Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is one of my favorite plays. At the...
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A SummerTIME blog by Betty Wanjiku Njenga
SummerTIME for the past one week has been quite enriching. The discussions and preceding readings involved the issues of sexual orientation, rape as a term used to describe the forceful penetration of one’s ideas into another culture, and gender violence. We had the opportunity to explore why and how many women, and sometimes even men, experience violence. Even [...]
The Race Begins Today
The purpose(s) of compulsory education in modern America have not been clear. Today, during President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s announcement of the criteria for the “Race to the Top” Fund, they will become a little clearer. In The Washington Post, both the President and Secretary of Education discussed the new plan. Duncan outlined four reforms: “To reverse [...]
Globalization and Higher Education
By Bill Tierney
A recently completed UNESCO conference in Paris raised a variety of issues I have been considering over the last several years: The findings from the conference, and a recent report I did with a colleague in Australia are similar in outlook and findings. Education is a growth industry, with most of the growth coming in Asia. Whereas [...]
Language policy and imperialism
By Bill Tierney
A year or so ago I spent my sabbatical in Malaysia at University Sains Malaysia. Malaysia is a great country with a superb climate, beautiful scenery, incredible food, and multiple cultures. The people are great. The country is also undergoing a great deal of change that is causing some angst. Over 50% of the population [...]
A SummerTIME blog by Victor Cruz
This week the program really emphasized its four fundamental aspects: tools, information, motivation, and education. Our readings switched from African-American critics to those of Mexican and Chicano decent. These readings were responses to first wave Chicano activists and their movement. The readings focused specifically on machismo and femenismo and their complex relationship. Traditionally these two [...]
A SummerTIME blog by Salvador Avila
This week was very exciting, even though I missed two days for orientation at my school. We went over our rough drafts with our instructor individually, while getting advice of how to improve our writing skills. We also learned how to link paragraphs together with great transitional sentences. We are also assigned a writing counselor [...]
A SummerTIME blog by Betty Wanjiku Njenga
This second week in SummerTIME has been an even more intense period. We shifted from discussions on the issues that affect African American and Latino people within the country to an explicit review of other marginalized people. This week we studied the Chicana women and their fight for liberation from a society that essentializes different [...]
Purposeful technology in the classroom
Last fall I stumbled upon a new technology. I imagined the potential uses for it in the classroom, and I longed to be a high school English teacher yet again. Sometimes technologies are thrust upon teachers and the purposes are not clearly defined and/or understood. Rather than facilitating learning, the technology becomes an albatross. In [...]
Are teachers saints?
Tapped, a blog by the folks at The American Prospect, recently commented on some comments made by Arne Duncan. In particular, the Secretary of Education said great teachers perform “miracles every single day” and effective teachers “walk on water.” The blogger, Dana Goldstein, describes the ideology of Arne Duncan: Teachers can and do educate disadvantaged students, but [...]
Recent Developments in Online Learning
By June Ahn
Evidence of online learning pop up everyday. Another state has adopted a free career counseling curriculum, available online and developed by Microsoft. In addition, a recent meta-analysis done by the U.S. Department of Education finds that blended learning – classroom instruction combined with online learning options – show improved learning performance when compared to just [...]
