Michelle Obama says one of her happiest memories of being a kid is watching the Olympics on TV – “cheering on (gymnasts) Mary Lou (Retton) and Nadia (Comaneci), (track star) Carl Lewis and so many others.”

“Like so many young people, I was awed and inspired by those athletes,” she told reporters on Monday in Dallas, Texas.

Now that she’s First Lady, Mrs. Obama hopes today’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes will inspire kids, too.

So she’s getting them involved in her “Let’s Move!” campaign – a campaign against childhood obesity.

Their goal:  to get 1,700,000 U.S kids involved in sports this summer.

(The Paralympics is the international competition for athletes with disabilities.)

It can be any sport you like – from basketball, volleyball and soccer to cycling, swimming and gymnastics.

The point is to find at least one sport that’ll get you up and exercising.

“All it takes is that first lesson or that first class to get a (kid) interested in a new sport,” Mrs. Obama said, according to the Associated Press (AP).

As part of the program, USA Swimming reportedly plans to enroll more than half-a-million people in its “Make a Splash” program.

And the U.S. Tennis Association hopes to work with even more kids – up to 750,000.

USA Cycling is reportedly offering free memberships and clinics across the country.

And USA Field Hockey plans to launch a program called “FUNdamental Field Hockey” at 250 locations all over the United States.

“We’re very proud to support the First Lady,” said Scott Blackmun, the chief executive officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee, according to AP reporter Dave Skretta.

Mrs. Obama will lead the U.S. delegation at this summer’s Olympics in London.

The opening ceremony is July 27th.

While she’s in England, Mrs. Obama says she’ll be thinking about all the kids back home – kids who’ll be watching the games just as she did, so many years ago.

“I’ll be thinking about the power of the (Olympic) games to truly inspire a generation,” she told reporters on Monday.  “And I’ll be thinking about how our Olympic and Paralympic athletes can serve as role models for our young people – as examples of the values we want our kids to learn.”

According to Mrs. Obama, it’s not just about winning gold medals

“They’re about trying your hardest and trying to overcome adversity,” she added.  “And helping others do the same.”

“This kid keeps calling me the N-word,” Arzell said in an interview with Oklahoma City TV station KFOR.  “And I’m getting mad about it.”

But according to Arzell, it went even further.

He says other kids tackled him and injured his knee so badly he wound up on crutches.

When other people in Harrah heard what happened, they decided enough is enough.

On May 5th, they held a rally outside the school – a rally against bullying and bigotry.

“Other kids are going through the same thing,” said Arzell’s foster mother, Beth Winstead, in an interview with the Oklahoman newspaper.

Harrah Public Schools superintendent Dean Hughes told the Oklahoman the school system takes all allegations of bullying seriously.

“If we find that there was something done wrong here, we will take care of it,” he told reporter Vallery Brown.

But a number of people at the rally said Arzell’s school was turning a blind eye to bullying – including the teacher that was supposed to be supervising the dodgeball game.

“They are proud to say they have a ‘no-tolerance’ policy,” Winstead told KFOR reporter Marika Lorraine.  “(But) I haven’t seen that it’s been implemented at all.”

On May 1st, Harrah Public Schools resource officer Phil Stewart told KFOR there was “no evidence of a pattern of bullying” against Arzell.

And he called the outcry about what happened to Arzell, “a staggering over-reaction.”

The people at the rally disagreed.

“The more publicity this has gotten, the more people that have come out and contacted me saying that they’re having the same problem,” Winstead told Oklahoma City TV station KWTV.

And in addition to dealing with the bullying problem, they also want a “no-tolerance” policy toward racism and other forms of discrimination in the schools.

“I mean, it’s 2012,” said Jamie Cox, who attended the rally, in an interview with Oklahoma City TV station KOCO.  “Who cares what color you are.”

“Many times I did not sleep at all,” he said, in an interview with NBC News.  “Especially when I had to write papers.”

Gac Filipaj wanted a college education so badly that he was willing to clean toilets and mop floors to pay for it.

And on Sunday, at Columbia University in New York City, he finally became a college graduate – at the age of 52.

