#nonacademic education

[trendynewsnow]

The Essence of Japanese Education: Lessons from School Performances

What a School Performance Reveals About Japanese Education By Ema Ryan Yamazaki What truly defines the essence of being “Japanese”? For me, the answer lies in the invaluable lessons we learn during our formative years in elementary school. From as young as six, children in Japan are entrusted with responsibilities that foster a sense of community; they are tasked with cleaning their own…

[thundercrack]

Study of Elite College Admissions Data Suggests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qualification

By Aatish Bhatia, Claire Cain Miller and Josh Katz July 24, 2023 (full text under the cut)

Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.

A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed résumés, and applied at a higher rate — but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in.

The study — by Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard who study inequality — quantifies for the first time the extent to which being very rich is its own qualification in selective college admissions.

The analysis is based on federal records of college attendance and parental income taxes for nearly all college students from 1999 to 2015, and standardized test scores from 2001 to 2015. It focuses on the eight Ivy League universities, as well as Stanford, Duke, M.I.T. and the University of Chicago. It adds an extraordinary new data set: the detailed, anonymized internal admissions assessments of at least three of the 12 colleges, covering half a million applicants. (The researchers did not name the colleges that shared data or specify how many did because they promised them anonymity.)

The new data shows that among students with the same test scores, the colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and to recruited athletes, and gave children from private schools higher nonacademic ratings. The result is the clearest picture yet of how America’s elite colleges perpetuate the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity.

“What I conclude from this study is the Ivy League doesn’t have low-income students because it doesn’t want low-income students,” said Susan Dynarski, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has reviewed the data and was not involved in the study.

In effect, the study shows, these policies amounted to affirmative action for the children of the 1 percent, whose parents earn more than $611,000 a year. It comes as colleges are being forced to rethink their admissions processes after the Supreme Court ruling that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional.

“Are these highly selective private colleges in America taking kids from very high-income, influential families and basically channeling them to remain at the top in the next generation?” said Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard who directs Opportunity Insights, and an author of the paper with John N. Friedman of Brown and David J. Deming of Harvard. “Flipping that question on its head, could we potentially diversify who’s in a position of leadership in our society by changing who is admitted?”

Representatives from several of the colleges said that income diversity was an urgent priority, and that they had taken significant steps since 2015, when the data in the study ends, to admit lower-income and first-generation students. These include making tuition free for families earning under a certain amount; giving only grants, not loans, in financial aid; and actively recruiting students from disadvantaged high schools.

“We believe that talent exists in every sector of the American income distribution,” said Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton. “I am proud of what we have done to increase socioeconomic diversity at Princeton, but I also believe that we need to do more — and we will do more.”

Affirmative action for the rich

In a concurring opinion in the affirmative action case, Justice Neil Gorsuch addressed the practice of favoring the children of alumni and donors, which is also the subject of a new case. “While race-neutral on their face, too, these preferences undoubtedly benefit white and wealthy applicants the most,” he wrote.

The new paper did not include admissions rates by race because previous research had done so, the researchers said. They found that racial differences were not driving the results. When looking only at applicants of one race, for example, those from the highest-income families still had an advantage. Yet the top 1 percent is overwhelmingly white. Some analysts have proposed diversifying by class as a way to achieve more racial diversity without affirmative action.

The new data showed that other selective private colleges, like Northwestern, N.Y.U. and Notre Dame, had a similarly disproportionate share of children from rich families. Public flagship universities were much more equitable. At places like the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia, applicants with high-income parents were no more likely to be admitted than lower-income applicants with comparable scores.

Less than 1 percent of American college students attend the 12 elite colleges. But the group plays an outsize role in American society: 12 percent of Fortune 500 chief executives and a quarter of U.S. senators attended. So did 13 percent of the top 0.1 percent of earners. The focus on these colleges is warranted, the researchers say, because they provide paths to power and influence — and diversifying who attends has the potential to change who makes decisions in America.

The researchers did a novel analysis to measure whether attending one of these colleges causes success later in life. They compared students who were wait-listed and got in, with those who didn’t and attended another college instead. Consistent with previous research, they found that attending an Ivy instead of one of the top nine public flagships did not meaningfully increase graduates’ income, on average. However, it did increase a student’s predicted chance of earning in the top 1 percent to 19 percent, from 12 percent.

For outcomes other than earnings, the effect was even larger — it nearly doubled the estimated chance of attending a top graduate school, and tripled the estimated chance of working at firms that are considered prestigious, like national news organizations and research hospitals.

“Sure, it’s a tiny slice of schools,” said Professor Dynarski, who has studied college admissions and worked with the University of Michigan on increasing the attendance of low-income students, and has occasionally contributed to The New York Times. “But having representation is important, and this shows how much of a difference the Ivies make: The political elite, the economic elite, the intellectual elite are coming out of these schools.”

The missing middle class

The advantage to rich applicants varied by college, the study found: At Dartmouth, students from the top 0.1 percent were five times as likely to attend as the average applicant with the same test score, while at M.I.T. they were no more likely to attend. (The fact that children from higher-income families tend to have higher standardized test scores and are likelier to receive private coaching suggests that the study may actually underestimate their admissions advantage.)

An applicant with a high test score from a family earning less than $68,000 a year was also likelier than the average applicant to get in, though there were fewer applicants like this.

Children from middle- and upper-middle-class families — including those at public high schools in high-income neighborhoods — applied in large numbers. But they were, on an individual basis, less likely to be admitted than the richest or, to a lesser extent, poorest students with the same test scores. In that sense, the data confirms the feeling among many merely affluent parents that getting their children into elite colleges is increasingly difficult.

“We had these very skewed distributions of a whole lot of Pell kids and a whole lot of no-need kids, and the middle went missing,” said an Ivy League dean of admissions, who has seen the new data and spoke anonymously in order to talk openly about the process. “You’re not going to win a P.R. battle by saying you have X number of families making over $200,000 that qualify for financial aid.”

The researchers could see, for nearly all college students in the United States from 1999 to 2015, where they applied and attended, their SAT or ACT scores and whether they received a Pell grant for low-income students. They could also see their parents’ income tax records, which enabled them to analyze attendance by earnings in more detail than any previous research. They conducted the analysis using anonymized data.

For the several elite colleges that also shared internal admissions data, they could see other aspects of students’ applications between 2001 and 2015, including how admissions offices rated them. They focused their analysis on the most recent years, 2011 to 2015.

Though they had this data for a minority of the dozen top colleges, the researchers said they thought it was representative of the other colleges in the group (with the exception of M.I.T.). The other colleges admitted more students from high-income families, showed preferences for legacies and recruited athletes, and described similar admissions practices in conversations with the researchers, they said.

“Nobody has this kind of data; it’s completely unheard-of,” said Michael Bastedo, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Education, who has done prominent research on college admissions. “I think it’s really important to good faith efforts for reforming the system to start by being able to look honestly and candidly at the data.”

