All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Remember how frustrating those penmanship lessons were back in elementary school? That struggle to make all those graceful little loops and connect one letter to the next?

Well, writing in cursive is a dying art. It's usually introduced around third grade, but it's rarely reinforced after that - when keyboards and monitors replace pens and paper as primary writing tools.

I'm a proficient typist on my Blackberry and I understand the need for speed, but penmanship still has its place. A hand written thank you note means a lot more than a typed one. A love letter by E-mail isn't quite as romantic. And one by text? Fuhgettaboutit!

Experts say cursive is more natural than printing. It helps children strengthen hand muscles and improve their hand-eye coordination.

With fewer kids learning it, the writing is on the wall - but it needs to be back on a page of paper to keep the art of penmanship alive.

That's a page from my notebook.

I'm Katie Couric, CBS News.

Mandy Clark is a CBS News Digital Journalist based in Afghanistan. In this blog, she previews her story for the CBS Evening News.

Nine young boys were tricked into delivering a bomb for the Taliban. It is the story of Eidullah and his friends. I came across the story on a military base in Khost, Eastern Afghanistan when a few of the boys had come for a check up. Military doctors saved their lives.

The boys were asked to deliver a fruit basket to a local commander working with U.S. forces. What they didn’t know was hidden in the basket was a bomb. It exploded early and injuring the boys. Two lost legs, one went blind, all their lives changed in a flash.

Using children is new terror tactic that is growing in Afghanistan. Doctors at the combat hospital say they are seeing child bombers more frequently.
Eidullah was one of the boys who lost his leg. When I met him, his face was etched with worry. He used to run his father’s shop in his village. His father is blind and as the oldest son it’s up to him to take care of his mother and 6 siblings. He doubts he can. It is hard to believe such responsibility for an 11-year-old.

Nine year old Mohammad’s father begged doctors not to amputate his leg, but the blast took out his sciatic nerve. His right leg is now dead. He has no feeling and no control over it. It will need to be removed in the future but the doctors respected the father’s wishes.

Even when it is amputated, it’s unlikely Eidullah or Mohammad will ever get a prosthetic leg, they are simply too poor to afford it. They will join the 50 thousand other Afghan civilians amputated by 30 years of continuous war.
Despite the agony from their injuries, not one of the boys complained. They were near stoic with their new reality given to them by a terrorist.

The bombing that changed the lives of these boys happened on September 11th. A terrible reminder of how it always seems to be their lives of the innocence that are torn apart by terrorism and war.

>Don Teague is a CBS News Correspondent in the Dallas bureau.

There are three words that bring joy to the hearts of parents, and dread to their children. Three words that feel like freedom for grownups, and prison for kids. Three words, that seem to get more expensive every year:

Back to School

I have to admit, that even 25 plus years after graduating high school, I still get a little nervous adrenaline rush on the first day of a school year. I guess most of us never completely recover from high school.

In Texas, about 4.8 million public school students went back to school this morning after the long summer break, my two teenaged daughters among them. They joined millions of other kids around the country who are now trying to figure out if they got the hard history teacher or the easy one, a good locker location or a bad one, if this will finally be the year they keep that pledge to do their homework early.

I, on the other hand, am joining the millions of parents doing serious checkbook math today, trying to figure where all the money went.

I actually know where it went. I just can’t quite believe it.

Over at Tech Talk, our sister blog, science and technology correspondent (and self-proclaimed "digital nomad") Daniel Sieberg has given us a little previewa of his story on tonight's CBS Evening News. It's about grade-school kids using the Web not just to share too much information about themselves - but to share potentially-illegal video tips on how to deceive their teachers and cheat on tests.

Here's a taste:

It's no secret that young people make mistakes; it's a necessary part of growing up. But the Internet - and specifically the rise of video-sharing Web sites - opened a new portal for potential pitfalls. On tonight's CBS Evening News with Katie Couric we're looking at how teens are posting controversial videos on sites like YouTube, often in the hopes of getting noticed or showing off. But in the process they may be setting themselves up for real-world consequences in the future.

