Reporters on the Job

• Journalism 101: To report today's story about secret Burmese schools, correspondent Anand Gopal went deep into the jungle along the Thailand-Burma (Myanmar) border. Some of the schools are so remote that the students have never seen a journalist before, let alone a foreigner.

"In one school I visited in the midst of the jungle, the schoolteachers were all volunteers, since the school was so impoverished it could not afford to pay salaries," says Anand.

In the classroom, wide-eyed children assumed he, too, was a volunteer teacher. "As I asked each child in the classroom a series of questions, they thought I was giving them English practice! Eventually their teacher intervened and patiently explained to them what journalism is and why I was there," he says.

"I apologized profusely for interrupting their class, but the teacher was delighted: Teaching children the principles of journalism, he explained to me, was just as important as teaching them math or English."

– David Clark Scott

World editor

This Week's Look Ahead

• Monday, Sept. 22:
London – Scientists who performed the first excavations at Stonehenge in 50 years give a press conference on their findings.
Nairobi, Kenya – First All Africa Congress on Biotechnology 2008.
Paris – French parliament debates future of France's force in Afghanistan.

• Tuesday, Sept. 23:
Tokyo – Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party votes for its new president, who will become the next prime minister.
United Nations, N.Y. – Opening of annual UN General Assembly ministerial meeting. President Bush speaks and meets with Pakistan's prime minister.

• Thursday, Sept. 25:
Beijing – Planned launch of rocket for China's first spacewalk.

– Associated Press