How the richest students benefit

Before this study, it was clear that colleges enrolled more rich students, but it was not known whether it was just because more applied. The new study showed that’s part of it: One-third of the difference in attendance rates was because middle-class students were somewhat less likely to apply or matriculate. But the bigger factor was that these colleges were more likely to accept the richest applicants.

Legacy admissions

The largest advantage for the 1 percent was the preference for legacies. The study showed — for the first time at this scale — that legacies were more qualified overall than the average applicant. But even when comparing applicants who were similar in every other way, legacies still had an advantage.

When high-income applicants applied to the college their parents attended, they were accepted at much higher rates than other applicants with similar qualifications — but at the other top-dozen colleges, they were no more likely to get in.

“This is not a sideshow, not just a symbolic issue,” Professor Bastedo said of the finding.

Athletes

One in eight admitted students from the top 1 percent was a recruited athlete. For the bottom 60 percent, that figure was one in 20. That’s largely because children from rich families are more likely to play sports, especially more exclusive sports played at certain colleges, like rowing and fencing. The study estimated that athletes were admitted at four times the rate of nonathletes with the same qualifications.

“There’s a common misperception that it’s about basketball and football and low-income kids making their way into selective colleges,” Professor Bastedo said. “But the enrollment leaders know athletes tend to be wealthier, so it’s a win-win.”

Nonacademic ratings

There was a third factor driving the preference for the richest applicants. The colleges in the study generally give applicants numerical scores for academic achievement and for more subjective nonacademic virtues, like extracurricular activities, volunteering and personality traits. Students from the top 1 percent with the same test scores did not have higher academic ratings. But they had significantly higher nonacademic ratings.

At one of the colleges that shared admissions data, students from the top 0.1 percent were 1.5 times as likely to have high nonacademic ratings as those from the middle class. The researchers said that, accounting for differences in the way each school assesses nonacademic credentials, they found similar patterns at the other colleges that shared data.

The biggest contributor was that admissions committees gave higher scores to students from private, nonreligious high schools. They were twice as likely to be admitted as similar students — those with the same SAT scores, race, gender and parental income — from public schools in high-income neighborhoods. A major factor was recommendations from guidance counselors and teachers at private high schools.

“Parents rattle off that a kid got in because he was first chair in the orchestra, ran track,” said John Morganelli Jr., a former director of admissions at Cornell and founder of Ivy League Admissions, where he advises high school students on applying to college. “They never say what really happens: Did the guidance counselor advocate on that kid’s behalf?”

Recommendation letters from private school counselors are notoriously flowery, he said, and the counselors call admissions officers about certain students.

“This is how the feeder schools get created,” he said. “Nobody’s calling on behalf of a middle- or lower-income student. Most of the public school counselors don’t even know these calls exist.”

The end of need-blind admissions?

Overall, the study suggests, if elite colleges had done away with the preferences for legacies, athletes and private school students, the children of the top 1 percent would have made up 10 percent of a class, down from 16 percent in the years of the study.

Legacy students, athletes and private school students do no better after college, in terms of earnings or reaching a top graduate school or firm, it found. In fact, they generally do somewhat worse.

The dean of admissions who spoke anonymously said change was easier said than done: “I would say there’s much more commitment to this than may be obvious. It’s just the solution is really complicated, and if we could have done it, we would have.”

For example, it’s not feasible to choose athletes from across the income spectrum if many college sports are played almost entirely by children from high-earning families. Legacies are perhaps the most complicated, the admissions dean said, because they tend to be highly qualified and their admission is important for maintaining strong ties with alumni.

Ending that preference, the person said, “is not an easy decision to make, given the alumni response, especially if you’re not in immediate concurrence with the rest of the Ivies.” (Though children of very large donors also get special consideration by admissions offices, they were not included in the analysis because there are relatively few of them.)

People involved in admissions say that achieving more economic diversity would be difficult without doing something else: ending need-blind admissions, the practice that prevents admissions officers from seeing families’ financial information so their ability to pay is not a factor. Some colleges are already doing what they call “need-affirmative admissions,” for the purpose of selecting more students from the low end of the income spectrum, though they often don’t publicly acknowledge it for fear of blowback.

There is a tool, Landscape from the College Board, to help determine if an applicant grew up in a neighborhood with significant privilege or adversity. But these colleges have no knowledge of parents’ income if students don’t apply for financial aid.

Ivy League colleges and their peers have recently made significant efforts to recruit more low-income students and subsidize tuition. Several now make attendance entirely free for families below a certain income — $100,000 at Stanford and Princeton, $85,000 at Harvard, and $60,000 at Brown.

At Princeton, one-fifth of students are now from low-income families, and one-fourth receive a full ride. It has recently reinstated a transfer program to recruit low-income and community college students. At Harvard, one-fourth of this fall’s freshman class is from families with incomes less than $85,000, who will pay nothing. The majority of freshmen will receive some amount of aid.

Dartmouth just raised $500 million to expand financial aid: “While we respect the work of Harvard’s Opportunity Insights, we believe our commitment to these investments and our admissions policies since 2015 tells an important story about the socioeconomic diversity among Dartmouth students,” said Jana Barnello, a spokeswoman.

Public flagships do admissions differently, in a way that ends up benefiting rich students less. The University of California schools forbid giving preference to legacies or donors, and some, like U.C.L.A., do not consider letters of recommendation. The application asks for family income, and colleges get detailed information about California high schools. Application readers are trained to consider students’ circumstances, like whether they worked to support their families in high school, as “evidence of maturity, determination and insight.”

The University of California system also partners with schools in the state, from pre-K through community college, to support students who face barriers. There’s a robust program for transfer students from California community colleges; at U.C.L.A., half are from low-income backgrounds.

M.I.T., which stands out among elite private schools as displaying almost no preference for rich students, has never given a preference to legacy applicants, said its dean of admissions, Stuart Schmill. It does recruit athletes, but they do not receive any preference or go through a separate admissions process (as much as it may frustrate coaches, he said).

“I think the most important thing here is talent is distributed equally but opportunity is not, and our admissions process is designed to account for the different opportunities students have based on their income,” he said. “It’s really incumbent upon our process to tease out the difference between talent and privilege.”

Source: Raj Chetty, David J. Deming and John N. Friedman, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges”

[luxe-pauvre]

Literature is not written for academic readers and is not read exclusively by them, yet most academic accounts of literary texts seem to tacitly assume as much. This is puzzling given that one of the most powerful justifications for the academic study of literature is that the entire human species cares enormously about telling and being told stories. But what would it mean for literary scholarship to speak to the experiences of nonacademic readers? The first step needs to be to notice, listen and learn from them. Alongside “traditionally educated middle-class men gone astray,” who Kurzke sees as the “best readers” of The Magic Mountain, I would like to place many others—not least of all self-conscious young women with budding academic aspirations who are made to feel that they are living in a culturally marginal place. The point, really, is that there are no best readers; there are just readers attuned to different aspects of the text, though some are listened to more than others. 

