tingilinde

getting into the right school at any cost

An Atlantic piece on kids with wealthy helicopter parents focused on Ivy admissions using niche sports as a tool.  But there's a big supply and demand problem. 

College sports are an interesting subject gong back to the era of "muscular Christianity" and the idea of the rounded (always male and usually upper class) student in the second part of the 19^th century. There are a number of positive and negative aspects to it these days and the pandemic may force some decisions.  But these rich helicopter parents...  

 

 

 

thinking you're figured it out..

Our online survey showed that all of the students had the required hardware and internet bandwidth to participate in the online courses

a letter to parents

A letter to parents from Lego in 1974 on what Lego is for..

a tip of the hat to John

outdoor learning

It's been practiced on and off in Germany, some of the Nordic countries and even the US over the past 140 years.  It makes a lot of sense with Covid-19 -  here's a Danish school.

 

zoom school

So much is broken.

snip

...

The lesson we refuse to learn with COVID-19 is that decisions we make today have no bearing on right now, but have a huge effect in a few months. That’s why locking down in March reduced the number of deaths in May. Why opening bars in May brought deaths right back up in July. Why parties on Memorial Day left us with COVID numbers nearly twice as high on Labor Day, and why reopening in-person school in September will likely do exactly what you’d expect come November. The delay between action and reaction means we keep half assing our way through a pandemic that kicks our asses in return.

Making school work in September required vision, action, funding, and resolve on the part of people far above your teacher or school board member in the spring when everything shut down. None of it came. The entire point of the shutdowns was to buy time, to make plans, to lay a foundation for a return that would work. All that time got flushed away by a president more obsessed with hyping miracle cures than doing the hard, thankless work of grinding out a workable plan with scientists and educators and then funding it at a level that could make it actually feasible. That’s what happened in pretty much every other country on the planet. None of them are foolproof, but they've done better than just the state of Florida alone, which had more than 10,000 kids under 18 test positive since their aggressive push for schools to reopen last month.

...

 

 

what if schools encouraged an interest in science

The wonder of it rather than memorization and at the right ages?

 

college collaboration houses

If college is online you can be anywhere.

 

deep springs college

With all the talk about colleges and what they accomplish there are some unusual places.  Here's an old Dana Goodyear New Yorker piece.

snip

...

The Deep Springs aesthetic prefers the broken to the fixed, the mangy to the groomed, the gone-to-seed to the still-in-bloom. Several years ago, students were irked when the wife of a former president planted flowers on the grounds. They dislike professors who use PowerPoint. The college was one of the last places in the country to use a crank phone and a toll station—it upgraded in the eighties—and when, about ten years ago, the phone company sent the students a big-screen television to reward them for spending so much on long-distance calls, a give-no-quarter faction, who called the thing a “giant teat” on which the weak were suckling, put it on a junk pile and attacked it with a sledgehammer. A normal truck at Deep Springs has dust caked in the vents, a half-ripped-out tape deck, exposed wires, and an orange peel on the floor. The shabbiness is somewhat a matter of budget—the school survives on $1.2 million a year—and somewhat a matter of style. “You wind up developing tastes that are totally out of synch with standard tastes,” John Gravois, D.S. ’97, said. “I’m still a little surprised when people don’t want to do the more difficult thing.”

...

It's clear why it didn't grow, but it's interesting to look at the outliers in an area where education has become a transaction for many.

 

 

 

college students and covid

Zeynep on surveillance and the social nature of college.

snip

...

One of the most important latent functions of higher education in the United States is to provide a place for socialization where young adults can meet their potential lifelong friends, spouses, and business partners, and where they can create their durable social networks. Another is to provide a quasi-supervised transition from parental control to responsible, fully independent adulthood. That comes with the basic understanding that students will socialize and, yes, party, and that’s why colleges trying to recruit students emphasize the quality of life and extracurriculars they provide: the meal plans, the climbing gyms, the social clubs. Plus, many colleges are home to fraternities and sororities, which supercharge some of higher education’s latent functions, providing members with more exclusivity and less supervision, but still under the umbrella of the university. To deny these latent functions is to deny why residential higher education exists. Certainly, it’s for the learning and the experience in the classrooms and labs, but it's not just for that.

...

At a minimum, universities should concede that if they open dorms and bring students on campus, there will be transmission. They should engage in frequent testing to try to locate, trace, and isolate outbreaks before they spread more. Contact tracing requires trust, and if digital contact tracing is to be invoked, it has to be through voluntary apps with strong guarantees of privacy and a lack of punitive consequences—ideally without any data collected in a central database or accessible to university administrators.

Instead of extensive but ineffective surveillance of the inevitable gatherings, universities should offer safer options for socializing (outdoors, distanced) throughout the semester while minimizing contact between students and staff and ensuring that adequate safety measures in regards to masks and ventilation are practiced. But that’s only if universities open in person. Instead of a haphazard opening followed by rapid backtracking that scatters students to seed more outbreaks, universities should stay closed to in-person, residential experience until the adults get their act together and get the virus under control. The rest is surveillance theater, ineffective against the pandemic and corrosive to what higher education should be about.

...

 

 

a media literacy course

Dan Gillmor and others at ASU have put together a well-received media literacy course.  It's gone through a fe changes and is now ready for the next round.  A three week adaptive course - no tests if that makes a difference. 

snip

...

The course stems from the work we’ve been doing at the News Co/Lab since we started it in 2017. Back then, and now, our goal was to boost the field known in academia as “media literacy” — and to do it at scale.
At the time, we said there were three main ways in our society to achieve scale. The first is education, where media literacy has gained a foothold in recent decades but is not close to universal. We admire the people and organizations who’ve worked to bring it into more schools, and hope our work will make their jobs a bit easier, since we’re focusing more on adults who need to understand and adopt these principles and skills just as much as their children and grandchildren.

Another institution that can bring scale is the media. The News Co/Lab has worked with journalists to bring these skills to their communities. As part of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, media — especially journalism — is integral to what we do. We’re partnering with media of all kinds on this project, including Arizona PBS, which is part of the Cronkite School.
The institutions that almost define scale these days are the social media platforms. They’ve begun to see media literacy as vital to their own missions, we’re pleased to see. And we’re especially glad that one of them — Facebook — funded this project with a gift to our university.

...

And it's free - here's the signup page