Opinion

As the academic year winds down, it's a great time to remind students of the joys of (unassigned) reading, writes Melissa Ballard.

We have a grant-funded program designed to get students with severe educational deficits into basic skills programs, and then into “contextualized” remediation that leads into short-term employable certificates. The idea is to help folks who would normally be consigned to the economic margins to become employable at higher, if still fairly modest, levels.

Young women scientists leave academia in far greater numbers than men for three reasons. During their time as Ph.D. candidates, large numbers of women conclude that (i) the characteristics of academic careers are unappealing, (ii) the impediments they will encounter are disproportionate, and (iii) the sacrifices they will have to make are great.

How many non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with edtech companies have you signed?

The other day, I was nonplussed to read a recap of a study here that found human and robot graders fared equally well in assessing the work of student writers. The robo-graders, according to the study, do as good a job as humans at assessing clarity, sentence structure, and sometimes (but not always) relevant content. While my initial reaction was “huh?” it’s important to note that this study only compared processes for scoring standardized tests. It has nothing at all to do with what happens in the classroom when students are learning to write. In fact, it really has nothing to do with teaching or learning, only testing, and testing the wrong things at that.

When I search for "social media guidelines," sans quotes on Google, there are 41,200,000 results. Corporate sites, blog posts, higher education institutions, and more provide a rich amount of social media guideline examples. When I'm out on the road working with schools or conference attendees, I am often asked to provide social media guideline resources.

One of the topics I teach in my Quantitative Reasoning class is the calculation of a retirement savings goal. It is always shocking to my students how much money they will need to save in order to live comfortably in their retirement. However, as daunting as the goal may seem, I emphasize that it is important to begin to put some of what we earn away into a safe fund so we can draw on it in the future, when we need it. I found myself thinking of this concept recently when I attended a track meet in which my daughter and her young friends competed. I had to laugh when she asked me after her meet "did you like to run when you were a kid, too, mom?"

Right now I am in the midst of the I-haven't-washed-my-hair-in-a-week, merciful-heavens-when-will-it-be-over, end-of-semester rush: a state to which I suspect a few Gradhacker readers can relate.