Karolina Watroba, The Anxiety of Difficulty

[granulesofsand]

Educational

I don’t know where Legion gets most of their statistics, but I do think it’s important to know the difference between a person in the role of an educator and a person just existing. In our time, most people we hear using quotes and statistics do so for communication. The point is to call attention to a piece of information, not to be accurate.

In academia, we expect people to be giving truthful and reliable information, which includes the statistics and direct quotes given. New information is peer-reviewed and held up to standards in the field.

Not every piece of media is created to be academic. Even nonacademic media can be brought into academic fields, and there are a few accepted means of doing this.

I’ve not been under the impression that the Legion’s content is primarily educational. When it is, they are still largely sharing their own lived experience and opinions. You could absolutely cite Legion on any experiential topic, and you could also cite disprovable data with the same risk as always; if they’re wrong, so are you. Many survivors have a social media presence without attempting to be academically educational.

The primary complaint we hear about Legion’s content is directed to their document, ‘The Alpha to Omega of Torture Based Mind Control’. This follows the same rules as any other text, and there are pieces that cannot serve as reliable citations in academic contexts. The majority of what’s written is a recategorization according to Legion’s own experience, which I believe was intended to replace an external list of similar terms that had been overwritten on the original site.

I like it. I find it beneficial to move away from the Greek letter programs aliases we were using, as those were taken from a document that was even more unreliable (and that also had usable information), titled ‘How the Illuminati Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave’. Having alternative names for programs keeps survivors from having to disclose the perp-given designations of their own programs, or having to describe what a program does.

We agree that Legion should be using Content Warnings appropriate for the material they share, but that in itself does not make them unreliable as much as it does inconsiderate. Letting others know that content creators might be triggering is different from telling everyone to stay away, and consuming content you cannot prove is not bad so long as you understand when you can or can’t cite it as a source.

We don’t use any statistic we can’t find in an academic text or by computing it ourselves (with a calculator or academically reliable program, we’re awful at math). We don’t encourage any to behave differently. And. We do cite anything and everything we find relevant, because sometimes that makes sense.

Just like you can cite a bag of chips in some academic writings, there are times where you can cite people; it shows what a population might believe, what was happening during a period, how ideas have evolved up to and from that point. Does that make sense? We would feel comfortable citing Legion for a paper (with permission), but not for their peer-reviewed academic opinions (because they don’t have them atm).

Still, no one has to interact with Legion or any other who makes them uncomfortable. It’s just important to me that we know which data we can use where, and not marking any source as all good or all bad. Even the most inaccurate information has pieces we can use, and people are more that just provable information.

(If you are Legion or have friendly contact with them, feel free to ask this be removed. We don’t love making targeted posts, especially with negative outlook, and we will take it down. Couldn’t reach them ourselves if this section is still here.)

[kontextmaschine]

Analysis of the growing share of nonacademic administrative roles in American higher education with reference to the way college towns are the only economically coherent small town experiences left in America, that providing middle-class clerkdom roles is now one of the university's social functions

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Eliot A. Cohen

Published: Dec 23, 2023

Like many alumni of Harvard, I have been following the misadventures of President Claudine Gay—first her coolly calibrated reflections on arguments for the genocide of Jews, and now accusations about the intellectual integrity of her published work—with appalled fascination. It is the latter topic on which I can claim some expertise.

I learned about plagiarism at Harvard by an accident of academic politics. The department of government, where I had received my Ph.D., had an opening for an assistant professor in the field of international affairs, and it had (in the department’s opinion) two equally attractive candidates. With Solomonic wisdom, they divided the position in half, offering me and my competitor half-time administrative positions. Mine was as the Allston Burr Senior Tutor in Quincy House.

The Harvard houses are modified versions of Oxford or Cambridge colleges. They are residences but not dormitories. Associated with each house was a group of faculty and visiting fellows who regularly dined and spoke there, and who helped constitute each house’s Senior Common Room. There was a staff of resident tutors, mainly graduate students, who taught sections of major courses and advised students in a variety of ways. And then there were the master and the senior tutor, also resident. The former presided over the collective life of the house; the latter was responsible for the students as individuals.

I should note here that the term senior tutor connoted a function that was chiefly educational. Harvard now calls them resident deans, because they came to do everything but educate, including directing students to mental-health resources and responding to the varied crises of a student’s life in the pressure cooker that is the college.. Harvard dropped the term master in 2016 because it reeked of the antebellumplantation. (Oddly enough, this compunction has not prevented Harvard from continuing to offer master’s degrees, for which it charges very healthy tuition.)

Harvard then took plagiarism seriously—and in one way still does, disciplining dozens of students every year for this gravest of academic sins. Even transgressions falling short of plagiarism could still constitute “misuse of sources,” for which a year’s probation and suspension from participation in extracurricular activities were the usual response. Plagiarists, meanwhile—those who had lifted someone else’s language without quotation marks or citation—were bounced from the college for a year, during which time they were required to work at a nonacademic job (no year-long backpacking trip) and refrain from visiting Cambridge. They would be readmitted after submitting a statement that examined their original misdeed and reflected on it.

The senior tutor was the one who received any initial complaint from a faculty member, some of whom were (or feigned to be) shocked when they learned that plagiarism could have material consequences. They would assemble the dossier, counsel the student, and present the case to the administrative board, composed of all the senior tutors and a few faculty and deans, about 20 people in all. The senior tutor would present the student’s case to his or her colleagues, and we would deliberate.

If the board voted to rusticate the offender, the student could make a personal appeal, which was surprisingly rare. After long conversations with their senior tutor, most of the students understood that they had gone seriously astray, and left with a feeling of, if not relief, then of catharsis. They could return to school with the slate wiped clean, and with much greater maturity and sense of purpose. This was, in part, because most plagiarists are not depraved or even lazy, but simply insecure. They came back as much more independent and self-reliant characters, which was what we wanted.

It was a very good system. Harvard’s approach to plagiarism then rested on the notion that even a disciplinary process should be educational. At its heart was the importance of accepting responsibility for one’s actions. It was not enough to correct the errant document; it was necessary to look at oneself in the mirror and say, “I did this, and it was wrong.” I believe that this approach was rooted in Harvard’s lingering mission of developing leaders of integrity and courage.

A leader must begin with a deeply rooted sense of responsibility; from there one moves to accountability, the ability to own one’s organization’s failings. For example, if Jewish students are being harassed and threatened on the university campus where one is president, it means saying, “I own this. I will fix it,” in simple and unqualified terms.

