IT Insights Blog — Education

It's almost summer. Yeah, don't give us all of that nitpicky mumbo-jumbo about how some random day in June is technically the "first day" of summer. You can already purchase watermelon at the grocery store. You can already see big blockbuster movies like Avengers: Infinity War and Deadpool 2 in theaters. And teachers everywhere are basically just hanging in there and running out the clock.

Tonight there will be a new lottery winner. No, it's not going to be a fry cook from Hackensack, or a plumber from Poughkeepsie. This lottery winner won't be clutching a ticket stub and breathlessly following along as a guy in a suit with a microphone reads off winning numbers displayed on a Wheel of Fortune-style flipboard by a lady in a cocktail dress. (Do they still do it like that on TV?)

It would seem that most of the nation's moviegoers are still infatuated with the story of the big purple guy — I think Star Lord calls him "Grimace," in the movie — and the magic rocks. Avengers: Infinity War sold $62 million worth of tickets at North American theaters, roughly as much as the next eight movies combined. (The eighth of those 8 movies, incidentally, is Black Panther — still in the Top 10.)

It's National Teacher Appreciation Week here in the United States this week. And frankly, even though there are so many weeks and days scattered around the calendar that's it hardly worth keeping track of them all, this is one that actually matters. It's hard to overstate the impact that a good teacher can have in shaping the course of a young learner's future.

There are different answers to the question of which human has dived deepest beneath the surface of the ocean. Almost four years ago, longtime scuba instructor Ahmed Gabr dove to a depth of 1,089 feet in a coastal region of the Red Sea near Dahab, Egypt. Gabr took 12 minutes to reach his record-setting depth, and 14 hours (assisted by nine oxygen tanks) to return to the surface.