Category Archives: Uncategorized
Having posted recently about not understanding some people’s affinity for some of the worst popular music of all time (which I insist was all made after 1995), I started thinking about pop culture more.
Truthfully, I am obsessed with movies, music and tv from the 80’s and 90’s. I even tried out for VH1’s “World Series of Pop Culture” with a team of other pop-culture addicts. I am still floored that we didn’t make it past the first round. There just couldn’t have been anyone better than we were.
But, in my pondering about the pop culture of my youth in that last post, I made reference to the fact that my parents banned hardcore rap in my house right at the height of the gangsta rap movement when everything was very political and driven. They, of course, never listened much to the lyrics to know anything beyong the fact…
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I don’t hate vegetarians, vegans or people who just breathe air until they die of starvation. I just hate tofu, lentils and anything made of soya that is supposed to taste like meat.
I couldn’t care less what you had for dinner.
I do suffer from limited patience with people who think they are better than me because they expel enough lentil gas from their rear ends to power a small city.
There’s recycling and there’s recycling.
I also suffer from a malady called sense-of-humor-itis that makes me poke fun at anyone who takes themselves way too seriously.
There is also the looming horror of having to prepare a gourmet vegetarian lunch for my son’s school next Tuesday.
His father is determined to enter into the parental competition and plans for me to whip some Nigella Lawson magical mystery meal.
I was just going to pop into the deli and…
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The worst nightmare of a college student has got to be graduating without a job. And the college major that a student selects can actually increase his or her chances of getting stuck in an unemployment line.
College majors that are hampered by high unemployment rates include a variety of psychology degrees, fine arts and architecture. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce delved into U.S. Census Bureau statistics to determine the employment rates of 173 college majors; I crossed them against a list of the most popular college majors.
College majors with the highest unemployment
1. Clinical psychology 19.5%
2. Miscellaneous fine arts 16.2%
3. United States history 15.1%
4. Library science 15.0%
5. (tie) Military technologies; educational psychology 10.9%
6. Architecture 10.6%
7. Industrial & organizational psychology 10.4%
8. Miscellaneous psychology 10.3%
9. Linguistics & comparative literature 10.2%
10. (tie) Visual & performing arts; engineering &…
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Will I get a job when I graduate from college?
That’s a huge question that college students are asking themselves, now perhaps more than ever. Students who select more marketable college majors are going to increase their chances of landing a job.
The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce used U.S. Census Bureau statistics to tease out the unemployment rates for 173 college majors. I looked at the 100 most popular college majors and pulled out the 25 majors with the lowest unemployment.
College majors with lowest unemployment rates
1. Medical technology technician 1.4%
2. Nursing 2.2%
3. Treatment therapy professions 2.6%
4. Medical assisting services 2.9%
5. Agriculture production & management 3.0%
6. Industrial production technologies 3.1%
7. Pharmacy 3.2%
8. Communications & disorders sciences 3.3%
9. Elementary education 3.6%
10. Special needs education 3.6%
11. Miscellaneous education 3.7%
12. Mechanical engineering 3.8%
13. High school teacher…
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Stanford University’s free introductory distance learning online degree in artificial intelligence has attracted thousands of people barely a month after it was announced.
The course begins in September and represents the world’s first completely free, open-access university-level course utilising the virtual learning environment of the internet and has already attracted 58,000 learners, the New York Times reports.
Such is the popularity of the experimental online learning project that the establishment announced a further two earlier this week (August 16th) from its computer science department.
“The vision is: change the world by bringing education to places that can’t be reached today,” said Dr Sebastian Thrun, one of the world’s most prolific and respected artificial intelligence experts and a course instructors.
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Anyone who has been paying attention for the past 20 years knows by now that, in America, Asian students perform the best, white students perform just below them, and Latino and African-American students are performing on the lowest rung of the academic ladder. Anyone who has been paying attention in the past 10 years knows that, worldwide, American students stack up very poorly against the students from most advanced nations, and, in particular, they look very bad indeed when compared to students in China and Korea.
So what the heck is going on in Asia, or in Europe, Finland? What are their schools doing for their students that we are not doing here in America? When one actually examines schools in Asia and schools in America, one discovers that there is not a gap in methodology. What one discovers is that there is a gap in respect and reverence…
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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 10/10
If you visit the 2010 API State Report for California, you will discover there are four subgroups that have achieved the goals set forth in the NCLB Act — Asian, Filipino, White/Caucasian, and a child of two or more races meaning parents from two different Ethnic/Racial groups where the mother may be African-American and the father White or the father Asian and the mother Latino.
I know from experience that for my brother, the learning equation (discussed in Part 2) was 1 + 0 + 0, which resulted in failure and an illiterate child growing up to become an illiterate adult. The teacher was there to teach but my brother was not there to learn.
When I was seven and my brother seventeen with some jail time already under his tattoos, my mother stepped in and taught me to read at home, and it was not easy for her. I fought her every inch of the way as my brother did. The difference is that my brother won that battle but lost at life.
However, to succeed with me my mother did something she did not do with Richard. She used a wire-coat hanger to spank me and motivate me to do as I was told and to learn.
Public school teachers in America are not allowed to do what a parent can do at home.
The result is that I learned to read and because of my mother’s involvement in that learning equation, I now have the ability to write things such as my novels, posts for this Blog and I enjoy reading books–lots of books.
Richard, on the other hand, died a broken man in both health and spirit at age 64, and he left behind several children mostly illiterate because he was a bad role model and was never involved in their educations, which resulted in more failure.
If you return to that NPR.org piece on the public school teachers and administrators that cheated on Atlanta’s standardized test results to make it look as if more students were making progress toward meeting the goals set forth in the NCLB Act, what caused that behavior was desperate people that did not want to lose their jobs due to the flawed opinions of fools in the federal government and of course among the Walton Wal-Mart family and talking heads such as Rush Limbaugh and my “old” NLBC friend that believe they know what they are talking about when they don’t.
I do not blame my brother Richard’s teachers. They did their job and taught. However, Richard did not learn because he chose not to learn and our parents were not directly involved in the process when Richard needed them to be tough and say no and mean it even if it meant using a coat hanger as an enforcer.
During those 30 years teaching in the public schools (1975 – 2005), I met many students like my brother Richard and my goal was to convince and/or motivate these individuals (both boys and girls) to be an active part of the education equation. It was never easy and the successes were rare but there were a few.
Return to Eager to Learn or Not – Part 9 or start with Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 