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Weekly or $1100 Monthly Fully FURNISHED Master bedroom with bath (oakland lake merritt / grand) $300 2bd

Available Imme .....available in 2br 2ba apartment Enjoy the lake walking, jogging and farmers market MONTHKY RENT $1100 OR WEEKLY $300 This is ideal for someone who is here for transit, here for a few months or on business commutes on weekdays, or summer student. I have a fully furnished 2B 2B and renting the master b/room with attached bath with lots of closet space for temporary rent. The apt is in the luxury 1200 Lakeshore luxury apt right on Lake Merritt I have the back view of the east bay and get lots of sun shine in the morning. Close to BART, Lake Merritt Bakery, Lakeshore/Grand shopping area, Laney College, and safe neighborhood. The apt has a gym, business office and a laundry facility in the building. There is only street parking. This is a fully furnished place and the only things you need to bring is your cloths and some personal stuff, no petsÂ…I have no room for anything else. You will be sharing this apt with me; friendly East Indian guy in his 40Â’s, IÂ’m a Consultant so I mostly travel during the week M-Th and have a very active life style so the whole place will yours when IÂ’m not there. IÂ’m looking for only one person for this master b/room who is clean, responsible and financially stable person who picks up after themselves . Rent is $1100 monthly & $300 per week payable in advance with a security deposit that we will be determined on the length of the stay. There will also be a cleaning charge of $35 payable with rent for when you move out or every 3 weeks whichever comes first. I will take care of the utilities, wireless internet and TV cableÂ….Linen and towels This room is ready for move in NON SMOKERS AND social drinkers ONLY

Marcel Berlins: So, teachers are boring. But is that the real reason pupils leave school unable to add or subtract?

I've always assumed that boring schoolteachers were the norm. At school, it never entered my mind that teachers ought to be anything else. After all, school was not meant to be fun. Lessons existed for the sole purpose of eventually passing exams. If there was anything in their content that turned out to be quite interesting, that was a bonus, rarely achieved. Stimulating lessons or teachers was not something I hoped for, expected or encountered. I have paid a price, part of which has been a lifelong inability to properly appreciate Shakespeare, a direct result of the ennui instilled in me by our English master.A few days ago, Ofsted announced a "crackdown" on boring teachers, accusing them of far more than spoiling their pupils' appreciation of literature. There was a link, according to Ofsted, not only between boredom and destructive behaviour in the classroom but also, more seriously, between the inattention paid to boring teachers and the subsequent achievements of their students. Quite how Ofsted proposes to carry out this crackdown is not made clear. It is my experience - in life, not just in education - that boring people cannot be taught to be not boring, let alone to be motivating and stimulating. Anyway, if there is a method of enlivening teachers, should it not have been applied during their training, rather than waiting until their dampening effect was let loose on the children? And how do you make arithmetic and basic maths exciting? A report published this week by KPMG concludes that innumeracy costs Britain £2.4bn a year, in addition to the damage caused to the lives of people who can't add. The Every Child a Chance Trust, the charity that commissioned the report, claims that 30,000 pupils leave primary school each year unable to do simple calculations. KPMG adds that such children are more likely than their numerate peers to play truant, be excluded from school, become unemployed and even turn to crime.What are the reasons for this lamentable educational failure? Is there something wrong with the syllabus, or are we back to blaming Ofsted's boring teachers? I do not know how you make sums - call them mathematical calculations if you must - fascinating for children. But as far as I know, no comparable European country has such a high level of child innumeracy, and I cannot believe that British children have a DNA preventing them from being competent with figures.Dr David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk at Cambridge (I haven't made up that title), has called for schoolchildren to be taught about probabilities and risk assessment, to enable them to make sensible, considered decisions when they enter the real world. It's an interesting proposal, but how can we even think of it when our schools don't even seem able to convey the basics of maths? In a week packed with stories about schools, the one that attracted the most publicity told of Sheffield's Watercliffe Meadow primary, which intends to call itself a "place of learning", because of the "negative connotations" of the word "school". How we jeered at this example of ridiculous euphemism. And yet, looking at Ofsted's strictures and the KPMG report, is there not some validity in the argument? School, to many, including to some extent me, represents tedious lessons on subjects of no interest to the recipient, learning by rote, learning without understanding, and exams requiring regurgitation of material rather than thought. Does this not amount to "negative connotations"? Where I part with Watercliffe Meadow is in its alternative choice. To me, a "place of learning" is just as fearsome and off-putting as a school. Have you heard of Mimie Mathy? According to a poll published on Sunday, she's France's most popular woman, and the only woman in the top 10 of the country's favourite people. Heard of Gel Elmaleh? He was fourth overall (and the most popular among the 16-25 age group); he had not even been in "Le Top 50" just six months ago. The Journal du Dimanche (JDD) commissions these polls twice a year, and the winner is rarely a surprise. Until 2003, it was almost always the undersea explorer Commander Cousteau, or the priest L'Abbé Pierre, champion of the homeless. Since then it has been either Zinedine Zidane, captain of France's greatest football teams, or Yannick Noah, the former tennis champion turned popular singer and committed worker for charities. He won again this time. More interesting are some of the other rankings - President Sarkozy at 42; Ségolène Royal's 47; Carla Bruni's 48. (Just in case you didn't know, Mathy is a 50-ish comedienne and chanteuse, Elmaleh, 37, a stand-up comic and actor.)The French are not as besotted as the British in discovering their country's favourite whoever or whatever and I think the JDD provides the only poll presenting a vaguely persuasive picture of their national attitudes (even though it was flawed by the fact that interviewees had to choose their favourites from a list shown to them, and could not offer their own selections). I haven't found a British equivalent. For all the hundreds of surveys claiming to assess public preferences in hundreds of categories, there doesn't seem to be one, methodologically valid, asking straight out, "Who is your favourite British person?" (a public figure is implied, to exclude lovers, offspring etc). My feeling is that Sir David Attenborough would win it here, until England wins the 2010 World Cup, when its captain, Sir Steven Gerrard, would take over.? This week Marcel saw the RSC's Hamlet: "Having no David Tennant didn't matter; Edward Bennett was admirable, if slightly young and under-tormented. Oliver Ford Davies was the best Polonius I've ever seen." He also saw Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood: "An interesting, worthy film, especially enjoyable if you think Angelina Jolie acts wonderfully. I don't."guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Clay Shirky on traditional media: "2009 is going to be a bloodbath."

Tom Teodorczuk of the Guardian interviews BB guest blogger alum Clay Shirky about the future of media. For traditional media, he says, "2009 is going to be a bloodbath." The things that the Huffington Post or the Daily Beast have are good storytelling and low costs. Newspapers are going to get more elitist and less elitist. The elitist argument is: "Be the Economist or New Yorker, a small, niche publication that says: 'We're only opening our mouths when what we say is demonstrably superior to anything else on the subject.'" The populist model is: "We're going to take all the news pieces we get and have an enormous amount of commentary. It's whatever readers want to talk about." Finding the working business model between them in that expanded range is the new challenge. Why pay for it at all? The steady loss of advertising revenue, accelerated by the recession, has normalised the idea that it's acceptable to move to the web. Even if we have the shallowest recession and advertising comes back as it inevitably does, more of it will go to the web. I think that's it for newspapers. Clay Shirky on traditional media...