Interesting New York Times article here on the new international campuses that have or soon will be opened by two of New York's most famous schools.
Washington Monthly takes a critical look at The U.S. News & World Report college rankings:
The U.S. News & World Report "relies on crude and easily manipulated measures of wealth, exclusivity, and prestige for its rankings," Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris wrote. The U.S. News' rankings take into account freshmen retention rate, admissions' selectivity, high school counselors' opinions of the school, faculty salary, per-pupil spending and the rate of alumni giving, among other things.They've come up with a system designed to measure how good the college is for the country:
the Monthly ranks schools using three main categories: how many low-income students the college enrolls, how much community and national service a given college's students engage in, and the volume of groundbreaking research the university produces (in part measured by how many undergraduates go on to get PhDs).
For comparison with South Korea, where rankings are done by the Joongang Ilbo with parenthetical information from here:
The JoongAng Ilbo’s evaluation team analyzed documents provided by the ministry of education and universities from across the country. The overall university evaluation is based on four categories: educational conditions and financial resources (technology and number of buildings); globalization (foreign faculty, foreign students, classes taught in English); research and faculty (research papers in academic journals); and reputation and alumni representation in society.
As people complain that college education in American is too expensive, this New York Times article argues that it's still worth it.
The Hamilton Project, a research group in Washington, has just finished a comparison of college with other investments. It found that college tuition in recent decades has delivered an inflation-adjusted annual return of more than 15 percent. For stocks, the historical return is 7 percent. For real estate, it's less than 1 percent.America has the most expensive college education followed by Korea, a very distant second. In Korea, students are protesting pretty loudly about the increasing costs...
In America, certain degrees are worth more than others. Colleges argue that a liberal arts education is a good investment but pretty much everyone in the real world would agree that as an investment you're better off with any of the following:
-Business (Accounting/Finance)
-Computers/IT
-Math/Stats
-Engineering
-Health Sciences
Some people argue that going to college is a waste of time and money until you know what you want to do. If you decide on a certain career (and 18 is often too young to decide) then you see if a college degree is required and you go get the right education.
What do you think about the value of a college education and its value as an investment?
Here's a language sample from a native speaker you may want to study:
I was a History Major. If I had some guidance 20 years ago, I would have taken a different route and probably had a much different, more accelerated career path. Unless you are teaching or looking at a career in academia, what purpose do liberal arts degrees serve? I ended up going back to school 2 times, once for a certificate program in computer programming back before the Y2K boom and then for an MBA. Each was necessary, I felt, because my BA in History wasn't going to take me very far.
We know school rules disallow students from defending themselves against other students. What about teachers? Should they be allowed to defend themselves?
The student who defends himself or herself probably faces a few days off from school as in the Australian bully case. A teacher who was recently cornered by a student, physically and verbally threatened, and threw a nice punch for a 64-year-old art teacher might lose her job. Does she deserve to get fired? Does it matter she was teacher of the year last year? That she has been teaching for 23 years with no trouble?
Did the kid who got punched deserve to get expelled (he didn't get expelled so far as I know but many people think he should be)? Not only did he physically threaten the teacher, but he also called her an "f*cking c*nt" plus other choice terms.
And what about the student who says, "Oh my God, he didn't do anything; you can't punch him in the face." Some people think her attitude is one of the problems in American schools today - kids can do whatever they want, threaten teachers, etc. And teachers should do nothing about it.
What do you think?
I learned about this from a message board where most people said the Cornell professor was behaving just fine and that there's no real problem with reminding college students to be polite. There were also, some people, who thought the prof was "self-important" and should "shut up and get over himself."
What do you think?
Engkey is an English teacher/robot supposedly. As far as I can tell it's only good for correcting pronunciation errors (as students run through memorized conversations) and even then I find it hard to believe it knows "natural pronunciation". But the real issue is that we know Behaviorism and the ALM have severe limitations.
You have to wonder if Choi Mun-taek (the team leader working on these "intelligent" robots) knows his SLA not only because of the robots' behavioristic teaching style but also because he says a robot with a female voice is more effective for teaching than a robot with a male voice. Is that backed up by science or just common sense?
