Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Tackling literacy is not so simple
Posted on Sep 30, 2011 06:00:41 PM
Literacy among the adult population needs dicussing, and the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) is pleased that The Guardian is highlighting the issue.
A recent NIACE inquiry into adult literacy found that those with the poorest literacy skills have been helped least over the past 10 years, and that we need a range of ways to help them improve their skills.
But it is important not to reduce a complex issue to a simple problem that can be easily fixed. People with poor literacy need to be taught by qualified and experienced teachers. Of course they can be supported by union learning reps and other champions. They can be helped by peers, friends and families.
But it is highly unlikely that someone who is illiterate will learn to read by using a paperback book for a couple of hours a week, one-on-one, in six months or less. Would you want your children taught in that way?
Tackling literacy is not simple. It needs ongoing investment, creativity and commitment. There is
still a huge amount of work to do in schools, in post-16 education, and with adults, many of whom are in the workplace.
Westfield is to be applauded, along with many other employers, for the steps they have taken. As should the publishing industry for the pioneering work it has done through the quick reads initiative.
There is a big role here for parents and carers too, as research shows that a child’s achievement is influenced more by parental involvement in learning than any other factor.
Adults are very rarely illiterate, but at least one-in-five need help to develop their confidence in reading, writing and speaking.
This requires a range of approaches – not least to attract those who hated school and dread the thought of going back to learning.
We need to work together to offer a range of the right opportunities for adults to gain the confidence they need to succeed and to encourage their children to do the same.
We owe it to those we have, collectively as a society, let down so badly to give them the best learning experience we possibly can.
Automotive Future is Tied to iPhones
Posted on May 11, 2011 06:52:18 PM
The iPhone is arguably the most popular device of its kind. People line up for days in advance just to get the next generation of the slick touchscreen mobile device. With such a rabid following from the general public, car manufacturers would have to be clinically insane not to consider incorporating it into automobiles along with affordable rates for auto insurance Ontario somehow. Oh wait! They already have!
Yes, most cars today have the ability to connect directly to your iPhone in order to play your songs or answer your phones calls via Bluetooth. But, the way the iPhone is being integrated into cars is moving beyond this. Consider the Chevrolet Cruze, the General’s new global compact sedan. The marketing strategy for the handsome car has not been so much about the merits of the car itself, but leaning more towards how the owner can interact with it through the iPhone. There is a Chevy Cruze app available that can do anything from unlock the cars doors and start it remotely to checking tire pressure and engine fluid levels. Yes, its very cool.
At the higher end of the automotive spectrum, Hyundai’s all new large luxury sedan, the Equus, uses an iPad as part of the buying experience, providing a leather-clad iPad that contains an interactive multimedia owner’s manual. It also provides the added functionality of Chevy Cruze app in addition to scheduling maintenance appointments with your local dealer.
The hunger for technology drives various markets to do new, outstanding things to entice consumers to spend their money with them. The automotive industry is no different. Do not be surprised if, in another 5 to 10 years, you get an iPhone with your new car instead of a key or an iPad installed in the dashboard where the radio should be.
The Law is Generous to Students with Learning Disabilities
Posted on Dec 15, 2010 04:45:59 PM
If anyone wants information on special education, they should probably have a chat with my friend Teresa, who with her 18-year-old son Matthew, has probably seen more of the world of special education resources than anyone else – offices, counselors, the rule books, the ins and outs. Her son, when he was born, had congenital orthopedic developmental problems and some urological deficiencies as well. When he was in elementary school, new problems seemed to surface each day. They were able to put a name to a couple: he had ADHD, and he had terrible dyslexia. And Matthew’s mother soldiered through the whole process, battling the system, trying every possible way to bring the boy every kind of therapy that would help him with a fair chance in life. What she discovered was that as well as it was that students with learning disabilities had the right of subsidized or free services in the public school system to help with their situation, those services aren’t ever handed to a child on a platter. They are always hard-won. If you don’t have the resources you need to send your child to a private school, you do need to be as pushy and as wily as Teresa had to be.
The thing is, Teresa’s struggles aren’t the exception: they are the rule. When parents of students with learning disabilities finally make it out of the woods after 12 years of struggling with the public education system, they feel they’ve really achieved something – like they just succeeded in wringing blood out of a stone. More than 5% of all school children in this country, millions actually, wait on the public education system for help with special education needs. And the government spends thousands of dollars for each child each year. They know that if they don’t, society will be burdened with far more in the end.
The responsibility of the federal government in helping students with learning disabilities is laid out in The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the theme it works on is a pretty inspiring one – every child with learning disabilities in the nation is to be granted an education that is appropriate, and is to be granted that in an environment of the greatest freedom possible. The law doesn’t make it the responsibility of the system to find out what best suits your child though – it is up to you to find out which among the resources available to your child, would work the best.