The members of the administrative board were predominantly teachers and scholars, not administrators, and that was crucial. We did not bring in lawyers. We did not hire expensive plagiarism experts as consultants. We read the materials carefully (the dossiers could be quite thick), deliberated, and made a decision. If a senior tutor got carried away defending a student from their house, their colleagues would gently but firmly nail the case to the undisputed facts. And when faculty members tried to intercede, they were equally firmly told that they were responsible for the grading side of the education, and we were covering the disciplinary side.

It is undisputed that Claudine Gay used other scholars’ language, often with the slightest modification or none, and occasionally without even a footnote acknowledgment. Were that not so, she would not have recently requested corrections to work dating back to her dissertation. I have looked at the evidence presented in various places, none of which has been controverted, and it is clear to me that this is plagiarism. For example, as The Harvard Crimson reports, her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation includes this paragraph:

The average turnout rate seems to increase linearly as African-Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. (If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatterplot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race’s turnout were compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph.)

A 1996 scholarly paper by Bradley Palmquist and Stephen Voss reads as follows:

The average turnout rate seems to decrease linearly as African Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot (resulting only when changes in one race’s turnout rate somehow compensated for changes in the other’s across the graph).

It is a pretty complete steal, with the bizarre substitution of “increase” for “decrease.”

Even if, in the most tolerant and sympathetic of readings, this and similar copying merely constitute “misuse of sources,” it is disqualifying for a position of leadership at any university. Her failure to accept responsibility in stark and unqualified terms makes matters worse.

The Harvard Corporation has stood by President Gay, even as scandal has mounted. The New York Post reports that when it first raised the plagiarism accusations with Harvard, the response was not a comment on the evidence, but a 15-page letter from Harvard’s defamation lawyer. Instead of standing up for Harvard’s motto, Veritas, (“truth”), the corporation has hunkered down.

Students have a keen scent for the stink of hypocrisy; they understand Gay’s original misdeeds and the evasions of the Harvard Corporation. They may even realize that something has gone deeply awry with the university when a Harvard professor dismisses the claims as a right-wing attack and tells The New York Times,“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting [the accusations] some credence,” as though the facts depend on the politics of those who point them out.

I have no idea how as a teacher at Harvard today I could look an undergraduate in the eye and hold forth about why plagiarism is a violation of the values inherent in the academic enterprise. They would laugh, openly or secretly, at the corruption and double standards. And I would not blame them for doing so.

President Gay is in a tough spot. The Harvard Corporation deserves to be in a much tougher spot, because it has betrayed the values that the university once cherished and that it still proclaims. In both cases, the remedy indicated is the one we senior tutors applied to many a student years ago: fess up, withdraw, and reflect.

[mariacallous]

At Lynn Community Middle School in Las Cruces, New Mexico, students’ dental needs were met at a school-based clinic. At Brooklyn Center Middle and High School in Minnesota, enrichment classes boosted student engagement. And at Bridges Academy in Oakland, California, a teacher dedicated to culture and climate interventions supported students in meeting their behavioral goals. These examples highlight different promising practices in community schools across the country, but these practices are only one small part of what makes these places community schools.

Community schools are a research-based, comprehensive school transformation strategy in which educators, local community members, families, and students work together to strengthen conditions for student learning and healthy development. As partners, they organize in- and out-of-school resources, supports, and opportunities so that young people are able to thrive. Although community schools have been around for more than a century, modern community schools—designed around whole child structures and practices—have been gaining momentum in recent years, supported by increases in state and federal funding and by the attention community schools received for providing services to and connecting meaningfully with families during the pandemic.

Over the past two years, a national collaboration called Community Schools Forward has highlighted how the community schools strategy aligns with evidence-based practice and research. The collaboration has developed a number of resources to illustrate that alignment, including a framework capturing the essential elements for high-quality community school implementation.

Source: Community Schools Forward (2023)

This framework was developed in consultation with over 700 practitioners, non-profit leaders, teachers, coordinators, researchers, and policymakers, among others. Importantly, it synthesizes long-standing experience from practitioners; existing models of community schools, including the four evidence-based pillars identified in LPI’s 2017 research review and adopted into policy in places across the country, the National Education Association’s Six Pillars, and the Coalition for Community Schools’ Standards; and recent research on the science of learning and development. The result is an evolved framework which includes six key integrated practices.

The first four of the six key practices grew directly out of the four pillars. Based on the voices and experiences of hundreds of practitioners and latest research on how children learn best, the Community Schools Forward team also added two new practices:

Integrated systems of support: School staff and community partners should systematically coordinate health and social services, academic and nonacademic supports, and enrichment opportunities in a manner that fosters student wellbeing.

Expanded and enriched learning opportunities: Students need access to before- and after-school and summer opportunities in which they can explore their passions, apply academic content beyond the classroom, and build knowledge.

Powerful student and family engagement: Families and students must be active participants in the school community and serve as key partners in decisionmaking and shaping the school’s environment and priorities.

Collaborative leadership and shared power and voice: Families, students, teachers, principals, and community partners should make decisions together through formal and informal structures.

Rigorous, community-connected classroom instruction: The curriculum should connect high-level content and skills to students’ identities, cultures, and experiences, and students should engage in inquiry-based learning that addresses issues they care about in the world around them.

A culture of belonging, safety, and care: Schools ought to be welcoming places that foster caring and trusting relationships. Everyone should be valued for their experiences and encouraged to share their views and take appropriate risks.

There is no doubt these two additional practices are essential for community school success, as illustrated in Oakland Unified School District, where community schools operate systemwide.

For example, community-connected instruction stands out at Oakland International High School, where many students are recent immigrants. The school celebrates the assets and strengths that students bring to school and makes an intentional effort to connect with their varied communities and cultures. During community walks, students lead educators and peers on tours of surrounding neighborhoods; on one such visit, a class had lunch in a halal market, and students from Yemen delivered presentations on their home country, traditions, and history.

At Roosevelt Middle School, also in Oakland, a community school transformation focused on fostering a culture of belonging, safety, and care. When a survey showed that students felt bullied in the cafeteria and unsafe walking to school, school leaders added more adult supervision at lunch and better monitoring of routes to school. They also created an advisory program to give students more say over their school experience and restorative circles for students to safely discuss issues troubling them and learn strategies for solving interpersonal problems. Because emotions and relationships strongly impact learning, these kinds of steps can have a positive effect on a host of student outcomes.

The six key practices are woven together and implemented well when those in community schools cultivate trusting relationships, practice inclusive decisionmaking, and work together toward a shared vision grounded in actionable data. All these essential components of a community school can provide a solid foundation on which great learning environments are built. We hope our ongoing work spurs further growth of transformative community schools where students and families can continue to thrive.

[wrathofthestag]

Thanks, @janespetticoat for tagging me! <3

Tag nine (9) people you’d like to know better.

Last song: Sheena is a Punk Rocker by the Ramones

Currently watching: Good Omens S2, Strange New Worlds, and Mozart in the Jungle S3.

