Of all the challenges faced by people who’ve been displaced, perhaps none is more important than to find new meaning in their lives. And so it is with the four young women who are students in a college prep class that I teach at Dickinson College. All four students were among the more than 200 Chibok […] … learn more→
Once captives of Boko Haram, these students are finding new meaning in their lives in Pennsylvania
Debate: How to make good use of school assessments?
What can be done when evaluations do not stop falling, be they international ( Pisa , Pirls or Timss ), or national ( CP, CE1 ), and that they are not very good? Should we deplore, with Stanislas Dehaene, the absence of a reaction of the “Pisa shock” type ? The disappointing performances of French students in recent surveys have most often had the effect of indignant […] … learn more→
Australia should start planning for universal tertiary education
Australia is often characterised as having a mass higher education system. In fact, it could be called near-universal. According to the 2016 Census, 56% of Australians aged 15 years and over – 9.6 million people – hold a post-school qualification, up from 46% in 2006. Universal education does not mean every Australian should attain a higher education […] … learn more→
What nobody tells you about ‘minor corrections’
In the UK system, the majority of PhD students pass their viva ‘with minor corrections’. Your examiners present you with a list of corrections, you go away and implement them. Easy, yes? Well, no, not necessarily. If you’re lucky, corrections are simply typos, formatting issues etc. So far, so good. Any thesis will inevitably contain […] … learn more→
«This site cannot be reached»: your first aid tips
“This site cannot be reached” is, maybe, the most frequent error that Google Chrome, Opera (and some other Chromium-based browsers) can face. It appears with the following explanations «server DNS address could not be found» and «Server IP address could not be found» and ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED code. The error has nothing to do with the version […] … learn more→
Leveling up in saying ‘no’
If there’s one thing that seems to dog many academics’ lives, it’s the inability to say ‘no’. We often find ourselves over-committed and frazzled with deadlines…and it can be a frenzy of our own making. I’m not talking here about being given inappropriate workloads or sky-high benchmarks to be met. These are larger structural and […] … learn more→
College prep for Generation Z
Generation Z is made up of those born between 1997 and 2012. They are the digital kids that have been raised with a device in their hand and a screen in their face, however, don’t discount this generation as an over obsessed bunch of tech addicts. Generation Z is proving to be a generation that gets the […] … learn more→
Teacher unions say they’re fighting for students and schools – what they really want is more members
When schoolteachers in Los Angeles went on a weeklong strike in January, the head of the local teachers union described it as a “battle for the soul of public education.” When Denver public school teachers went on a three-day strike in February, they did it in the name of “schools Denver students deserve.” When teachers began their […] … learn more→
International graduate school enrollments decline in consecutive years (First time ever)
Gloom and doom reports have always been around. I can find “new reports” of the dollar becoming worthless from the turn of the century…and similar reports from last week. Sooner or later they’ll be right, I suppose. Even a tiny rise in my tumor markers can presage the final run of cancer through my body…and […] … learn more→
An intern in a company: need to be paid or not? Legal and ethical study
A number of students in Quebec Canada at the end of November last year demanded that the internship be paid. Do they have a point? Some people consider unpaid internships to be a good thing, especially those who have benefited from the internship contract. While some others emphasize that there is forgetting the issue of injustice if we consider […] … learn more→