May your stuffing be tasty
May your turkey plump,
May your potatoes and gravy
Have nary a lump.
May your yams be delicious
and your pies take the prize,
and may your Thanksgiving dinner
stay off your thighs!
Unknown
Out With Textbooks, in With Laptops for an Indiana School District
- October 19, 2011
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Laura Norman used to ask her seventh-grade scientists to take out their textbooks and flip to Page Such-and-Such. Now, she tells them to take out their laptops.
The day all have seen coming — traditional textbooks being replaced by interactive computer programs — arrived this year in this traditional, well-regarded school district, complete with one naysaying parent getting reported to the police. Unlike the tentative, incremental steps of digital initiatives at many schools nationwide, Munster made an all-in leap in a few frenetic months — removing all math and science textbooks for its 2,600 students in grades 5 to 12, and providing a window into the hurdles and hiccups of such an overhaul.
The transformation, which cost $1.1 million for infrastructure, involved rewiring not just classrooms but also the mindset of students, teachers and parents. When teachers started hearing that “the server ate my homework,” they knew a new era had begun.
Pleas Unheeded as Students’ U.S. Jobs Soured
- October 19, 2011
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The college student from Moldova was in the United States on a cultural exchange program run for half a century by the federal government, a program designed to build international understanding by providing foreign students with a dream summer of fun in America. So he summoned his best English for the e-mail he sent to the State Department in June.
“Pleas hellp,” wrote the student, Tudor Ureche. He told them about “the miserable situation in which I’ve found myself cought” since starting a job under the program in a plant packing Hershey’s chocolates near the company’s namesake town in Pennsylvania.
Students like Mr. Ureche, who had paid as much as $6,000 to take part in the program, expected a chance to see the best of this country, to make American friends and sightsee, with a summer job to help finance it all.
As California State Tuition Rises, Financial Aid Offices Struggle to Adjust
- September 30, 2011
- tuition
- 1 Comment
On what should have been a carefree day of reconnecting with friends and settling into new classes recently, more than two dozen students at the University of California, Berkeley, sat in uneasy silence outside the financial aid office.
The airy room on the second floor of Sproul Hall took on the desperate feeling of an unemployment office, with students waiting their turn to plead for emergency loans.
“I want to have enough money to pay for school,” Daniel Seman, a junior majoring in English and music, said as he waited to see a financial aid counselor last Wednesday. “My mom is really worried.”
Mr. Seman, 23, said he had already spent an emergency loan of $500 from the university on books and food. But faced with about $7,230 for tuition and fees this semester, roughly $1,000 more than the fall semester last year, he was back in line trying to get another loan.
Faced with drastic cutbacks in state financing, U.C. tuition increased 18 percent this school year, and the university’s Board of Regents is expected to vote on a plan to raise tuition 8 percent to 16 percent a year through 2015-16. With the cost of rent, food and books also soaring, more students like Mr. Seman are scrambling to be able to afford their education.
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World
- September 27, 2011
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This speech was given to the Class of 2009, University of Portland, by Paul Hawken:
When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” No pressure there.
Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.
Brain pickings
The great philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born 300 years ago. His work sparked a new dawn of hope for liberty and equality, ultimately fuelling one of the greatest sociopolitical upheavals in the history of our civilization — The French Revolution — and, eventually, the American Revolution. These “Romantic” ideas permeated nearly every facet of culture, from art to politics, and the legacy of his seminal novel, Émile: or, On Education underpins many of the concepts in these 7 must-read books on education.
Here is a fantastic 2005 BBC documentary titled The Romantics, exploring the birth of the individual in modern society. Each of the program’s three parts examines one key aspect of the Romanticism movement. Liberty looks at how Rousseau and his contemporaries, including Denis Diderot, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, challenged the authority of Church and King to rein in a new era of self-empowerment.
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