the Sam Jackson College Experience

Why not discover something new–why not hear some unfamiliar music this weekend?

The South by Southwest music festival in Austin always releases lots of MP3s of artists each year, but this year did not put them together in a torrent all in one place. Luckily, Greg Hewgill did. Click here for the link to his torrent.

I love using Last.FM and Pandora to find new music, and this is another great one-off source. If you just want to browse by artist / location / song on the SXSW site, you can do that too. But this is a really awesome collection, with some really great music to be discovered from all over the country and all around the world. You should do yourself a favor and check it out. The torrent is well-seeded and you can start listening to some of the mp3s while you download!

Have a nice weekend, everyone! I will be slaving over midterms, but at least I’ll have a nice soundtrack…

I was recently having a little debate with Diana over at the Digital Natives blog about how best to manage online identities as a teenager, inspired by Lifehacker’s recent post about managing digital reputations. My main point of agreement was about ‘becoming the source’ for information about yourself, and how important it is to maintain a high-profile place for positive information control. I do that very well with this website–google ’sam jackson’ and you’ll see I’m the fourth result–but right before I saw Diana’s post, I had decided I wanted to cover some other bases.

It’s midterms time here at Yale, and while some people like to go out and shop or buy things to de-stress some, I opted for another route: buying a few domain names. I went to gratuitous lengths to try to acquire a few I’ve been negotiating over for ages, with continued failure. But I did go ahead and buy www.SamuelAJackson.com and www.SamuelABJackson.com. I remain bitter that I don’t have the funds to acquire samjackson.com, or samueljackson.com, etc.

I wish I had been a little older–or a lot wiser–when I was younger, because I would be a lot richer now for my domain purchases if that had been the case. But, in case anyone is ever searching for my full name, I now have some good insurance. These wouldn’t really rank, of course, and I will just have them redirect back here for now. Still–pays to try to cover as many angles as possible, and it’s really pretty cheap. Certainly a much lower down payment now than there will be later, if you have to try to buy a domain off someone or do damage control from high-ranking bad PR.

For a good place to start investigating how to control your public identity online, check out both that lifehacker post and danah boyd’s musings on the subject last fall.

Hello everyone! This is my first time hosting a blog carnival, but it is the 160th Carnival of Education! I got a lot of submissions for this week and chose the best ones to share with you today. Welcome to the February 27, 2008 edition of the carnival of education, let’s get started! When you’re done with these links, be sure to check out all the higher education content you can find right here on my site : )

General Education

Alvaro with the Brain Fitness Center at SharpBrains gives us some helpful suggestions for how to keep our brains in tip top shape–he also hosted the 159th carnival!

Should parents pay for college (in whole or in part)? An interesting question… and one that I’m glad my parents answered basically in the affirmative.

Phil says that, paying for college or not, parents should do more to teach their kids patience. It took too long to read everything he wrote so I’m not quite sure, however, of what the entire post was about–I guess I’m just in such a rush all the time!

Noirlecroi is a big fan of blog carnivals, which is good, because it makes me want to link to their review of Mosaic of Thought, a book about teaching comprehension, that much more.

The Daily Grind provides a suggested Student Code of Ethics… what do you think about it?

Matthew K Tabor writes about the links between baseball and education, and they’re more compelling in the context of the UFT than you might have imagined.

Great for Educators and Teachers

When, and if, to use if instead of when: tips from So You Want to Teach? about just that–teaching.

For more tongue twisting fun, consider the post about questioning questions, or at least the way teacher-questioners question. Lead from the Start ponders this and more in the context of preschool.

In case these other posts were sounding too cheery, read about this nightmare situation from Scenes from the Battleground, a blog about teaching in tough situations.

On the note of troublesome students… Siobhan has a teaser about what he’s doing dealing with tough COLLEGE students.

But we shouldn’t always blame the students! What about when parents make it difficult for students to stay in class by constantly moving? Bluebird’s Classroom tells us about this unfortunate trend in certain seventh grade classrooms.

Any history teachers reading? History is Elementary has a post about hundreds-of-years-old fashion styles as it relates to teaching. Check it out.

Speaking of history–over at Scheiss Weekly we have a post asking whatever happened to the unsung heroes?

Does school kill poetry? Read Jennifer Ward’s take on it.

Social Commentary about Education

The relationship between New York education policy, great apes, and why the teachers wants Joel Klein to understand more about teaching. All this and more at Under Assault, now!