“I am very happy,” he told the New York Daily News.

Had Gac Filipaj been born in the United States, he might have graduated from college 30 years ago.

But Filipaj is an Albanian refugee from Montenegro – a country that was once part of Yugoslavia.

He came to this country in the early 1990s to escape the political and ethnic violence that eventually tore Yugoslavia apart.

He didn’t know a word of English.

But he knew he wanted to go to college.

“I asked people which are the best schools in New York,” he told the Associated Press (AP).

After people told him Columbia was the best school, “I went there to see if I could get a job,” he told AP reporter Verena Dobnik.

Why get a job at Columbia?

Because university employees can take classes for free.

So Filipaj took a job as a janitor at Columbia.

He worked full-time – eight hours a day.

He also worked as a restaurant busboy.

When he wasn’t working, he took classes and studied.

It took him 12 years.

But he’s now a college graduate – with a degree from an Ivy League school.

His major?

Roman and Greek classics.

“I love Seneca’s letters,” he said, speaking about the ancient Roman philosopher.  “They’re written in the spirit in which I was educated in my family – not to look for fame or fortune, but to have a simple, honest, honorable life.”

It’s a philosophy Filipaj lives by.

When asked if he plans to try to go out and get a high-paying job with his new Ivy League degree, he told reporters, “no.”

He did say he was trying to get a better job at Columbia – maybe as a supervisor of the other janitors.

Why?

Staying at Columbia would allow him to get a master’s degree for free – maybe even a doctorate.

After working this hard and waiting this long to get his bachelor’s degree, Gac Filipaj has no plans to stop now.

He told the AP it’s not about making money – not for him, at least.

“The richness is in me, in my heart and in my head,” he said.  “Not in my pockets.”

If the latest test scores are accurate, then American kids are doing a little bit better than a few years ago.

But not much better – and not enough of an improvement for a lot of people who say the United States is falling far behind a number of other countries.

“When you consider the importance of being scientifically literate in today’s global economy, these scores are simply unacceptable,” said Gerry Wheeler, the interim head of the National Science Teachers Association, in an interview with the Associated Press (AP).

Wheeler is talking about the test scores from last years NAEP tests – scores that were just released on Thursday.

(NAEP stands for the National Assessment of Educational Progress.)

According to the test results, only two percent of the nation’s current eighth-graders are working at an “advanced” level when it comes to science.

That’s only one out of every 50 kids.

Approximately one out of every three eighth-graders is rated “proficient.”

That means they showed “solid academic performance,” according to a report by MSNBC.

According to the test results, the rest of the kids are reportedly operating at a level of “basic” or lower.

That means they have just a limited understanding of science – or less.

“This tells me … we have to do things differently,” said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, according to the AP.

There are some bright spots in the latest test results.

On average, test scores were up compared with 2009.

And African-American and Latino students made even more progress than students as a whole.

North Dakota students reportedly did the best on the test, with 44 percent scoring at the proficient or advanced levels.

Mississippi students reportedly did the worst, with just 18 percent proficient and zero percent advanced.

“There is much work ahead if our kids are going to be competitive in the global economy,” Duncan said in a statement.

“The gains are encouraging,” added David Driscoll, the chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, according to a report by MSNBC.  “But … in order to compete in globally competitive and expanding fields (such as) technology and medicine, we must make sure we give our students the tools to excel.”

The world’s oceans are full of surprises.

“We never know what we’re going to find,” said 12-year-old Emmitt Anderson of Sitka, Alaska, in an interview with the Daily Sitka Sentinel newspaper.

Emmitt and his dad reportedly like to go beachcombing.

And there’s a lot of beach to comb near Sitka.

After all, it sits along Sitka Sound, just miles away from the Pacific Ocean.

One day last month, Emmitt and his dad were exploring a nearby island when Emmitt came across a red piece of plastic.

It might have just looked like junk to a lot of people.

But Emmitt noticed that it had some numbers on it.

He also noticed that there was a $1 reward offered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), to anyone who found it.