Nevertheless, the Education Ministry wants every kindergarten to have one (8,400) by 2013. They say Engkey can replace native speakers. I say if you're in Kindergarten you don't need a robot or a native English speaker.
New information on a story I linked to in February: Lower Merion School Dsitrict still thinks they have a chance to stay out of trouble:
An attorney for the district declined to comment last night on the Robbinses' latest motion, except to say that a report due in a few weeks will spell out what the district's own investigation has found.From the plaintiff's claims in this story, I see a large settlement in the near future. I don't see how the school district can expect anyone to accept hundreds of pictures taken of kids in their homes in secret. You have to wonder if the camera ever caught a kid getting dressed or something because that would have to mean a lot of trouble."To the extent there is any evidence of misuse of any images, that also will be disclosed," said the attorney, former federal prosecutor Henry E. Hockeimer Jr. "However, at this late stage of our investigation we are not aware of any such evidence."
Most of the list may be pretty tame - there are certainly bigger concerns out there but some of the items are worth discussing:
3. We’re sick of standardized testing and having to “teach to the test.”
4. Kids used to go out and play after school and resolve problems on their own. Now, with computers and TV, they lack the skills to communicate. They don’t know how to get past hurt feelings without telling the teacher and having her fix it.
Apparently one school is facing a lawsuit for spying on students and their families. The school issued laptops to each high school student and allegedly remote activated web cams to see what each student was up to.
It seems a little hard to believe (how could school administrators put themselves in a position where they might see students getting dressed, undressed, etc. ?) but equally hard to invent. Now we've got a class action lawsuit making its way through the system...
t'll be interesting to see what happens to this story!
I think it's kind of funny, but then again, it's not my 4th grade kid that cried after getting made fun of in school because the teacher made him turn his shirt inside out.
Students in my high school had to turn shirts inside out if they were obscene. In this case the kid was wearing a Yankees shirt and the teacher was a Red Sox fan. I guess the Yankees insignia is pretty obscene to a serious Red Sox fan but it's not quite the same...
Interesting article here on Obama's desire to add hours to the school day.
One issue that's not addressed here is how this would impact school sports. When I was in high school, we finished school around 2:30 and then had wrestling practice (in winter anyway) until 5:30. If we had finished school at 3:30, would wrestling have gone to 6:30?
And based on this LOL quote it seems like we're talking about more than one hour:
"I was like, `Wow, are you serious?'" she said. "That's three more hours I won't be able to chill with my friends after school."Her school is part of a 3-year-old state initiative to add 300 hours of school time in nearly two dozen schools.
We have a California teacher who accidentally sent a sex tape to 5th graders and their parents.
We have NYC school teachers being paid to do nothing.
What else have we got?
There are some interesting points in this article. The author argues that the US is not as far behind as we have been led to believe and points out several ways the public has been misled.
However, the author also provides at least some misleading information when comparing the US and South Korea: "South Koreans do have a longer school year, measured in days. But Americans actually spend more time in school. The average U.S. eighth-grader has 1,146 instructional hours a year, compared with 923 hours a year in South Korea."
Before accepting this you might want to know that many Korean high school kids spend a ridiculous amount of time in school - an unhealthy amount of time in school. After the regular school day has ended they go to private institutes or stay in school and study. I often hear stories about students who wake up at 6:00 AM and get home at midnight. I also see high school kids fooling around so it's not all work and no play for everybody...
But my point is that this writer can not be counting the time spent studying after school, either in the school itself or in private institutions or with tutors at home.
Public Forum Debate is one of the three popular forms of academic debate in America and I think probably the best for EFL classes. here's a video from a US high school debate on the following resolution / topic:
Resolved: That eliminating the United States Government budget deficit should be prioritized over increasing domestic spending.
Robert Paxton, until recently an Iowa community college president, resigned over controversy involving a photo of him holding a keg and apparently pouring beer into a young woman's mouth.