They’re not the only ones with complains about New York City schools: check out what Education Notes has to say on the subject.

SwitchedOnMom says that there should be more field trips. I totally agree.

EduWonkette wants to ask you what you think of different approaches to mitigating the achievement gap… and also to remind you to try to avoid being food poisoned.

Which brings us to Dave’s commentary on some problems with metrics for measuring high school drop out data in California. What lessons can be learned from different measurement techniques?

General Educational Resources

SarahSpy has a great listing of free / pay-whatever days at a long list of NYC museums. Definitely worth checking out, sending along.

Life. Money. Development, writes about the seven habits of highly effective students… and how to acquire them. By clicking that link, presumably.

 

Web Tools for Students, Educators, and More

OEDb has some excellent (50!) tools for students and educators alike for use on the web, for research and learning. Check out their top 50 tools for researchers and students.

Bill Ferriter, 6th grade, teacher, is encouraging teachers to use RSS, in Pageflakes for Teachers, a good informative post.

CollegeDegree.com mentions 25 excellent tools for librarians. While most of these are fairly commonsensical, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of some avenues that might be missed; worth looking at for others in a similar situation.

Some fun math games, courtesy Let’s Play Math.

Successful Teaching writes about blogging in the classroom– always a great subject.

_ _ _ _ _ _

And that’s it for this edition of the carnival… Submit your blog article to the next edition of the carnival of education using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page. The next edition is currently set for March 12. Thanks for reading, and be sure to have a look around my site before you go!

[Brief note on my selection methodology, since concerns have arisen in the comments: some people thought I was overly selective with this carnival, but I put in almost every post that was about education... if you or someone you know was left out, it was most likely not intentional. I volunteered to host this carnival after another, for March, was already ticketed; this means that if you submitted a post BEFORE my carnival for this date was open, it may have been directed there instead and so you might not have been left out at all, you might just have to wait two weeks.]

There were a fair number of Yale Daily News stories last semester about various incidents of news-worthy intolerance; this sad trend seems to have continued this term with the “We Love Yale Sluts” debacle where, for those unfamiliar, a group of Zeta Psi fraternity pledges posted photos on Facebook of themselves holding a sign with that moniker outside the Yale Women’s Center, causing quite a few problems for themselves and quite a lot of talk on campus.

I received an e-mail this evening from one of the Yale mailing lists I’m on with this disturbing message:

Dear friends,
I am writing to let you know that, on Friday night, some of my close friends discovered a swastika and the “SS” symbol written in packed snow on a tree on Old Campus. The Yale Police were notified and the graffiti was removed, but I think it behooves us all to not let this disturbing event go unnoticed. It is shocking for these kinds of hateful images to appear anywhere, but it is even more disturbing when it is within the locked gates of Old Campus. I don’t think anyone can even speculate as to who did this, but we should be loud and insistent that it is completely intolerable.
Pictures of the tree were taken as evidence, and I’ve attached them below. May this be the last hateful image we have to see on our campus.

I will try to write more about this and the other sad events sometime soon–it’s an issue that I have really wanted to address, and has really been on my mind in the last couple of days in general. For now I just wanted to get the word out about what happened, to initiate discussions about it.

Update: the Dean sent out an email, it is attached below.

Dear Yale College Students:

Over the weekend students and others forwarded to the Yale College Dean’s Office photographs of trees on the Old Campus on which a swastika and other Nazi symbols appeared. This disturbing incident is not the first aimed at specific groups of students on our campus this academic year. As you are well aware, in recent months students have discovered racist and homophobic graffiti spray-painted on University walls, and a group of individuals held a sign containing a sexist slogan in front of the Women’s Center.

Even on a campus committed to freedom of expression, acts such as these are offensive and corrode the spirit of community so cherished at Yale. We do not know who is responsible for some of these offensive acts, but I implore all members of our community to consider the impact of words and actions on others and to treat each other with dignity and respect.

If you become aware of incidents such as those described above, report them to the Yale University Police, who will investigate whether a crime has been committed and, if so, will attempt to identify the perpetrator. You should also contact your college master or dean and Marichal Gentry, the Dean of Student Affairs, who convened a committee last semester that developed a protocol guiding our response to such incidents.

My colleagues and I join with others on campus in condemning these deplorable acts.