Currently reading: Finishing a re-read of Red White and Royal Blue before tomorrow's premiere. Also, Montessori education's impact on academic and nonacademic outcomes: A systematic review.

Current obsession: jam jar cocktails. Gin and blueberry jam, in particular. Also, I'm currently on a The Doors kick. It's cyclical. The last time was in my Doosr phase was about five years ago.

Inviting anyone who'd like to play along.

[relocationsingapore]

RELOCATION ESSENTIALS: MOVING FROM SINGAPORE TO THE UNITED STATES

Moving from Singapore to the United States can be a very exciting yet complex process that calls for critical planning and organization. Be it for work, family, or personal reasons, the transition to a U.S. life can be quite intimidating due to cultural, geographical, and legal differences. This move, though, can definitely be smooth and stress-free, provided one is well-prepared with the necessary steps involved.

Here are some key relocation essentials you should know when moving from Singapore to the United States related to visa requirements, how to pack, manage your finances, and adapt to life in a new country.

Understanding U.S. Visa Requirements

Being in America requires you to consider the type of visa, given the reason for relocation to the country is for employment, studying, or reunification with family.

Work Visa (H-1B, L-1, E-2): In case your purpose for going to the United States is because of work, then you may use the H-1B or L-1 visa. Both types are widely issued in the United States for specialized workers, but they differ basically in their meaning. The first one refers to an employee with specialized knowledge, while the second refers to the employee of a company who has been transferred to another branch within the United States or in another country. If you will start a business or invest in a company in the United States, then an E-2 investor visa might be considered as an option.

Student Visa (F-1, M-1): Students coming to the United States for higher education will need an F-1 or M-1 visa, depending on the course of study. The F-1 visa is required for an academic course; a course of vocational or nonacademic study requires an M-1 visa.

Family-Based Visa: You will be able to make an application for a family-based visa, which would include IR-1 in the case of a spouse of a U.S. citizen or F2A for spouses and unmarried children of permanent residents among others, for reunion with family members who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

Keep in mind that obtaining a U.S. visa sometimes is a very cumbersome process, and, therefore, requires an early start. Be sure to gather all necessary documents, attend your visa interview, and follow the timelines provided by the U.S. embassy in Singapore with care.

Financial Planning and Setting Up U.S. Bank Accounts

Moving to the United States requires a lot of financial planning in order to transition smoothly. Some things you will have to consider are how to transfer money from Singapore into the U.S., how to handle exchange rates, and how to set up a bank account in the States.

Money transfer: Research international money transfer services for the best rates of exchange and fees before you make your move. Use popular services such as Wise, Revolut, or traditional banks to assist you in securely and efficiently moving your money from Singapore to the U.S.

Opening a U.S. Bank Account Upon entry to the U.S., one of your first activities should be to open a local bank account. U.S. banks such as Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo provide a number of account options for new arrivals. You will need identification, proof of address, and your immigration documents to open an account.

Credit Score: The U.S. is quite particular about credit history, which it would use to decide whether you are in a position to avail loans to purchase or rent a house, or even to subscribe to a mobile phone plan. As you are a new immigrant, you do not have any U.S. credit score; therefore, apply for a secured credit card or deal with any financial institution that assists in building up credit history.

Housing Options and Renting a Home in the U.S.

Finding housing in the U.S. is another important aspect of your move. Whereas the majority of people in Singapore live in apartments, housing in the U.S. comes in several configurations: apartments, townhouses, and single-family homes. How you find a rental will possibly vary with the city or state to which you are relocating.

Apartment: Websites such as Zillow, Apartments.com and Craigslist are good sources to find rental property in the United States. Be prepared to provide proof of income, references and identification to rent a property. Most landlords require a security deposit and first month's rent up-front.

Short-Term vs. Long-Term Rentals: If one is not sure where one would like to stay, consider initiating the process with a short-term rental or staying in a furnished apartment. This will avail you with the opportunity to explore other neighborhoods and find what will work best for your longer-term needs.

Lease Contract Understanding: Lease agreements in the United States often go on for a 12-month duration, though shorter and longer leases may be available. The lease must be read carefully since it contains all the rights and responsibilities, including utilities, maintenance, and early breaking policy if necessary.

Health Insurance and Healthcare System in the U.S.

Being highly privatized, unlike Singapore, which subsidizes healthcare, health insurance forms a very vital part of relocation to the United States of America because medical care could be very expensive without coverage.

Health Insurance Options: This would be a health insurance option availed from the employer in case one is shifting to another city for work. Else, this would have to be sought from the Health Insurance Marketplace or through a private insurer.

Types of Plans: Basically, there exist a myriad of health insurance plans within the United States: Health Maintenance Organizations, Preferred Provider Organizations, and High Deductible Health Plans. Each differs in grades of coverage, networks of physicians, and out-of-pocket expenses.

Understanding Healthcare in America: When you have been covered under the insurance policy, the next thing will be to know how the U.S. healthcare system works. In contrast to the Singapore healthcare system whereby any hospital or clinic can be visited, the U.S. insurance plans normally have networks of doctors and hospitals; you may also need a referral from your primary care physician to see any specialist.

Packing and Shipping Belongings from Singapore to the U.S.

Moving across the world means shipping your belongings across, and that is something which entails a lot of logistical planning. Planning what to bring with you, what to leave behind, and how to ship your belongings efficiently will ease the process of moving.

What to Bring: Before packing, take the time to assess what you will need in the U.S. Given the different climates across the country, it's important to pack accordingly, especially if you're moving to a region with colder weather than Singapore. Also consider how much it will cost to ship larger items, like furniture, versus how much it would cost to purchase them upon arrival.

Select a moving company: Lots of international movers exist that have specialized services in moving from Singapore to the U.S. Some well-known companies include Asian Tigers, Allied Pickfords, and SIR Move Services, which can provide door-to-door shipping to safely move your belongings.

Shipping Costs and Timeframes: The cost of shipping depends on the volume of your goods as well as the method of shipping/sea freight or air freight. It is cheaper by sea freight, which takes several weeks, while air freight is faster but more expensive. Make sure to get quotes from a few moving companies and plan accordingly with your shipping timeline.

Living in the U.S. : Making the Adjustment

Life in the U.S. will be both exciting and challenging because there are great cultural and lifestyle differences from those of Singapore. An open mind and a bit of preparation, however, make all the difference in your ability to settle into your new community.

Cultural Differences: While the U.S. is a melting pot, indeed, of different cultures, there are many marked differences in communication styles, workplace culture, and social mores relative to Singapore. For instance, Americans may be more upfront in their communications, with workplace hierarchies being a lot less formal compared to those in Singapore.

