is because some teachers don't believe great spelling is necessary to pass the high-stakes standardized tests that drive public education. And because many don't know how to teach it.

Some wind up substituting spelling competitions for real instruction and insist that students memorize lists of words for a weekly test. That is no way to help students understand what words mean, experts say.

"Most teachers -- unfortunately -- think of spelling as a rote visual memory skill, and it's much richer than that," said Marcia Invernizzi, an education professor at the University of Virginia and a spelling researcher who has written textbooks on the topic.

Spelling bee afficianados, though, will undoubtedly be obdurate.

John Blackstone is a CBS News correspondent based in San Francisco.

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I have reported a couple of stories now on the mysterious die off of honeybees that has hit beekeepers in at least 35 states. It’s a threat to all of us because bees are responsible for pollinating the crops that provide more than 30 per cent of our food.

One of the things that struck me about this story is what a big business beekeeping has become. When the almond crop is getting ready to bloom in California’s central valley huge transport trucks loaded with bees travel the highways and farm roads carrying hives into the orchards. The farmers pay the beekeepers thousands of dollars to rent their bees. Without the bees there would be no almond crop. The same for apples and pears, most berries and melons, squash and pumpkins. The list goes on to include much of what makes our diet healthy and interesting.

But there was a time, decades ago, that farmers didn’t have to depend on beekeepers to bring in bees to pollinate the crops. Back then there were enough wild pollinators around to do the job for free. Two things have happened since then. Agriculture has grown to a larger and larger scale and wild pollinators, including butterflies, bats and hummingbirds as well as bees, have been disappearing.

There are hundreds of species of wild native bees in America but we have come to depend on just one domesticated species, the non-native European honeybee, raised by beekeepers, to produce much of our food.

So I was encouraged when I visited a farm near Davis, California where the farmer had set aside a strip of land to create a habitat for native wild bees...

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