students

Yesterday I had an interesting discussion with a former student about math. That's right: math.

The Women's Studies department I teach in has a sort of open adjunct/student lounge with computers and a small library and a table and such -- a place to hang out and get a little work done or chat online or whatever. This student was working on some algebra, and was clearly frustrated. She turns to me and says, "Why do we have to learn this stuff?! When am I ever going to need to know about imaginary numbers?"

Two things you should know about me. First, I started my academic career as an engineering major -- aerospace, to be precise. While I quickly bailed out of engineering, I have a great respect for the applied sciences, and the sciences in general.

Scott Young, who I interviewed on Lifehack Live back in January, sent me a copy of his new e-book called Learn More, Study Less. In our interview, he describes his notion of "lifelong learning" (which he says is a misnomer -- "if learning isn't life long, what is it?") which makes up the subject of his new book.

Every semester, I spend a lot of time explaining the term paper assignments to students. I talk about them when I hand out my syllabus, I spend a good half-hour discussing the assignment about 3 weeks into the course, and I revisit the topic several times up until the last week before the due date.

Every time I bring it up, I ask if students have any questions. The questions I get are always about teh same damn thing: formatting. "Does it have to be typed?" "What size margins should I use?" "What style do you want the references in?"

I can only imagine that other professors and/or high school teachers hammer students over formatting, without paying much attention to their ideas -- which are, ostensibly, what we assign papers to help students get at and express.

Last August, I wrote about the high price of textbooks and what I feel is an exploitative relationship between authors and publishers on one hand and the students we serve on the other. An officer of the Text and Academic Authors Association (TAA), to which I belong, came across the post and asked me to write up my argument for the TAA Newsletter. The piece is coming out in print next month, but is already up on the TAA website. The post itself is in the member's only section of the site, but I'll post it to my portfolio once it's out in hard copy.

I read a lot of other people's writing, in both my role as a teacher, grading papers students hand in, and as an editor at lifehack.org, preparing contributors' work for publication on the site. Lately, I've been noticing a strange phonemenon: the gratuitous Capitalization of random Words.

It's as if suddenly we've returned to the days of Pilgrim's Progress, where Words are capitalized to show that they represent Important Concepts -- except the words That are capitalized are often not All that important. Or it's like we suddenly adopted German Grammar, where all the Nouns are capitalized -- except it's not Just nouns. In fact, I've searched in vain for a pattern, and can't find one.

If you're a college student and a blogger, CollegeScholarships.org is offering a $10,000 scholarship you might want to apply for. $10,000! Why didn't we have blogging when I was in college...?

Last weeks post at lifehack.org were:

• Sticky Ideas Workshop (Part 3): Concrete Part 3 of my series on Chip and Dan Heath's Made to Stick
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Let me let you in on a little secret: college textbooks in the US are grossly overpriced. It's been shown time and again that the same books can cost much less in Canada and the UK, and can often be ordered for less even after adding the cost of international shipping!

When I was in graduate school, I tutored low-income high school students through the Princeton Review's non-profit branch, to prepare them for taking the SAT. While I had the satisfaction of knowing I was helping some really smart kids get into college, SAT prepping isn't really education.  Most of it consists of teaching kids how to game the system -- the SAT is a really unsophisticated test, and all it takes is a few simple tricks to boost your score 100 or even more points.

Read/Write Web has a great list of online applications for students. Online applications are generally free (at least for basic service, and upgraded services tend to be cheap), fairly easy to use, and most importantly are available wherever you have access to a computer.