High School, College Instructors Differ on Students' Readiness

From Curriculum Matters:

High School, College Instructors Differ on Students' Readiness: "

What does it mean when far more high school teachers think their students are ready for college than do the college instructors who teach them? It means we have a pretty big disconnect between what high schools think is needed for success in college and what actually is needed.

This is not exactly news. We know there are many reasons that high school students fail to make it to college, or fail to thrive once they're there. But a new survey of thousands of high school and college teachers, conducted by ACT Inc., fleshes out a few of the key reasons why.

One reason is that high school teachers and college instructors have differing views of what skills are important in college. High school teachers, for instance, rate things like media literacy and financial literacy as far more important than do college professors, who value the content areas of math, English, and science more.

Another is that high school teachers think they've prepared their students for the rigorous types of reading they will encounter in college, but college professors disagree. Science and math teachers in high school say it's important for students to master reading strategies in those subjects, but they spend little or no time teaching such things.

Expectations play a role, too. High school teachers say that they or their colleagues have lower expectations for students who are perceived as not being college-bound.

These are key new findings of the survey. The report also reiterates many other interesting findings from earlier ACT curriculum surveys that are worth examining. For example, high school teachers tend to see as crucial for college a very wide swath of content and skills, compared with college professors, who believe in a shorter list of essential skills and knowledge.

This is interesting stuff to keep in mind as the debate about defining and measuring college readiness rolls on. The full survey is packed with data; a shorter version that highlights the findings and focuses on their policy implications is also available.

"

Google's Eric Schmidt on Gaming

From Google's Blogoscoped:


Google's Eric Schmidt on Gaming: "

From H+ Magazine:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt made news at the recent G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, suggesting that multiplayer video games provide good career training – particularly in technology – where workplace collaboration stimulates innovation. “The game world is good training for a career in tech,” he said. “It teaches players to build a network, to use interactive skills and thinking.”

“Everything in the future online is going to look like a multiplayer game,” said Schmidt to this international audience. “If I were 15 years old, that’s what I would be doing right now.”

[Thanks Destinyland!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google's Eric Schmidt on Gaming | Comments]

[Advertisement] Books about Google available on Ebay"

Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go

A great article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about the dangers of pursuing an advanced degree in the humanities. It's a sad state of affairs, and I wish it were otherwise, but that's not the case.

Here's the killer quote for me:

Most undergraduates don't realize that there is a shrinking percentage of positions in the humanities that offer job security, benefits, and a livable salary (though it is generally much lower than salaries in other fields requiring as many years of training). They don't know that you probably will have to accept living almost anywhere, and that you must also go through a six-year probationary period at the end of which you may be fired for any number of reasons and find yourself exiled from the profession. They seem to think becoming a humanities professor is a reliable prospect — a more responsible and secure choice than, say, attempting to make it as a freelance writer, or an actor, or a professional athlete — and, as a result, they don't make any fallback plans until it is too late.

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen Calls for End to Homework in Elementary School

From the Blog Stop Homework:


Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen Calls for End to Homework in Elementary School: "

(Welcome back and thank you so very much for your generous donations to Stop Homework)

Over a decade ago, the economist and Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen, formed the Partichi trust to examine the issues of primary education and health in India. Last month, he released the Partichi Education Report II, which recommended ending homework in elementary school and focusing on reading, writing, and arithmetic during school hours. The report also stressed the importance of recognizing and addressing the role of class barriers in educational under-achievement.

According to thehindu.com,

Prof. Sen said: “A somewhat counter-productive overloaded curriculum, incomplete education during school hours and necessity of homework are the reasons that there is a perceived necessity of private tuition since the parents try to supplement at home the education which could not be completed in school.”

He recommended “re-examination of the curriculum and banishing the necessity of homework at the elementary level” to overcome the situation.

Prof. Sen also emphasised the deep social impact the system has among the economically disadvantaged sections.

“It [the problem of class division] applies particularly to the first-generation school-goers, whose parents remain illiterate … the parents can neither help their children with their homework nor can they afford a private tutor. So then, instead of removing inequality through education, we perpetuate inequality between the haves and the have-nots.”

"

Can a Smart Phone Make You More Patient?

Pretty insightful stuff from Harvard Business Review's Conversation Starter:

Can a Smart Phone Make You More Patient?: "

On your way to meet a colleague, you get stuck in traffic. Radio traffic reports tell you it's a ten-minute backup. You can spend ten minutes inching forward, or you cut out and take a circuitous route that will add 15 minutes to your drive, but it'll be 15 minutes in which you're moving. Which do you you choose?