For our story we talked to two young people about their decision to post "how to cheat on a test" videos on YouTube. Both of our subjects are unrepentant about their decision - but they also do not want us to use their real names. Both said they're seeking attention and aren't worried about being caught because "adults don't use YouTube."

Wait, adults don't use YouTube? Huh. Somebody must have forgotten to tell Oprah, Charlie Rose, and, or course, Katie. Anyway, check out the rest of Daniel's blog post right here, and don't forget to watch tonight at 6:30 ET.

Remember this story problem from elementary school math class? One train leaves New York at 9 o'clock and another leaves San Francisco at 10 o'clock … oh, never mind – it brings back too many bad memories.

So many of us, including me, were never very good at those problems. So more and more elementary schools are bringing in tutors, not just for the kids, but for the teachers.

Teachers that are great at, say, reading or social studies are not always as comfortable helping students figure out fractions and pi. In fact the National Council on Teacher Quality says most states don't even require elementary school teachers to have high school math skills

Many teachers who have used tutors say they really help, and there's some evidence it's working.

While our children's' math skills are far below results in Singapore, Japan, Belgium, and a number of other countries, they have been going up. That equals progress.

That's the kind of "new math" we can all understand.

Seth Doane is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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When school is out for the summer, the free or reduced-price meals that millions of kids depend on each day during the school year stop as well. The federal government is stepping up efforts to address this meal-gap, but there are a number of hurdles for organizations interested in trying to offer meals. One of the challenges is finding places where kids assemble.

So, more and more, parks and summer camps are becoming feeding sites.

We met Crystal Hamilton and her kids one morning earlier in July as they were getting ready to walk to a local park for a free bag lunch. Crystal says she's thankful that the local Salvation Army is close. Their car is broken and they can't afford the parts and labor to fix it. Even if their car was working - putting gas in it would be the next stumbling block.

For Crystal and her husband, O.B., this summer lunch program eases some of the pressure of buying enough food to put another meal on the table. Crystal lost her job, and O.B. is cleaning carpets for about half what he made in his former job as a driver for cement and construction trucks. Though they receive government assistance, they still struggle to provide healthy meals for their kids.

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A lot of parents I know are worried about their kids and the Internet - and not just because of chat rooms or porn sites.

At Facebook, for example, you can opt to put an "honesty box" on your page, for anonymous insults from "friends."

Or consider Juicycampus.com, where college kids post anonymous gossip. For the rest of my Notebook, just click on the monitor.

Every year, an estimated 1.3 million kids run away from home. For decades, many have found help through a federally funded hotline, 1-800-RUNAWAY.

A recent report on that hotline by the AP found some alarming trends. But over the years, the number of callers has grown to 100,000 a year.

For more from my Notebook, just click the video monitor.

EDITOR'S NOTE: this entry by CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson was first posted last June, but as the debate over autism and vaccinations rages on, it seems worthy of repeating. You can read the original post here, or simply scroll down below to see it in full.

Just yesterday, U.S. health officials conceded that childhood vaccines interacted with and worsened a rare disorder that ultimately led to autism-like symptoms in a Georgia girl. Her family is set to be paid from a federal fund.

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With the first autism case now being heard in federal vaccine court in Washington D.C., it makes sense to ask: Why is anyone even still debating the possibility of a link between vaccines and autism? After all, for years, many government health officials, advisors and vaccine manufacturers have said there's no association.

Here are a number of reasons why the question remains open:

1. While government scientists, advisors and pharmaceutical companies have been responsible for infinite lifesaving and life improving medical advances, they are not infallible.

• It's the same group that originally thought it was safe to use x-ray machines in shoe stores, gave pregnant women Thalidomide for morning sickness and once allowed mercury in medicines. They assured us Vioxx and Duract were safe painkillers, prescribed Rezulin for diabetics and then denied any of them were responsible for patient deaths. If we never questioned that group, we might not have discovered that Fen-phen and the dietary supplement Ephedra are not safe weight loss products, that antidepressants in kids can lead to suicidality and Viagra can cause blindness. The list goes on.

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No one wants to feel unpopular. But a new study shows it might actually be detremental to teenage girls' health. The girls who thought they were less popular were more likely to gain weight.

For more from my Notebook, just click on the monitor.