Blogs

Aaahh. It’s evaluation season. Time for the tables to be turned on you. Yes, you, the professor. You thought you were being so clever by trying to institute some kind of an email policy: Telling your students not to email you at midnight and expect an answer before the 9 am class. You thought you were teaching your students responsibility by telling them not to wait until the night before to ask questions about their papers.

The second day of the NCPR conference struck a funny note. Many of us had noticed that the persistent theme on Thursday was “here’s a study that shows that (pick your intervention) doesn’t work.” Honestly, it was a little dispiriting. To start Friday’s discussion, Tom Brock of the CCRC opened by acknowledging the relative bummer of the first day’s findings, but then suggesting that, tone aside, some consensus had emerged about measures that actually do work.

This weekend the NYTimes ran a story headlined "Apple’s Retail Army, Long on Loyalty but Short on Pay". We learn that of the 43,000 U.S. Apple employees, 30,000 are relatively low-paid store employees. Apple's 327 stores sold $16 billion in merchandise, and have per square foot earnings that are higher than any other retailer (next is Tiffany's).

The Olympics are right around the corner. To me, swimming is a thing of beauty.

Two weeks ago we traveled to Colorado for a family wedding. The wedding was beautiful and I also appreciated the fact that this was an academic love story in every way. The bride (my niece) who holds a Master’s in Math and the groom who has a Ph.D. in Math fell in love in graduate school and their love of math was an important catalyst. What a beautiful story and it all added up to a wedding to be followed now by an increasing number of anniversaries.

On the eve of his high school graduation, Ben told me he had a recurring fear that his diploma would actually be the blank sheet that the principal hands students who have not completed graduation requirements, but wish to walk with their class. I assured him that if he was missing or failing something, I would know about it — but in the event, we both checked.

In the spring of 2008 I stood on the lawn in front of the president’s house at the College of William and Mary with a group of undergraduates, fellow graduate students, and faculty singing the alma mater and wondering if anybody was hearing the students’ voices swell.

I spent Thursday at the “Strengthening Developmental Education” conference presented by the MDRC at Columbia University in a shockingly hot New York City. It was an odd cluster of presentations. On the one hand, the intellectual firepower present and the quality of evidence mustered was encouraging. There was an honesty about findings, and a humility in the face of facts, that’s all too rare at academic conferences. On the other, though, that meant that many of the findings suggested that much of the student success toolkit -- learning communities, summer bridge programs, and dual enrollment, to name a few -- just won’t live up to our hopes.