The logical answer, the rational economist's answer, is to spend ten minutes inching forward since it will take you less time to get where you're going. But if you're like me, you'd rather spend fifteen minutes actually driving than ten minutes staring at a bumper in front of you. It doesn't really make sense that I'd voluntarily choose to take longer to get where I'm going, but it's also proof of what I consider one of my personal failings: a severe lack of patience.

Lucky for me, then, that I have an iPhone, the impatient person's best friend. Just two years ago, I found myself tapping my foot or tugging at my hair during traffic jams or any of life's little waiting games. Bank queues. Lines for the bathroom. The wasted minutes at the start of meetings waiting for everyone to arrive.

Today, my iPhone (any smart phone will do; I happen to own the iPhone) rescues me from all these micro-delays. A traffic jam becomes time to listen to a podcast. I check Twitter during a bank line-up. I can check Facebook while waiting for the loo and I can do email at the beginning of meetings.

Delays that would formerly have driven me into a frenzy pass very happily now. And if you're looking at measurable outcomes — my willingness to wait for a delayed colleague, the courtesy with which I (finally!) greet the bank teller, the number of hairs left on my head when traffic finally starts moving — then Alex-with-iPhone looks a lot like Alex-with-patience.

But it's not, really. Patience isn't just about measurable outcomes. Patience is an internal state. It's the ability to be present with the thoughts, emotions and anxieties in a vacant moment. It connects us with the inner voice that gets drowned out by the constant background noise of phone calls, e-mail and TV. And it's important. Being truly patient helps us improve and solve problems. In patient moments, we suddenly see the solution to an engineering problem, or come up with that tag line for an ad campaign. We think about telling the boss what we really think — and find a constructive way to do just that. We may realize that we've gone off-track and think of ways to get back on track.

Some people find this patience through exercise, meditation, church or other spiritual practices. Others — especially those of us attached to our smart phones — do whatever we can to avoid these moments and prevent them from finding us.

In fact, far from fostering patience, my now-reflexive reach for the iPhone is an evasive action, a way to avoid reflection. On the rare occasion when my iPhone runs out of juice (I've got a backup battery. What, you don't?) or actually breaks (I've got a spare phone. What, you don't?) I quickly rediscover that I'm still that impatient person spending extra time driving around traffic. My intolerance for waiting, for quiet, for nothingness is still there and I'm forced to recognize that my iPhone isn't 16 gigabytes' worth of patience: it's 16 GB of distraction.

So I thought the phone was good for my personal failing, but now I think that it's exacerbating it. The serendipitous gaps that used to be part of even the most hectic modern life can now be reduced to near zero. The emotional muscles stretched by those moments of emptiness — the ability to tune into one's self, to tolerate the anxieties that swim up, to even experience a moment of absolutely nothing — are quickly atrophied. We lose the inspirations and innovations that come from quiet, but we also escape uncomfortable, necessary questions that come from there, too. Am I doing meaningful work? Am I living with integrity? Am I happy? We keep them at bay, along with the possibilities that might arise from searching for real answers.

I still use my phone in those moments. And to the outside observer, compulsive smart phone users like me may look like the very picture of calm. With screens to fill our every waking moment, our lack of patience won't be betrayed by tapping feet or chewed nails.

But let's not kid ourselves: filling your time checking your phone doesn't make you more patient on the inside. Patience is a virtue. There's not an app for that.

Alexandra Samuel is the Director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University, and the co-founder of Social Signal, a Vancouver-based social media agency. You can follow Alex on Twitter as awsamuel or her blog at alexandrasamuel.com.

"

“Older workers don’t suffer from the deficiencies that a lot of people think they do.”

This seems like an obvious point, but the discrimination against veterans seems pretty widespread and is, in my view, entirely too stereotyped and dismissive.


“Older workers don’t suffer from the deficiencies that a lot of people think they do.”: "

A study in which “seniors” (those over 50)  were pitted against “juniors” (those under 30) in three different decision-making tasks – risk taking, competitiveness, and cooperation – found that seniors “hold their own.” They’re also more cooperative, contributing more during the cooperation test. The NY Times reports that researchers also found “groups with a mix of ages outperformed homogeneous groups.”

(There are many great ideas in the NY Times series so you should click the second link too.)

The Myth of the Deficient Older Employee | The 9th Annual Year in Ideas | The New York Times | 18 December, 2009

Via Neuroanthropology (where you’re sure to find a link you like in this list of research papers on culture, evolution, the mind, and anthropology.)

"

At Colleges, Humanities Job Outlook Gets Bleaker

The New York Times outlines another reason I'm kinda glad I left academia for the independent school world.


At Colleges, Humanities Job Outlook Gets Bleaker: "Graduate students in languages and literature may face a sharp decline in faculty positions as the recession forces cutbacks in university hiring."