According to Sentinel reporter Craig Giammona, Emmitt didn’t care about getting the dollar.

“I just like to find stuff,” he told Giammona.

But Emmitt’s dad, Steve Anderson, was reportedly a lot more curious.

He wanted to know where the card came from, what it was used for and how it wound up washing up near Sitka.

So he made a few calls to NOAA to find out.

It turns out that little red piece of plastic had apparently been floating around the ocean for 33 years.

According to oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, the plastic card was dropped into the water in 1979, between Kodiak Island and the Alaskan mainland.

It was reportedly part of study of ocean currents, to determine what might happen if there were an oil spill off the Alaskan coast.

(This was ten years before the huge Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound.)

Kodiak Island is nearly 650 miles from Sitka!

How did the plastic card get all the way from where it started to where it ended up?

No one knows for sure.

It might have spent the past 33 years floating in huge circles around the North Pacific.

Or it might have just gotten picked up and dropped on the beach.

Ebbesmeyer says other cards from the study have washed up as far away as France.

“The truth is, it’s impossible to know exactly where (this one) went,” he told the Senintel.

That NOAA study ended years and years ago.

So it looks like Emmitt will get to keep the card.

He told the Sentinel it’s one of the coolest things he has ever found on the beach.

“When I don’t find stuff,” he told the Sentinel, “I’m not every happy.”

Eight-year-old Ajia Richard says riding your bike to school is a “very good” idea.

“It gets people pumped for the day.  And gets oxygen to their brains,” said Ajia, a student at Stout Elementary in Silver City, New Mexico, in an interview with the Silver City Sun-News.  “Riding bikes (also) helps people get healthier.”

Ajia is right.

And the health benefits of riding a bike are part of what led to the creation of “National Bike to School Day.”

Lots of local school district have held “Bike to School” days in the past.

But this year, May 9th was the first-ever national event.

And more than 700 schools participated, according to a group called the National Center for Safe Routes to School.

In Cedar Falls, Iowa, eight-grader Charly Wohlert participated by riding her bike to Holmes Junior High.

But Charly says she rides her bike to school just about every day anyway.

“It feels nicer,” she said, in an interview with Waterloo, Iowa, TV station KWWL.  “(And) it helps me wake up and stuff in the morning.”

It’s not always easy for kids to ride their bikes to school.

In some cities, there are lots of busy streets full of cars to watch out for.

“Sometimes, they honk at us,” said 11-year-old Harrison Hirsch, in an interview with the Glendale News-Press in Glendale, California.

But Harrison and his brother still reportedly ride their bikes to R.D. White Elementary School every day, with their parents’ support.

“It’s a lot more fun,” he told News-Press reporter Megan O’Neil.  “And it is healthy for you.”

As for communicating with people in cars, “Hand signals help a lot,” Harrison said.

“The success of this first-ever National Bike to School Day illustrates that communities across the country understand the need to provide students with healthy options on how to get to school,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, in a press release from the National Center for Safe Routes to School.  “I look forward to seeing the program expand to more schools in the future.”

“I wish I could ride every day,” said 10-year-old Kennedy Petersen, a student at Southern Pines Elementary in Southern Pines, North Carolina, in an interview with the Pilot, the local newspaper there.

“Hopefully, we will one day have bike lanes in place,” said Southern Pines principal Marcy Cooper, “so that parents will feel better about letting their kids bike to school.”

In New Mexico, Ajia says she already bikes every day at home after school.

“Every time I eat something bad, I’ll go bike outside,” she told the Sun-News.  “And even if I don’t, I’ll still go out and bike.”

To paraphrase an old saying by former President Harry Truman, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the bakery.”

Truman actually said “kitchen.”

But in Massachusetts, “bakery” is more appropriate – especially after a political controversy over cookies, cupcakes and other sweet treats.

On May 10th, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said he would sign legislation that lifts a ban on school bake sales.

That ban was scheduled to take effect this summer.

But when people found out about it, there was an outcry.

Some people said it would hurt fundraising efforts by school organizations.

And at least one elected official called it “downright un-American.”