So he resigns over the controversy and gets a severance package that officials said was valued at about $400,000. This includes 2 years salary and health care for a while. How many people would resign right now, after having done nothing wrong, if they could get paid for doing nothing the next 2 years?
Intersting article on how US schools are having trouble getting kids to school on the bus because of gas prices. Some are moving to 4 day weeks...
Some people are surprised to learn that many universities in America are called "party schools" but it's true. This article lists the top 20.
Here's a nice story about 3 generations of a family teaching at the same school. What I want to know is how they teach French - good old GT or something else?
Or is it just that I hear more about American news stories? Here's a 40 year old teacher marrying a 16-year-old student in North Carolina.
Some minority students were not given diplomas because people cheered during the graduation ceremony. One of the students brings up an excellent point about not being able control everyone. For example, I don't like Fred so i get a few people to cheer when his name is called and Fred can't get his diploma.
That bothers me, but what bothers me even more are claims that when white students were cheered there was no penalty. 4 black students and 1 hispanic were punished in this school district near Chicago.
A school in Indianapolis actually had police remove parents who cheered for their kids during graduation. It seems a bit crazy to me.
I thought this number, 2/3 of graduates have student loan debt, was pretty shocking. The average is about $19,000 in debt.
The article I linked to recommends consolidating federally backed loans as soon as possible and long before July 1.
For consolidating other loans, they give several useful web sites and remind people that they can consolidate with any lender. They recommend looking beyond a school's list or preferred lenders to all the controversy (lenders paying schools to get on the preferred list).
If you need help paying off student loans, whether it is through a dedicated student loans service or some sort of other debt consolidation for non-homeowners, make sure that you use the Internet as a resource before deciding how to consolidate student loans debts uninformed.
Schools in the US are finding that giving kids laptops to fool around with doesn't make them smarter - it just makes it easier to find porn and practice hacking:
"After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none," said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process."
People are amazed at how expensive college is in America. For example a school I've never heard of, Collins College in Tempe, Arizona is $55,550/year according to scholarship.com.
It seems like you need a scholarship or a student loan just to go to college in the US. In this article on The Game of Life, players choose whether or not to go to college. University doesn't always mean better paying work, but it does mean more job choices.
In Ohio, they realize that some people can't afford a higher education so they are working on a tuition freeze. The schools aren't sure they can make the plan work since tuition covers over half of their operating budget. Take the example of Miami (Ohio):
Miami's already facing a shortfall of between $6 million and $7 million next year, and Hodge said Miami is on the bottom of the beneficiaries of the compact: Less than 18 percent of funding for the Oxford campus comes from the state, university figures show; nearly 70 percent comes from tuition and fees.American culture values a higher education, but public funds don't seem to reflect that culture. Public money just doesn't end up in education like it used to so tuition becomes more and more vital to universities (and that means expensive).It wasn't always this way.
Two decades ago, state support accounted for nearly two-thirds of an Ohio public university's budget, said Eric Fingerhut, chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents. But that support began to erode.
So if college loans are a necessity for most students, what does that say about American culture? How much do we really value higher education?
If students are having sex in class, isn't it safe to say that the teacher isn't doing his/her job? Yet in Louisiana, the kids face felony criminal charges.
I recently heard from an American high school teacher who wishes that his high school wasn't obligated to continue tolerating students until they are 21:
I am a high school teacher. We have a student who: often cuts school, often cuts class, never does any work...I know par for the course in today's society. Here are the kickers of the situation: He is 20 years old, parents live in South America, he lives in an apt near campus (with another horrific student), he has no job, barely speaks English, and according to his academic record he has no possibility of ever graduating from this HS. His stated purpose in coming to school is be "be near the 14 year old girls". He will stay until he is 21 when he is legally obligated to leave.The school administration is well aware of this "kid". It was apparently confirmed recently that he does live in our jurisdiction, and we have to keep him until he turns 21 in the spring. Everyone seems covered legally, it just turns my stomach.
Pamela Rogers, 28 and a former elementary school teacher, spent six months in jail for having sex with a 13-year-old student. Recently, she was arrested again, for allegedly communicating with the boy on MySpace.