Tag: Education

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Best Read-Resume Cover Of a Startup, Employee??–Dashnine Media » I (may) need a new job because my boss is a jerk

Jerk City
Image by Emma Swann via Flickr

Read the whole thing . I’d have to say after a 12 hour work day, with only a 30 minute lunch and a couple of breaks I felt a surge while reading this. Although I am not working for a startup.

Dear _________,
I’m writing to express an interest to interview with your company. I may need to leave my current situation. I know its against convention to trash my last employer when applying for a job. If you read this, I think you’ll understand and excuse my behavior.
For six months I’ve worked under the promise of an eventual pay off. To date, I’ve received minimal compensation for my efforts. The past three months, I’ve worked 12-14 hour days six days a week and my boss expects me to “stick it out” for success that may or may not come. I know the hours for a fact. When I had trouble getting things done he made me account in writing
Dashnine Media » I (may) need a new job because my boss is a jerk.

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Chris Blattman's Blog: Is college the new high school?

Higher Education
Image by JohnConnell via Flickr

Forgive me for the old they don’t make em like they used to rirades but they actually don’t.

Is college the new high school?
A liberal arts English professor writing in Inside Higher Ed:
After too many years at this job (I am in my mid-40s), I have grown to question higher education in ways that cannot be rectified by a new syllabus, or a sabbatical, or, heaven forbid, a conference roundtable. No, my troubles with this treasured profession are both broad and deep, and they begin with a fervent belief that most of today’s college students, especially those that come to college straight from high school, are unnecessarily coddled. Professors and administrators seek to “nurture” and “engage” and they are doing so at the expense of teaching. The result: a discernable and precipitous decline in the quality of college students. More of them come to campus with dreadful study habits. Too few of them read for pleasure. Too many drink and smoke excessively. They are terribly ill-prepared for four years of hard work, and most dangerously, they do not think that college should be arduous. Instead they perceive college as an overnight recreation center in which they exercise, eat, and in between playing extracurricular sports, they carry books around. If a professor is lucky, the books are being skimmed hours before class.
Via MR.
Chris Blattman’s Blog: Is college the new high school?.

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Study to be paid

Philantrophist Eli Broad has an educational program called Spark to improve school children’s test scores:

Seventh-graders can earn up to $50 a test — for 10 assessment tests throughout the year. There’s a similar program for fourth-graders. The money goes into a bank account that only the student can access. The better you do, the more money you earn, up to $500 a year for seventh-graders. The idea is to make school tangible for disadvantaged kids — short-term rewards that are in their long-term best interest…
[Eight-grader Soledad Moya] said she wasn’t a “studying kind of” person before the awards. Now she and her friends like to look in the dictionary and memorize words and their definitions, and they ask their teachers for more practice tests. Even though she’s not eligible for the awards now that she’s in eighth grade, she’s still studying harder before tests, she said. “Once you get started with something, you keep doing it.”
The changes she saw in students like Moya caused Lisa Cullen — a literacy and social studies teacher at the school — to go from skeptic to supporter: “I saw how it takes away the uphill battle you have trying to get students to study for tests.” She saw a definite increase in students’ excitement, enthusiasm and effort.
Link

Wow! That is exactly of why I studied to ace that Science in fourth grade, to buy myself a horde of comics.
Even though they may say that it’s basically bribing kids to study (isn’t that what scholarhsips are about?), you have to concede that the short-term gains are quite tangible and attractive enough to be taken upon on. In plain economics, it’s the power of incentives!
What experts underestimate here is the power of building a long-term habit in the school children participating with the program. Not only are study habits going to be built, but the confidence and self-esteem of the students will also be given a boost.

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