“We have more important things to debate,” said Republican State Senator Michael Knapik.  “But sometimes, the elected representatives have to step in and make things right.”

The bake-sale ban came about because Massachusetts health officials were required to implement a state law that passed two years ago – a law designed to reduce obesity among kids by limiting junk food and sugary drinks at school.

But Governor Patrick knows which side his cupcake is frosted on, so to speak.

So instead of jumping out of the baking dish and into the fire, he’s agreeing to exempt baked goods that are not sold by the school cafeteria or vending machines.

“Nobody is interested in banning bake sales,” Patrick told reporters, according to the Boston Globe.  “What we are interested in is student nutrition and delivering good choices.”

In Needham, Massachusetts, dietitian Lyn Schwartz told New England Cable News she agrees with the decision to lift the bake-sale ban.

(A dietitian is someone who specializes in showing people how to eat right.)

“We do have bake sales at our school.  And we do raise a lot of money,” Schwartz said.

When it comes to baked good, “It’s all about teaching kids moderation,” she said.

But not everybody is on board with the decision.

Some people think it’s, well, crumby.

“We are telling the students you need to eat healthy, except if you want to purchase something in the corridor to support an organization,” said Gail Koutroubas, the president of the School Nutrition Association of Massachusetts, in an interview with the Globe.

“Our hope coming out of this is that we don’t let it distract us from the task at hand,” added Maddie Ribble of the Massachusetts Public Health Association, “which is to make kids and schools healthier.”

What do you think?

That’s what some folks at a Texas school are learning right now – the hard way.

And I’m talking about the grownups.

It all started nearly nine years ago.

That’s when the Fort Worth Independent School District decided to rename one of its schools – Sunrise Elementary – to honor the school’s first teacher.

Sunrise Elementary School became Sunrise-McMillian Elementary School.

What’s wrong with that?

Nothing – or so just about everyone all thought.

Until last month.

That’s when a relative of the teacher in question pointed out that her name was Mary McMillan – not McMillian.

So the school’s name was supposed to be Sunrise-McMillan.

That meant the name on the outside of the school building had been misspelled since the 2003-04 school year.

“I was kind of shocked,” said school groundskeeper Ernie Johnson, in an interview with Dallas-Fort Worth TV station KXAS.

So was the school’s principal, Marion Mouton.

“Just thinking, ‘Wow, all the things we have to do now to fix one mistake,’” he told Dallas-Fort Worth TV station KDFW.

First, they had to take the extra “i” out of the “McMillian” on the side of the building.

But that wasn’t all.

In the past in few weeks, the school has had to update other signs, as well its website and the letterhead on its stationery.

It also has to fix all sorts of official documents, plus business cards and visitor’s passes, according to KXAS reporter Andrew Tanielian.

No one is sure why the spelling error went undetected for almost a decade.

But school officials hope this whole mess can be used as a “teachable moment” for students.

The lesson:  always check your work.

As for the school district, it’s trying to laugh off the mistake – as much as it can.

According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, district officials sent out a news release saying, “There’s (now) an extra vowel looking for a home.”

On Sunday, May 13^th, a lot of kids will give their mothers cards and flowers, take them to brunch or maybe try to make them breakfast-in-bed.

Why that day in particular?

Because this year, May 13^th is Mother’s Day.

It’s a holiday that goes back a long, long time — more than 2,000 years, according to some historians.

They say it began with an ancient Greek celebration honoring Rhea — the goddess who was considered the mother of all the other Greek gods.

Her festival was held every spring.

More recently (around 400 years ago), a holiday called “Mothering Sunday” became common in England.

It was celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent, which is the period leading up to the Christian holiday of Easter.

And here in the United States, the social activist and poet Julia Ward Howe is given credit for first suggesting the celebration of Mother’s Day back in 1872.

But the woman many people consider the Mother of Mother’s Day here in America is a woman named Anna Jarvis.

In the first decade of the 20th century, she started a campaign to make Mother’s Day a national holiday, after the death of her own mother.

On May 10^th, 1907, she organized a special Mother’s Day service at her mother’s church in her hometown of Grafton, West Virginia.

