Incentives for high school curriculum change
Leslie Maxwell writes a short and solid blog entry (and maybe a story later this week) about the politics of college admissions at San Diego State University. Specifically, SDSU’s move to eliminate a preferential admissions policy for high school students from San Diego has sparked a debate about perceived obligations to serve the local community. […]
Avoid the interrupting, comma
One more bit of advice to students this afternoon: If you wish to write forceful sentences, do not be a writer, who places a comma between the subject, and verb of a sentence, nor between parts of a compound verb or noun with, only two items, nor in the middle of, a prepositional phrase. (Remove the underlined […]
Do not use dictionary definitions in papers, unless you’re writing a paper about dictionaries
A word of advice to all students: in almost every subject, no matter what some teacher told you years ago, do not ever waste your time or words repeating a dictionary definition in an academic paper. Whatever Mr. Johnson’s and Mr. Webster’s successors wrote down is descriptive, not authoritative, and almost certainly it is useless […]
Issues in electronic grade reports
This morning’s article in USA Today on electronic grade reports is a reminder of a few important facts in evaluating technology use in schools: Ease of use (in jargon, “usability”) is critical to adoption. The systems that existed a few years ago were (and many still are) clunky and hard to use for both teachers […]
Sometimes, negotiations are tough slogging because they’re tough
By Sherman Dorn on November 11, 2009
Whether in reference to the Obama administration, the AFT, academic administrators at some universities, Iran, or some other entity, my personal news reading and listening in the last week has been full of finger-pointing about reneging on deals, backing away from apparent deals, undermining good trends, falsifying promising hints, or ruining fresh minty breath. It […]
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