Obtaining a Driver's License In comparison with Singapore, which has public transport options available most anywhere, it is a fact that many locations within the United States will require a vehicle to get to work. If you plan to drive, you will want to get a U.S. driver license. To obtain a license, each state operates its own DMV, and you may be required to take a driving test.

Building of Social Network: Emigration may prove to be an extremely solitary experience during the initial period. However, there is much one can do to create a social network upon arrival. Joining local clubs and organizations, attending community events, and connecting with other expatriates are ways in which one may make new friends and set base in a new lifestyle.

Conclusion

Moving from Singapore to the United States requires some serious life changes. It is a process that calls for careful planning, organization, and an open mind. If you understand certain things, such as those revolving around requirements for visas, financial planning, options of housing, and health care, it would go a long way in ascertaining a relatively smooth transition into life here in the U.S. With proper preparation and the right mindset, you'll be able to adapt to your new environment and thrive in your new home across the world.

For more information please visit Asiantiger singapore relocation

[luneflower-1830]

Harry Potter Work of Fanfiction In Progress

Prologue:

Harry Evans, yearning for his dead mother’s, Lily Evans, approval, grapples with his distant relatives,’ the Dursleys, disdain, particularly from his aunt Petunia. Despite the scorn, he is driven to fulfill in her stead Lily's dreams to attend the University of Hogwarts. As he holds a letter announcing an interview for the University of Hogwarts’ Achievement Program, mixed emotions surge within him. When he answers the call from Minerva McGonagall, he feels a mix of anxiety and hope. Armed with a sticky note containing carefully crafted responses, Harry navigates the interview with newfound courage. The conversation unfolds, and he surprises himself by asking insightful questions. He had already been accepted to the University of Hogwarts on a full-ride scholarship. Still, everyone admitted to the University of Hogwarts wanted entry to their elite summer program where heirs and heiresses had three months to network before the official commencement of university. Somehow, he is accepted into the elite UHAP on a full scholarship with additional stipends for his nonacademic costs. With this accomplishment, he finally breaks free from the Dursleys’ oppressive grasp, setting the stage for a brighter future filled with possibilities and the chance to honor his mother's legacy.

Intro:

Harry felt empty awe looking at the letter in his hand. He had worked so hard to be someone his lovely mother, Lily Evans, would be proud of. His beautiful mother Lily Evans was dead. She died during childbirth. Lily made her choice, preferring for her son Harry to live even if it meant her own end. To Petunia Dursley’s scorn, her sister, Lily Evans, got pregnant with James Potter in secondary school. Harry heard from his aunt that his mother’s goal as a child was to attend the University of Hogwarts. He could proudly say he had been accepted with a full ride, now all he needed to do was an interview to get a full ride for UHAP. The University of Hogwarts had a couple of slots available for students demonstrating great financial need for UHAP so that the brilliant commoners could mingle with modern-day aristocrats. The dreaded ringtone went off, mixed emotions welled up within Harry. He smothered down any feelings of dread and answered the phone.

“Hello, is this Harry Evans? This is Minerva McGonagall speaking. I’m calling for the agreed-upon interview to enter the University of Hogwarts Achievement Program.”

Harry quickly grabbed the sticky note, knowing he would need it to answer McGonagall’s questions with faux confidence. Soon the interview nearly concluded, instilling Harry with the bravery to ask his questions for McGonagall. It was amazing that his sticky note just happened to have been filled with the right responses to make in chronological order. Before he knew it the interview was over, and he was soon to be out of the Dursleys’ hands. He not only had earned a full ride to the prestigious and elite University of Hogwarts, he had also won an opportunity to mingle with the heirs and heiresses of great fortunes. He was free.

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.

Warning: This is an Alternate Universe. This work will be M/M. I'd like to hear ideas about what to include in this work in progress. Please let me know how you feel about this work. This story is inspired by the American Higher Education system. In this fictional universe, the University of Hogwarts is among the top 3 universities in the country, with an acceptance rate of 5%.

[vijudon]

IIIT Lucknow Admission Process

All academic and nonacademic facilities are currently offered on campus by the Institute to its students. Central counseling is used to accept candidates who pass JEE Main to IIIT Lucknow's B.Tech program. Check the IIIT Lucknow admission process at our website.

For more details:- https://collegetour.in/st-xaviers-college-of-distance-education-kolkata

[afrocentrism-debunked-by-ola]

Afrocentricity: Academic Origins

Photo: Molefi Kete Asante.

Afrocenticity was founded by Molefi Kete Asante as he published his book Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change in 1980, followed by a series of publications exploring the same topic. According to Asante, Afrocentricity “is the study of the ideas and events from the standpoint of Africans as the key players rather than victims,” thus it is “Africa asserting itself intellectually and psychologically, breaking the bonds of Western domination in the mind as an analogue for breaking those bonds in every other field” (“The Afrocentric Idea in Education” 172). Afrocentricity manifests in a myriad of areas, including but not limited to: social, spiritual, traditional, ethnicity (Mazama 394). Afrocentricity, according to Mazama, is a paradigm, as “there is confusion in large part because scholars have often failed to approach Afrocentricity in a systematic manner” (390). The Department of Africology at Temple University, to which Asante belongs, is home to Afrocentricity and has trained plenty of scholars who have produced a lot of dissertations through Afrocentric inquiry. Among the most notable authors who have written about Afrocentricity are: Cheikh Anta Diop, Marimba Ani, John Henrik Clarke, and Chancellor Williams.

Today, the term “Afrocentrism,” a derivative of the term “Afrocentricity” coined by Asante in 1980, is popularly used by the public. Yehudah argues that “Pop-Culture Afrocentrism” is “an approach fashioned out of mainstream sound-bytes” that is an “often anti-intellectual and nonacademic misappropriation of [Afrocentricity’s] constructs” (551). He claims that the academic, Afrocentric inquiry is focused on Asante’s “location theory” (551), unlike the term “Afrocentrism”, which is used “to speak to anything that featured Black bodies” (552). Among the main beliefs associated with Afrocentricity/Afrocentrism is that the Ancient Egyptian culture, i.e. Kemet, is a Black culture – a claim that is featured in both: pop-culture and major academic projects, such as: Martin Bernal’s Black Athena project in three volumes (1987, 1991, 2006), Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization (1974), Asante’s The Egyptian Philosophers: Ancient African Voices from Imhotep to Akhenaten (2000), and the list goes on. My scope of research is focused on the manifestations of Afrocentrism in Pop-Culture and media, with a special emphasis on the Afrocentric pseudohistorical claim of the Blackness of the Ancient Egyptian heritage, which has been proven scientifically inaccurate with DNA tests. Nevertheless, the race of Ancient Egyptians and the origin of current Egyptians still poses a controversy on a lot of social media platforms as well as media depictions of Egyptians, and it has become a social media trend that is on the rise, especially in the 2020s. I will be mainly investigating the phenomenon of defending an obviously false claim on social media platforms and media productions, reflecting on the academic roots of such a feign belief, and the consequences such a widespread logical, historical, scientific, and cultural fallacy.