The very first step you need to take in all of this is to really understand what rights you have, and what services you have a right to demand. Those rights and services happen to be pretty far-reaching. For instance, you can demand that the school system prescribe a free learning disability evaluation for your child; and you can demand a reevaluation anytime you want. And when the results come, according to the law, you the parent are an important part of the team that decides on the direction your child’s education will take – you, along with a special education instructor, a representative of the school district, a teacher of your child’s, and a school administrator. The law not only makes sure that nothing is thrust upon you, it states that you have an absolute right to demand a custom-made plan for your child, that is formed in consultation with an expert. For students with learning disabilities – you could ask for occupational therapy, speech therapy or even a full time personal nurse in the classroom for your child – you have the right, if you can demonstrate to them that valid medical opinion requires it.
More often than not, either willfully or out of ignorance, the school district will assert that you do not have the right to lots of these services. You’ll need to download and print out a copy of the law if you wish to go and speak to them about demanding a new service for your child. They might argue that he only needs occupational therapy twice a week, and you would prefer four times. If you see that your child isn’t progressing on the experts’ plan as well as they hoped, you have the rights to right away demand a reevaluation of the whole arrangement. As much as the school district has experts on the law, they don’t really care for your child as much as you do. If you read up on the law as much as they need to, there’s really no questioning your authority. You’d know what was best for your child.
Types of Affordable Online Business Degrees
Posted on Jul 15, 2010 03:23:12 PM
There are many types of affordable degrees available online. These range from associate through to PhD programs in all aspects of business. Among of them, online college degree is one of the most popular degrees online. These include:
* Online Degree in Accounting: This affordable online degree is designed to develop in students skills of effective analysis, technical accounting management and their applications. This degree can be earned in 12-24 months depending on if students chose the accelerated of regular program. Access to classes are available 24 hours per day where students can study and post classwork.
* Online Degree in Business Administration: Business administration covers all aspects of operating a business. During the online degree programs in business administration, students gains the skills of good project management, critical thinking and leadership and how best to employ them in real life situations. At levels such as the bachelor’s and higher they are afforded the opportunity to specialize in areas such as accounting, business management, finance, marketing or human resource management.
* Online Degree in Economics: Online economic students have the unique opportunity of gaining an understanding of economic policies with direct access to economic modules from different regions. This is because, online economic studies attract students from all over the world who then pool their ideas and study different economic modules and approaches. The course work features subject areas such as finance, strategic planning, accounts, macro and microeconomics.
* Online Degree in Human Resource Management: Online degrees in human resource management instill in students the importance of a sound relationship between employer and their employees. It focuses on issues that affect organizations such as labor relations, worker compensation, training, employee assessment and safety. Human resource management students also learn skills of dispute resolution that often prove vital in resolving many of the issues that develop between the general workforce and management.
How To Learn And Have Fun (At The Same Time)
Posted on Jun 8, 2010 02:43:00 PM
For some unknown reason, tutors love giving endless exam materials for us poor students to learn in a short period of time.
Being sure that I am the most talented student ever, I used to think that if I read the whole material once (without bothering myself too much) I would do great on the exam.
So, before an exam I would just open my books, turn on my favorite music, put a bar of chocolate by my side and started reading. The time I spent reading was very useful, because I managed to make a few important phone calls, thought of what I was going to wear the next day and analyzed the past week.
Somehow this proved to be wrong, because at the exam I found myself unable to remember a single word from what I was supposed to learn. So I realized that my perfect learning concept was not that perfect after all.
Being the most talented student ever, I decided to find out what was the problem and moreover, how to solve it.
I thought I read the material, but in fact, my eyes ran over it, while my mind was busy with completely different stuff. This is not a thing to do. When reading something, you should think of what you read. Text is not just a string of words somehow connected to one another. Those words have a particular meaning, which is sometimes quite difficult to understand.
I developed my own technique of reading and understanding things. I first try to understand what the author meant by a certain sentence. Then I try to connect that idea to my life. It makes it more clear, and it’s also a great memorizing technique. When you link some information to your own experiences, you are sure to remember it.
Another good way for me to understand and remember things is by imagining what I read in colorful images– sometimes I even make up whole stories of what I learn.
Snow Day Productivity
Posted on Jun 7, 2010 10:02:52 AM
Sometimes you have to just give up on getting any real work done. This was excruciatingly true yesterday and today, when Seattle had some “snow days,” (I use the term loosely). Seattle is a city with little or no annual snowfall, which means there’s not much by way of snow removal equipment. Also, Seattle is basically a collection of hills all lumped together. Not as bad as San Francisco, but it’s not like driving through snow in the flatlands of Kansas, either. All of which means that a few pathetic inches of frozen white stuff shuts the whole damn city down.
