The Writing Teacher"s Hypocrisy - http://clapway.com/2015/11/08/writing-teachers-hypocrisy/

The hardest thing about teaching people how to write is teaching them to make mistakes, to not be afraid, and to write what they want to write. Most of my students were more concerned with the product than the process, which is what kills good writing. How can someone produce a good piece of writing if s/he is counting how many points I will take off for each grammatical error? How can an essay be enticing if the author’s main concern is where their thesis statement belongs, or that there are only two body paragraphs in the essay instead of three? How can a teacher teach someone to write if they are expected to count the grammatical errors, or evaluate the formulaic essay? That is one reason I stopped teaching. I was a hypocrite! Writers become writers when they take risks when they learn how to enter the zone, when they make a million mistakes, delete drafts, and revisit a piece over and over again. How could I not teach that? I was not an effective teacher because I couldn’t teach my students that their process of writing was valuable. Standardized education teaches students to earn a grade in the same way that they will earn a salary someday.

The new audience for a high school student is a computer that can grade a paper objectively. Do computers remember a piece that made them laugh or cry? Do computers get blown away by something a student wrote? Do computers know where that piece started and ended? Do computers know that sometimes a subject only deserves one paragraph? How can a piece of writing be evaluated without emotion?

I stopped teaching because the audience is the most critical part of the process. It is hypocrisy to teach that it is not. I had become too comfortable in my public-school-pension-cocoon, so at 56 I gave up the better pension, stuffed all of my stuff in my attic, rented out my house and headed to Malaysia. After four months working for an e-learning company, I suddenly found myself in a position as a team leader because I was the only one willing to take the risk and do it. Taking this risk has given me a chance to grow. I find myself jazzed by the challenge and the knowledge I have gained about people, process, language, and business. And I have not gained this knowledge without a few mistakes along the way. Now, I am not a hypocrite. I can ask people to take risks, make mistakes, meet impossible deadlines, and rewrite, or restart. However, here in an office, in a country far away from my own, I see the writers suffering from the non-risk-taking syndrome. They, like my students, balk at rewriting their work, doing something more than once, or doing something differently. These are people who were raised in the 60’s and 70’s. Weren’t their masters Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Alan Ginsburg, Toni Morrison, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Atwood to mention a few?

So I leave you with the introduction to this piece, which just became the conclusion. Sometimes when I start to write a piece for this blog, I look at the other posts and my critical voice tells me this is all wrong. I am not following the rules. When I search a site that lists trending topics, I am wrong again. No one seems to be interested in Indonesia or stranded cars in Mexico. So what to write? I want to tell the world what to do. I want to be funny and opinionated. I want to write about being an expatriate, about lessons learned, about being a teacher, about my two-year walkabout. . . So that is what I am going to do.

The Writing Teacher"s Hypocrisy

The #Obama administration has recently unveiled the "#CollegeScorecard," highlighting schools with the biggest bang for your #education buck. - http://clapway.com/2015/09/14/obama-college-scorecard123/

In a push for education equality and against exploitation by for-profit colleges, the Obama administration has unveiled a “College Scorecard” highlighting schools with the biggest bang for your buck.

The end-product of a two-year investigation of 7,000 institutions of higher education, the College Scorecard differs from other university ranking systems by comparing college costs to graduation rates, loan repayment rates, and average post-graduate salaries. The resulting college search engine tool, available at collegescorecard.ed.gov, encourages recipients of Pell grants and student loans to apply to schools with high graduation rates and post-graduate salaries.

The Obama administration is also sharing the data it found with major college ranking services and websites in order to better provide the public with savvy information when applying to schools.

College Scorecard Is a Push Against Corporate College

While the US has more institutions of higher education than ever before, access to high-quality higher education has never been more prohibitive. With perhaps the fastest-growing pricetag of any service in the country, college’s role as a “great equalizer” is becoming more and more of a fiction.

Two things are happening: first, expensive colleges are becoming simply too expensive to be worth the cost. Especially for the vast majority of these school’s students who are forced to take out loans–which often take upwards of two or three decades to repay in full–the comparative opportunity that these schools offer does not make up for the shackling debt that they require. Hence, more people are vying for cheaper college options (but clearly not enough, since colleges can hike their prices every year and people still apply).

Second, many cheaper colleges are using increasingly dirty business tactics, evidenced in the rise of “for-profit colleges.” These schools–which include many single-location schools as well as nationwide and/or online programs like University of Phoenix, Corinthian Colleges, DeVry University, and ITT Technical Institute–advertise their education aggressively, sometimes even shaming low-income people into applying. Many for-profits have grown notorious for prioritizing tuition revenue over graduation rates, career preparation, and post-graduate salaries. Far from equalizers, many are perpetuators of income inequality and poverty.

Both of these phenomena–the rising costs of higher-quality universities, and the dirty business methods of cheaper ones–are products of an overall corporatization of higher education. One of the purposes of College Scorecard is to make prospective students as business-minded as these colleges: if schools only care about their bottom line, then students deserve to be able to use the same logic, choosing a school based on how likely they are to graduate from it and find a well-paid job, based on how much they have to pay for it.