Peter Salovey

Dean of Yale College

Update: Hillel also sent out an email, also attached:

Dear Yale Hillel Community,

Many of you no doubt already know that several Nazi symbols were pasted in snow on Old Campus trees this past Friday evening.  We condemn in the strongest possible terms both this act and the ideology it stands for. This isolated incident is not representative of any wider anti-Semitic trends or overtones within the Yale community. That said, there are also other groups at Yale who have been and continue to be hurt and marginalized both by hate speech and other types of unacceptable behavior.  We are unequivocally opposed to all such acts of hatred.  Students wishing to talk about these recent events or with any questions or concerns should not hesitate to contact either board or staff members.

Sincerely,
The Yale Hillel Board

Photos are attached after the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most popular posts ever written for this blog was the one in which I wrote about the finer details within the 2006 Senior SAT College Board data. In a way, I am very much a beneficiary of the same standardized-testing and college admissions stresses which I rail against. However, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to provide clear and accessible information about the 2007 Senior SAT data–information which will help de-stress applicants, hopefully, and also raise awareness of some of the ways in which the SAT is biased and why we should think twice before judging people on their SAT scores.

I’m going to break it up into a few posts, starting with this one about some general data for the SAT I: Reasoning, with another on percentiles and more detailed demographics, and one more about the SAT II subject tests.

There’s a lot of information in the total national report to cover, so I’ll start with the big picture and hit the most important tables. If you’re interested in the whole report, it’s worth checking out. I aim to give a narrative overview of what is going on in all the most important tables of that 18 page document, so if you don’t want to stare at numbers but want to know what’s going on… keep reading. Numbers given are in Critical Reading / Mathematics / Writing , or complete SAT I reasoning composite score out of 2400 maximum.

The College Board says this data can be used to

• interpret scores of individual students within the broader context of data aggregated across groups of collegebound seniors;
• study changes over time in the characteristics of students taking SAT tests; and
• look at year-to-year educational and demographic changes in this population, along with changes in test performance.

So let’s do the last two, and individual readers can do the first with their own scores or whoever’s scores they happen to have handy, if they want.

First things first–scores dropped for the second year in a row. These scores are “within the expected range” over the long term, but this continues the trend seen with the introduction of the “new” SAT last year. What does it mean? Nothing that should matter on an individual level–the test, in its new longer and more expensive format, is unlikely to change again any time too soon.

Of the 1,494,531 people who took the SAT, with an average composite score of 1511 (502 Critical Reading, 515 Mathematics, and 494 Writing), 53% were female and 46% were male; this mirrors results from last year. The score comparison is, for CR / M / W, Male v. Female, 1526 (504 / 533 / 489) v. 1501 (502 / 499 / 500): a total score difference of just 25 points, in favor of guys. Last year, the difference was… 26 points. You see where this trend is going? Females were helped, once again, by the 11 point writing section advantage in the new SAT, which held steady from last year.

Here’s some correlational information which I find especially interesting: breakdowns of who took the test when. The College Board tracks people over their high school years and indicates if they most recently took the test in Senior, Junior, Sophomore, or Freshman year. Of the graduating class of 2007, 1,001,667 took the test their senior year (either only, or most recently, as an additional sitting). 485,401 took it their junior year, and from there it trickles down with 6339 / 1124 for 10th and 9th grade, respectively. Now, the scores from these sittings? Freshman fare worst overall, and they don’t have writing scores to compare since it wasn’t around for them, but still manage a 1 pt increase over seniors in mathematics. People who only take the test their senior year are the next worse, with 493 / 505 / 486 for a composite score of 1484. Followed by, shocker here, juniors! Who go 522 / 534 / 511 for a total composite of 1567. The best scoring group are those who take the test only in their sophomore year, and their mean score is 1603 (526 / 549 / 528).

Lastly for today, a few Fun Facts, a preview of the percentiles and demographics data to come in the next post in this series:

• Of the 9% of test takers for whom English is not their first language learned (reporting), there was a 7 point mean increase on the math section, while there was a 32 point decline in the critical reading and 24 point decline on average in the writing section.
• 22% of test-takers say they don’t plan to apply for financial aid. (Why not? Lot’s of reasons, but a lot of those numbers probably should be applying, I bet!)
• Those students with coursework or experience in Italian did worst on the math section of all languages polled, with a mean score of 509–lower even than the dismal performances of “other languages.”

Look forward to more to come! Just didn’t want to overload people with too many numbers and too much text all in one place. Enjoy!