This is what happens: We get a few inches of snow, which is slush by late afternoon. Nighttime comes around 3:30 p.m. (oh how I wish I were exaggerating), the temperature drops, the slush freezes, and the whole city is one giant hilly ice rink. Most Seattleites are transplants from California, like me, and can’t drive for s**t on anything but freeways (Southern Calif., not me) or foggy country roads (Northern Calif., me). Although, I’d like to see anyone try to drive up the steep hill I live on when it’s covered with a solid inch of ice.
My husband and I like to drink our morning caffeine on snow days while standing by the front windows, watching car after car attempt to make it up our hill. They always give up and have to try to look cool (and like they know what they’re doing) while trying to back—braking—down an icy hill. It’s never pretty, and that’s why we park our cars around the corner where no inept, ice-driving chuckleheads will smack into them as they slide back down the hill.
A snow day in Seattle also tends to mean that the icy roads have hosed the school bus routes. Which means delayed or non-existent school days. And while I do love to spend the day trapped inside with my offspring, I don’t get any work done. About mid-morning yesterday I started to get that panicky, today-is-going-to-be-a-complete-waste feeling. That particular flavor of panic always makes me cranky. I dislike an unproductive day. I tried to work, but it’s hard to finish a thought (intelligent or otherwise) when tiny humans are asking you a seemingly infinite number of questions.
I was this close to snapping and turning into the fire-breathing version of myself when I remembered the post Gear Fire had up the other day about implementing a Task Kill Day. It’s the holiday season, so I have an a**load of tasks to kill. I took a deep breath, gave up on the idea of getting any real work done, and told the kids it was Getting Stuff Done Day. They are 7 and almost-3, so they didn’t really have any tasks to kill other than some artwork and bouncy-ball testing. But because I wasn’t sitting in one place and trying to have long, involved higher thoughts and was instead running around the house being super busy and kicking task ass, they mostly did their own stuff and left me alone.
I crossed several items off of my To Do List that were causing me more peripheral stress than I had thought; when I took stock of how much I’d gotten done, I saw several dark Eeyore clouds lift.
My point is this: if your day is suddenly not going in the preferred productive direction, sometimes redirecting your Unplanned Non-Work Day into a Task-List Demolishing Day can make you feel better and save you time later on. And you’ll be saving others from the cranky version of you, which people always appreciate.
Adult Scholarships explained in brief
Posted on Jun 7, 2010 10:02:15 AM
There is no age limit for education. So if you are an adult wanting to return to education there are many adult education centers available for your help. There can be numerous reasons for not pursuing education at the right age. While it can be frustrating at a later stage, you can easily do away with that frustration with adult education. However, not everyone is financially sound enough to fund for their education. This is where Adults Scholarships can be of great help. But you do need to qualify for a particular scholarship before you can start taking its advantage. Details such as your previous qualifications, the subjects that you want to pursue etc are required to be registered in order to become eligible for an adult scholarship. The internet can be your best resource while looking for adult scholarships. You can always look for scholarship information online and register for them. You will be automatically informed once you qualify for a specific scholarship.
Play Doh-Smeared Credentials
Posted on Jun 5, 2010 10:03:03 AM
While I understand the need every parent has—on a weird, biological level—to do as much for their child as is feasible in order that said kid’s life path can be as smooth and highly elevated as is everly possible, I have never been able to be anywhere near fine with the insane pressure and bizarre hoop-jumping some parents put their kids through.
Succeeding in life is super great, don’t get me wrong. Going to college for the sake of the education and the life experience is not something that can be duplicated. I’m pro-success and pro-college, absolutely. But I really (a whole damn lot) can’t fathom how working your ass off from preschool on through grad school to be in the top 5% of your cohort for any and all school and extra-curricular activities is either necessary or healthy. Plus, it can’t be all that fun.
Is it peculiar and freakish that I lump “success” and “happy” in the same pile? Perhaps. I love my kiddos, and I really do believe the high-pressure helicopter parents love their kiddos, too. We have different ways of showing it, however. I have some grandparental units who showed their love for me, for the first 25 years of my life, in ways similar to the hyper parents of today; they wished me every success, including unfounded dreams of sending me off to medical school because that’s what they had done and that’s where all of their friends’ grandkids were obediently marching off to (like cranky little lemmings, I might add).
My grandparents’ way was to coddle, protect, pressure and prepare me for the future until I was incapable of getting their lecturely tones out of my head. For the most part I’ve let it all go and have moved past the self-doubt and the second-guessing and the perfectionist tendencies I harbor. I put a lot less pressure on myself and I don’t intend ever to crush the souls of my own progeny, turning them into miserable beings, incapable of happiness or contentment. (It’s conceivable that I haven’t moved on entirely.)