Obama’s Dream, Partially Realized

Obama first announced this plan two years ago. But back then, it was more ambitious: not only would it rank all 7,000 schools based on their “worth” from a student perspective, but it would even penalize high-cost, low-reward universities and for-profit colleges by restricting their access to Pell grants and Federal student loans, shifting these benefits to more “worth-it” schools. The idea was that taxpayers should not be subsidizing tuition that profits institutions more than students.

The idea garnered scathing criticism. Much of it came from presidents of the very high-cost universities and for-profit schools who would have been penalized by the program. They paid to lobby against the plan and save their backs. They seem to have succeeded.

There were reasonable critiques of his idea as well: that an alternative ranking system would manipulate the truth about quality of education, or that an emphasis on post-graduate salaries would end up de-funding the liberal arts. But who can say to what extent these critiques were construed to veil the penny-pinching motives of corporate college lobbyists.

Still, the College Scorecard Is a Step in the Right Direction

While more work still must be done in terms of breaking down corporate colleges and equalizing education opportunity, this is a step in the right direction and a much-needed show of resistance against the unadulterated corporatization of higher education. But if more steps do not follow, then the College Scorecard’s impact may be difficult to measure.

What do you think is the most important step in providing equal access to higher education in the U.S., starting with the College Scorecard? Share your wisdom!

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Obama Administration Reveals College Scorecard

As if we needed more reasons to quit smoking. - http://clapway.com/2015/07/12/need-another-reason-why-smoking-is-harmful-heres-one-235/

Another Reason Why Smoking is Harmful

There may be a new reason why smoking is harmful for your health — it may hinder your ability to receive an education.

A recent study conducted by three universities — University of Colorado, New York University, and University of North Carolina — estimates that “approximately 145,000 deaths” could be avoided each year with higher retention rates for high school students, and better push for these same students to earn an advanced degree after high school.

This number is suggested to be the same amount that suffers from smoking-related illnesses each year, inspiring the possibility of the link between education and smoking to be hypothesized.

What Were the Study’s Findings?

The study also suggests that those who acquire a higher degree have a higher likelihood of earning more comfortable incomes and are numerically less likely to become smokers; they also tend to have access to better health care, including jobs with health insurance. This result suggests a reactionary effect: those with better educations have a higher social status, which allows for access to better healthcare and income. Interestingly enough, the study doesn’t actually find direct correlations between smoking and education in its findings, though there is plenty of information to support this hypothesis.

So why focus on education in this kind of study? Co-author and associate professor of public health Vanessa Chang says, “In public health policy, we often focus on changing health behaviors such as diet, smoking and drinking. Education —which is a more fundamental, upstream driver of health behaviors and disparities — should also be a key element of U.S. health policy”. Indeed, many may question how education directly impacts health care problems, though it is clear that it plays an important role in the impact of the importance placed on these health care factors. Apparently, smoking is harmful in multi-faceted ways other than physical health.

How Can This Help?

By using education as the bridge between the influences of poor decision-making when it comes to other health care choices — like smoking, diet, and exercise — we can allow for a better analysis of how to combat these issues and work towards making it easier for adolescents and young adults to steer clear of these influences.

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How Can Higher Education Save Your Life? - http://clapway.com/2015/07/09/how-can-higher-education-save-your-life876/

Low levels of education are quite common in the United States, as well as all over the world. More than 10 percent of the adults between the ages of 25 and 34 who live in U.S do not have a high school degree, and this appears to be influencing their rate of mortality.

An initiative aiming to improve life in the United States was launched by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Its goals are to increase the number of students who complete high school by the year 2020. According to the researchers, meeting these goals can have an enormous impact in increasing people’s survival rates.

Even if it might sound insane, researchers have determined that the lack of higher education can be deadly in certain situations. Yes, physical death can be linked to differences in education.

IS LACK OF higher EDUCATION DEADLY?

According to the team of researchers from the University of Colorado, New York University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who analyzed information on populations from 1925 through 2010, education can influence death rates to a staggering degree – to over one million people between the ages of 25 and 85, the lack of education is as dangerous as smoking cigarettes.

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE and it also informs us that about 110,000 deaths could have been prevented in 2010 if adults had completed their bachelor’s degree.

WHY CAN PEOPLE WITH HIGHER EDUCATION LIVE longer lives?

People who go to high school and a university may live longer for many reasons. The only reason isn’t that they can have higher income. Their lifestyles are generally healthier, and so is their psychological well-being.

Of course, there is no definitive proof between death and education, but the higher risk of death for less educated people is undeniable. Because of their unawareness, uneducated people are more likely to suffer from a diversity of diseases and their risk of a heart problem is quite higher than expected.

The conclusion researchers offered is supporting the notion that if people who didn’t complete their higher education studies went back to school and got their diplomas, we might save an impressive number of lives.

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How Can Higher Education Save Your Life?