Blogs

Another morning all home together. As I begin this blog, it’s a holiday here in BC, the very first celebration of the newly created Family Day. With this holiday, plus two professional development days for teachers, the short month of February is a very short month indeed for school children. For many families the extra days off mean scrambles for childcare and fewer hours for those who depend on the time their children are in school to get work done.

As higher education’s business model implodes, its connection to ethics is revealed.

This semester I find myself engaged in a television serial for the first time in a long time, and I think it’s no accident that it’s the same semester that I’m teaching Victorian literature again for the first time in a long time. The pleasures of the serial are well established, and the Victorian novel originated many of them: the multi-strand narrative with many characters, intertwining narratives of class mobility and courtship, love, death, and striving.

I need some help from my wise and worldly readers on this one. A longtime reader writes: Do you know of any data, reporting, etc, on the information-seeking habits of transfer students when looking at four-year colleges? I would make a guess that some things are the same, but if there are differences, then we should be taking them into account.

Are we paying close enough attention to the lessons we can learn from our colleagues in for-profit higher education? Will the for-profits invest the resources and maintain the long-term focus necessary to develop educational platforms and post-secondary services that elevate them into the elite tier of higher education?

An award-winning high school teacher wants to make sure we know what's to blame for unprepared college students. He's asked college teachers to spread the word.

In the aftermath of the December 2012 shooting tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, I joined with a group of more than 350 university presidents and chief executive officers to sign a letter urging our elected representatives in Washington to take action against what is becoming an increasingly disturbing incidence of gun violence at educational institutions.

The last time I wrote about Sandy Shugart, I gave him a bit of a hard time. Based on his essay last week, I regret that. It’s a wonderful piece, well worth reading. It’s about the “completion agenda,” and the useful and destructive ways that it can be interpreted.