My way is to support my kids and the choices they make, and to make sure they have a rich, well-rounded education, both in the classroom and at home. My main goal is to have happy kids. I honestly don’t care where or if they go to college, and whether they go right after high school or never. That sounds incredibly slackerly of me, I realize, but there it is.
The older I get (I just turned 35) the more I realize how hard it is to be a content and beatific adult. I’m happy, but only after letting go and unclenching a little. I’m fine with giving my kids an education (one where they are not expected to kick everyone else’s ass) and following their lead as to where they want to go in life. In this day and age, that’s a pretty revolutionary statement. I’m supposing people will respond with, “That crazy b**ch is going to let her kids do what they want with their lives!”
Anyway, this spew was brought on by Eduwonkette’s guest blogger, Hilary Levey. She’s a PhD candidate at Princeton, and wrote her dissertation on the whole high-pressure parent phenomenon, specifically the credentials those parents expect, want, and need their kids to acquire and achieve. The post is basically a summary of her dissertation, “Playing to Win: Childhood, Competition, and Credentials Bottlenecks.”
It’s a great article, and in it Levey does such an excellent job of explaining what the motivation is behind these insanely gung-ho parents, that I was able to open my mind up a smidgen more and maybe, a teensy bit, see the parents’ point. However, as much as I’d love to read the actual dissertation and all of her research (because her papers and her research sound fascinating), I think it would either enrage me or curl me into a ball that I wouldn’t want to come out of for a few days.
More With the Education, Less With the Simulation
Posted on Jun 1, 2010 10:03:28 AM
It sucks that there is poverty in the world, and there’s something to be said for promoting poverty awareness, but I’m not sure Princeton and Dartmouth are going about it in the most effective way. It’s probably possible to educate people about poverty, but I don’t think there’s a feasible way to simulate the true poverty experience for college kids.
College kids are often lacking in disposable income, yes, but if they were actually living anywhere near enough to the edge to be capable of looking starvation in the eye, they would have bigger things to worry about than midterms and research topics and they would not currently be working to cross “College Degree” off of their To Do lists.
Dartmouth recently hosted the “Two Dollar-a-Day Challenge” and Princeton will host their own Princeton Poverty Simulation on Saturday, Nov. 22nd. Again, it’s excellent to be making people aware of how this lifetime is going down for a large portion of the human population, but I’m not on board with the attempt to simulate anything.
Nina Shield at IvyGate nails it superbly with this:
We had something like this once a year in elementary school gym class. It was called TRAFFIC and we all wheeled around on scooters and if we sped or veered off the roads or ran through the stop sign we were sent to traffic-jail, and when we went through the car wash Mr. Hennessey spritzed us with water. It was exactly like real driving.
Superlative Advice For Potential Grad Students
Posted on Apr 7, 2010 10:04:16 AM
The Johnsen Biology Lab at Duke University has this gorgeously honest warning/disclaimer/nugget of wisdom posted on their website.
We currently have room in the lab for more graduate students. Before you apply to this lab or any other, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, be realistic about graduate school. Graduate school in biology is not a sure path to success. Many students assume that they will eventually get a job just like their advisor’s. However, the average professor at a research university has three students at a time for about 5 years each. So, over a career of 30 years, this professor has about 18 students. Since the total number of positions has been pretty constant, these 18 people are competing for one spot. So go to grad school assuming that you might not end up at a research university, but instead a teaching college, or a government or industry job. All of these are great jobs, but it’s important to think of all this before you go to school.
Second, choose your advisor wisely. Not only does this person potentially have total control over your graduate career for five or more years, but he/she will also be writing recommendation letters for you for another 5-10 years after that. Also, your advisor will shadow you for the rest of your life. People will always think of you as so-and-so’s student and assume that you two are somewhat alike. Finally, in many ways you will turn into your advisor. Advisors teach very little, but instead provide a role model. Consciously and unconsciously, you will imitate your advisor. You may find this hard to believe now, but fifteen years from now, when you find yourself lining up the tools in your lab cabinets just like your advisor did, you’ll see. My student Alison once said that choosing an advisor is like choosing a spouse after one date. Find out all you can on this date.
Finally, have your fun now. Five years is a long time when you are 23 years old. By the end of graduate school, you will be older, slower, and possibly married and/or a parent. So if you always wanted to walk across Nepal, do it now. Also, do not go to a high-powered lab that you hate assuming that this will promise you long-term happiness. Deferred gratification has its limits. Do something that you have passion for, work in a lab you like, in a place you like, before life starts throwing its many curve balls. Your career will mostly take care of itself, but you can’t get your youth back.
If, after reading this, you want to apply to this lab, we would love to hear from you.
It also works for explaining to the young(ers) about life and how it’s hard for a while and then you kick it (and by “it” I mean the bucket, not relaxing on the couch), so it behooves us all to figure out how to be happy sooner rather than later.