Literature Review 

Pro-Afrocentrism

The main body of Afrocentric research promotes the different aspects of Afrocentricity as an ideology and a research method: mainly a historiographical, Black-centered retelling of history to highlight the achievements of the Black people, replacing the slavery narratives with other accomplishments that, according to them, the Western history telling robbed them of. The Afrocentrist approach mainly aims to liberate history from the Eurocentric view that is regarded as the main version of history. However, this approach might not totally align with the scientific methods of research, as it rather depends on presenting history in a way that promotes old African glory, even if their arguments are sometimes totally inaccurate or lack supporting evidence. Therefore, it is perceived as an unreliable academic approach that is used to manipulate proven historical in some aspects, which suggests an underlying agenda for the Afrocentric practices.

Anti-Afrocentrism

Being an extremely controversial academic approach, the reception of Afrocentricity has undoubtedly instigated a strong academic reaction from academics who totally disagree. Notable Anti-Afrocentric publications include: Mary Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa, Lefkowitz and Maclean-Rogers’ Black Athena Revisited, and Howe’s Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes. 

Just like the abovementioned books, Masonen’s article “Revolution has no use for savants” heavily critical of the Afrocentrist philosophy. The author argues that, academically, Afrocentrism is not a reliable research methodology, deeming it as an ‘apohistory’ and a socio-political movement that cannot replace the Western, scientific historiography as is based on the ethos (guilt, on the ‘white’ people’s part) rather than concrete facts. The main argument of the opposition to Afrocentrism is that it is based on hypotheses and not facts, thus it falsifies history and appropriates other cultures for the sake of glorifying the Black race’s historical presence, regardless of the accuracy of such a representation. 

Research Gap

As demonstrated, the research done in this area is basically a comprehensive academic debate about Afrocentricity/Afrocentrism in definition and theory. In light of this controversial academic discussion, this research – written by an Egyptian academic who is evidently opposed to the Afrocentric claim of the Blackness of Ancient Egypt – aims to fill a research gap by exploring the multifaceted dynamics and adverse implications of this audacious, systematic, racism-driven theory. Afrocentrism is currently evident through (social) media hostility against modern Egyptians initiated by Afrocentric fanatics. Based on fictional retellings of history that state that Ancient Egyptians were black, Afrocentrists are not-so-subtly accusing modern Egyptians of being descendants of colonizers who do not own the land and history of Egypt due to the fairness of their skin color. Such an idea is starting to be accepted as the true version of history in the Western world in multiple realms of the media and cultural exhibitions, therefore this research is a reaction to such a cultural-appropriating trend to highlight its fallacies and set the record straight. 

References:

Aidi, Hisham. “Egypt and the Afrocentrists: The Latest Round.” Africa Is a Country, 2022, africasacountry.com/2022/03/egypt-and-the-afrocentrists-the-latest-round#:~:text=By%20mid%2DFebruary%2C%20the%20One,of%20an%20abiding%20Arab%20racism.

Asante, Molefi Kete. “The Afrocentric Idea in Education.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 60, no. 2, 1991, pp. 170–80. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2295608. Accessed 29 Sept. 2023.

Asante, Molefi Kete. Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge. Africa World Press, 1992.

Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Rutgers Univ. Pr, 2020. 

Diop, Cheikh Anta. The African Origin of Civilization. 1974

Hanretta, Sean. “Egypt in Africa: William A. Brown and a liberating African history.” The Journal of African History, 2023, pp. 1–5, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021853723000440. 

Howe, Stephen. Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes. Verso, 1999. 

Lefkowitz, Mary R., and Guy Maclean-Rogers. Black Athena Revisited. The University of North Carolina Press, 1996. 

Lefkowitz, Mary. Not out of Africa. Basic Books, 1998. 

Masonen, Pekka. “Revolution has no use for savants.” Afrique & Histoire, Vol. 1, no. 1, 2003, pp. 169–208, https://doi.org/10.3917/afhi.001.0169.  

Mazama, Ama. “The Afrocentric Paradigm: Contours and Definitions.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 31, no. 4, 2001, pp. 387–405. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2668022. Accessed 29 Sept. 2023.

Nowar, Mariam. “Kevin Hart and Afrocentrism: Why Some Want His Show Cancelled in Egypt.” El-Shai, 13 Dec. 2022, www.el-shai.com/kevin-hart-and-afrocentrism-why-some-want-his-show-cancelled-in-egypt/. 

Yee, Vivian. “Black Artists Embrace Ancient Egypt.

Egyptians Aren’t Happy about It.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 18 June 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/06/18/world/middleeast/egypt-african-dutch-museum.html. 

Yehudah, Miciah Z. “Distinguishing Afrocentric inquiry from Pop Culture Afrocentrism.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 46, no. 6, 2015, pp. 551–563, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934715593054.

[levantu]

DO STUDENTS USE PHONES DURING CLASS?

DO STUDENTS USE PHONES DURING CLASS?

(Sinh viên sử dụng điện thoại trong giờ học?)

Dr Le Van Tu-11/2/2024

 

I read “Bans may help protect classroom focus, but districts need to stay mindful of students’ sense of connection, experts say”

With Anna Lamb, Harvard Staff Writer,March 13, 2023. 

Anna Lamb opens the article: Students around the world are being separated from their phones.

In 2020, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that 77 percent of U.S. schools had moved to prohibit cellphones  for nonacademic purposes. In September 2018, French lawmakers outlawed cellphone use for schoolchildren under the age of 15. In China, phones were banned country-wide for schoolchildren last year (2022).

***

The National Center for Education Statistics of the United States, France, and China have their reasons for acting this way. There is no denying the negative aspects when students study in the classroom and watch their phones for entertainment at the same time!

Supporters of these initiatives have cited links between smartphone use and bullying and social isolation and the need to keep students focused on schoolwork.

77%Of U.S. schools moved to ban cellphones for nonacademic purposes as of 2020, according to the National Center for Education Statistics

But some Harvard experts say instructors and administrators should consider learning how to teach with tech instead of against it.

***

That's right, lecturers consider and choose how to teach and learn with technology for students, especially how to use phones during class.

***

And “Returning back to in-person, I think it was hard to break the habit,” said Victor Pereira, a lecturer on education and co-chair of the Teaching and Teaching Leadership Program at the Graduate School of Education.

***

This thinking is true that students cannot quit the habit of using phones and neither will the future.

***

Pereira added: Through their students, he and others with experience both in the classroom and in clinical settings have seen interactions with technology blossom into important social connections that defy a one-size-fits-all mindset. “Schools have been coming back, trying to figure out, how do we readjust our expectations?”

It’s a hard question, especially in the face of research suggesting that the mere presence of a smartphone can undercut learning .