She chose the second Sunday of May because that was the anniversary of her mother’s passing.

Jarvis then got financial backing for her campaign from wealthy Philadelphia philanthropist John Wanamaker, who founded one of the first department stores in the United States.

Just seven years later, on May 14^th, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation that made Mother’s Day a national holiday, on the second Sunday of May each year.

For Jarvis, Mother’s Day was not a day to go out and buy something for your mother.

In fact, she opposed what she saw as the growing commercialization of the holiday.

She saw Mother’s Day as a day to honor women for the work they do as mothers, not as a day to make money.

So if you don’t have money to buy your mom a gift, don’t worry.

Just do something nice for her to show her you appreciate what she does for you every day.

Chances are, that’ll be enough of a gift for her.

“Kids tell you what they think – not what they think they should think,” Maurice Sendak once said.  “They are a better audience and tougher critics.”

The honesty of kids is one of the main reasons Sendak liked writing for them – for more than half a century.

Maurice Sendak died Tuesday at a hospital near his home in Connecticut.

He was 83 years old.

But by all accounts, he never forgot what it was like to be a kid.

“Children are tough,” he once told The New York Times.  “They have to be tough.  Childhood is not easy.”

He didn’t look down on kids.

And he didn’t talk down to kids, either.

“They know what’s real and what’s not,” he told the Times’ Bernard Holland.  “They know everything.”

In Maurice Sendak’s books, kids sometimes throw temper tantrums and get sent to their rooms without supper.

But instead of sitting and sulking, they escape – if not literally, then figuratively, into a fantasy world that helps them sort out the reality of being a kid.

That’s essentially the plot of Sendak’s best-known book – “Where the Wild Things Are.”

It was first published in 1963.

But kids are still reading it today.

And they still relate to it.

“A lot of kids want to escape when they’re in trouble,” said 11-year-old Matthew Rushford, in a recent interview with The Associated Press (AP).

The book is about a boy named Max – a boy who, in his anger, “sailed off through night and day … to where the wild things are,” after being sent to his room.

“The Wild Things” are the monsters Max meets during his journey.

Is the journey real?

Or is it all in his head?

That’s for you to decide.

When Max no longer feels angry, he returns home.

“My favorite part was how Max grows up,” Matthew said, according to AP reporter Leanne Italie, “and returns home to find his dinner waiting for him.”

Sendak recognized that life is like that for kids – not all good and not all bad.

“I did not want to reduce Max to the trite image of the good little boy that you find in too many books,” he told a reporter in 2009.

(“Trite” means common or unoriginal.)

“He let kids know that it’s okay to sometimes be a wild thing,” Matthew said.

Sendak also drew the illustrations in his books – illustrations that were just as full of fantasy as the words that went with them.

Fantasy was very important to him throughout his life.

It was the way he escaped during his own childhood, growing up during the dark days of the Great Depression and World War II.

“I believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we’re not fantasizing,” he said in 1972, according to The Christian Science Monitor.

But according to Sendak, kids know how to move back and forth between fantasy and reality “in a way (most grownups) no longer remember how to do.”

“It is through fantasy that (kids) achieve catharsis,” Sendak said in 1964, according to AP reporter Hillel Italie.  “It is the best means they have for taming wild things.”

(“Catharsis” is another word for “relief” or getting rid of tension.)

Kids wrote letters to Sendak over the years.

According to the Times, an 8-year-old once wrote to him asking, “How much does it cost to get to where the wild things are?  If it’s not expensive, my sister and I would like to spend the summer there.”

That was reportedly one of his favorites.

But according to another account, his all-time favorite might have been a letter he got from a kid named Jim – “a charming card with a little drawing on it,” as Sendak described it.

“I loved it,” Sendak said.  “(So) I sent him a card and drew a Wild Thing on it.  I wrote, ‘Dear Jim:  I loved your card.’

“Then I got a letter back from his mother,” he continued.  “She said, ‘Jim loved your card so much, he ate it.’

“That,” Sendak said, “was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received.”