***

Certainly, the presence of inappropriate smartphones will reduce students' learning efficiency.

***

Michael Rich an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says that phones and school don’t mix: Students can’t meaningfully absorb information while also texting, scrolling, or watching YouTube videos.

“The human brain is incapable of thinking more than one thing at a time,” he said. “And so what we think of as multitasking is actually rapid-switch-tasking. And the problem with that is that switch-tasking may cover a lot of ground in terms of different subjects, but it doesn’t go deeply into any of them.”

***

Pereira’s approach is to step back — and to ask whether a student who can’t resist the phone is a signal that the teacher needs to work harder on making a connection. “Two things I try to share with my new teachers are, one, why is that student on the phone? What’s triggering getting on your cell phone versus jumping into our class discussion, or whatever it may be? And then that leads to the second part, which is essentially classroom management.

***

My point of view is that it is impossible for students to entertain and study at the same time.

I have taught more than 30,000 students. I have commented: STUDENTS THAT SIT AT THE HEAD OF THE TABLE USUALLY STUDY VERY SERIOUSLY AND STUDY WELL.

IN CONTRAST, STUDENTS WHO SIT BELOW CLASS ARE MAINLY SURFING ON THEIR PHONES.

***

If the lecturer just sits or stands fixedly on the podium, the area below the classroom will not absorb the lesson at all, and the students' learning results are often not good.

When starting with the first session, I made a rule and agreed with the students not to use phones during lectures. There must be student consensus.

Of course, to teach, you must be healthy and move regularly to the back of the class. Not all students are 100% self-aware.

***

Pereira continued “Design better learning activities, design learning activities where you consider how all of your students might want to engage and what their interests are,” he said. He added that allowing phones to be accessible can enrich lessons and provide opportunities to use technology for school-related purposes.

***

I also often let students use the phone to find answers to questions that the students and I ask.

Or use the phone when taking tests, taking open-ended exams and during group discussions and presentations, especially real-life examples. There are plenty of real-life examples on social networks.

In short, I still let you use your phone during class when taking tests and open-ended exams; Group discussion and presentation when using the phone to expand knowledge for the lesson.

Hopefully this article will help leaders, educational managers, and instructors on how to let students use smartphones during class. And this is the educational trend of the future.

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DR LE VAN TU, FOUNDER-PRESIDENT

No. 23B/1, Area 3, An Binh, Ninh Kieu, Can Tho

Tel:0989577088  Email: levantu7979@gmail.com

Bans may help protect classroom focus, but districts need to stay mindful of students’ sense of connection, experts say

#Bansmayhelpprotectclassroomfocus# #studentssenseof connection#drlevantu#HoasinhtanHD#CanthoVietnam#closeandlongstandingmember#10years# lecturercollegesuniversitiesCantho

#DOSTUDENTSUSEPHONESDURING CLASS

#sinhviensudungdienthoaitronggiohoc

[nciwch]

An impactful study for Montessori advocates!

The highly anticipated (and long-awaited) Randolph et al. meta-analysis is out! Read the plain language summary below, or click here for a free download of the full text:

[tropicalrpg]

13 just came back from the only creative writing class i'll probably ever take

i have an american friend to whom i've described redação class as essay-writing. that's not quite it; i didn't write an essay until, well, i wouldn't say i have. i was supposed to write an essay last year and one a couple weeks ago, but none of them are proper essays, like i'm writing now and would like to write more. (i tried to write an essay last year that i have yet to finish. i think it would be really interesting, even if i turned into an article.)

redações, especially in the enem model (and maybe i'm being a little bitch for writing about something like this in english, but consider this an introduction to the brazilian school system) (consider; you: consider this; you: my nonexistent reader, my guinea pig, my english-speaking pet), are anything but creative writing. here's the basic idea: you get a prompt upon which you have to build an argument. you get 30 handwritten lines. you have to reference another field of study, and in the last paragraph you have to propose a solution to the prompt's problem that fulfills a series of criteria (deed, agent, means, finality, details). you have to write this in up to a couple hours but ideally less than one, with no access to any type of resources to do research or base your argument on.

i hope it comes across, in the instructions given to write a redação enem, that it's just ridiculous. it does not build better students, better writers, or better citizens. you have to excell at writing redações enem in order to get into university, and that's basically all you need to know how to write them for; how do they make you better scholars? in what way do they prepare you for higher education? i study "letters", or what would be the equivalent to an english degree except it's not a portuguese degree but instead a languages, literature or linguistics degree; the second i got into uni, the only thing i would ever use a redação enem for would be to get a job. and that job is correcting redações enem; i have never, and know that i will never, have to write any sort of text anything like those ever again.

that class was not essay-writing. i described it as such because going over the details like i went here would have been wasted time, and it's a lot easier to work with approximations, like how american high schoolers have to write essays, we have to write redações. it's a similar exercise in practising textual skills, how to write, how to argue. it doesn't work the same, however, and perhaps the one thing i'd say the american education system has over ours (theoretically, not in practice) is the presence of essays from a young age.

essays are great. this creative writing class, which is not a creative writing class because that's not a thing teachers can offer as a class, but it is largely a class about producing each a singular essay (nonacademic, thank the lord; i've written academic essays already, but it's the still scholarly but truly creative pieces that i'm fascinated by) that has all the freedom in the world to be creative — this creative writing class is quite simply and quite literally a class on essays. reading and writing them. i have never read so many essays and learned so much, and i've never appreciated a literary genre more. this feels like true literature. the peak of nonfiction and fiction alike. i don't know; it's hard to find the words for it.

this is all to say that on monday, i think, my professor talked about writing with limitations. he asked if any of us had tried that (i could not allow myself to mentions things such as, i've written for fanzines that required certain lengths; required me to rewrite certain scenes; i've participates in ship week events that had me writing different stories of thousands of words day after day; i won nanowrimo in 2018, at fourteen fucking years old) and then mentioned how we are always writing with limitations, and, as an example, he cited writing tweets. i use twitter a lot, i always have and it might forever be my primary social medium, but i don't feel limited there. i feel more limited here, not only on this blog because i put a pressure on myself to write posts as long as i can make them but also because originally i wanted to write every day. i failed both ways.

i also failed if we look at my unnamed inspiration. they're so fucking poetic. to be frank, these days i hate their poetry, but their prose, good god. i hate their poetry and i hate their plot and i hate the characterisation they give to characters i love, but i adore their prose. and when they wrote every day for a couple months, they didn't push out blog posts that read like linear essays, not like i do. i start on a subject and get right to it, or even if not right to it i follow a line of thought. is that because i've grown up writing these disgusting, succint argumentative texts? i cannot say. but i can't suddenly write maybe two thousand words about swans in love. if i can get myself to be honest about my past and my present, i'm already doing more than i ever have. my writing has never been about me. maybe that's why i find essays so liberating.

2023.04.26