Adios to Spanish 101 Classroom (Inside Higher Ed)
After several years of experimenting with “hybrid” Spanish courses that mix online and classroom instruction, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has decided to begin conducting its introductory Spanish course exclusively on the Web. ¶ Spanish 101, which had featured online lessons combined with one classroom session per week, will drop its face-to-face component in an effort to save on teaching costs and campus space in light of rising demand for Spanish instruction and a shrinking departmental budget. ¶ “We were seeing that there was just a lot of demand on our resources, both monetary and space-wise, due to Spanish,” said Larry King, chair of the Romance Languages and Literatures Department.Larry King? That guy really gets around.
• Meanwhile, the nation’s Poet Laureate is targeting community colleges, her favorite sector of higher ed, to promote poetry:
Poetry for Community Colleges (Inside Higher Ed)
…Today marks the official launch of [Kay] Ryan's project "Poetry for the Mind's Joy," an initiative through which she hopes to draw national attention to community colleges, as well as drawing the colleges' attention to poetry. ¶ "I couldn’t wait to get to UCLA," Ryan says, "to get away from the community college, and it took me a number of years to have it truly dawn on me that I’d been treated much better at community college than I was at UCLA … [where] I was in classes of 300, and … I didn’t ever talk to my professors, I talked to the TA, and often my papers were graded by a whole rotation of TAs. If I had three papers, they would wind up graded by three different TAs, and there’s no coherence, there’s no relationship.… And at community college, all of my instructors knew my name; I had a personal relationship with them. Which is beyond price."…• Back here in the OC, Tom Fuentes’ pal Chris Norby, on the Board of Supervisors, is lengthening his record of bizarre comments and actions. The Supes heard a report on child welfare in the county, and this led to a discussion of childhood nutrition:
Do bike-helmet laws, free lunches make kids fatter? (OC Reg)
…21 percent of O.C. kids age 5-20 are still overweight, according to Dr. Michael Riley, Social Services chief deputy director, who discussed the findings at the board’s regular biweekly meeting.Wow. What an idiot.
Riley also noted that the recession has affected children, although not as much as in harder-hit parts of the country. Forty-three percent of public-school children got free or discounted lunches as part of a federal program during the 2008-09 school year, up from 40 percent last year.
Supervisor Chris Norby peppered Riley with questions throughout the doctor’s presentation. Norby wondered whether there might be a connection between obesity rates and the free-lunch program.
“When we give kids more and more free food, because they are in economic need, yet they are getting fatter, is there something there that’s a health concern?”Norby said.
The Reg later interviewed Norby by phone, and he then “acknowledged that the nutritional value in school lunches affects all kids, not just poor ones.”
Evidently, Norby’s also down on bike-helmet laws.
“I think bicycle helmet laws, while well-intentioned to protect kids, probably have contributed to [obesity] as well, because when you make it more difficult for kids to exercise because maybe you’re concerned about his safety, sometimes you have a negative effect where the kids don’t do as much of it,” he said during the meeting.
6 comments:
This guy is one of Fuentes' pals? Figures.
- First day of class this quarter:
English 28A at UCI
Student: "What is a Poet Laureate?"
Instructor: "Oh. Uhm--I don't know. It's a title, really. They don't do anything, kind of like the State Flower. It just exists."
- I never wore a helmet on my bicycle. I DID stop riding when the law was enforced. I bought a bike last year, and I still don't wear a helmet. It don't have a good reason why, and I still don't care.
- A majority of Mrs. 13's students in a Capo MS last year were on the free lunch program. They never had pencils and notebooks for class because they were too poor. But, they had pizza and potato chips every day. They also had sharpie markers, which were not allowed, and they drank Red Bulls and Rockstar energy drinks like it was water. Many of them were obese. Correlation is not causation, but there may/could be something there upon further examination? (and that goes for every student, not just the poor ones)
13, I suppose my thinking was this: even if the lunches poor kids get at school cafeterias are mediocre (healthwise), it is better (again, healthwise--with regard to conditions for learning, development, etc.) that they eat a mediocre meal midday than no meal at all. What do you think of the latter proposition? Also, I assumed (erroneously? correctly?) that these kids are eating more or less the same food that non-poor kids are eating, since they are eating at the same cafeteria. Hence, it struck me as odd that Norby would conclude that "feeding the poor causes them to get fat" when the obvious conclusion is more general: cafeteria food (at the schools) is part of the obesity problem. -R
Jason - what class IS ENG 28A?
Is the teacher (TA? Prof? lecturer?) offering a critique or ???
Just FYI - the poet laureates that I know - Robert Hass and Al Young, national and state, respectively, worked their a****s off.
(Also - have you discovered the official UCI Disorientation Manual? The Radical Student Union published it. They have a blog and are on FB and MySpace. You might want to look 'em up. Radical Student Union UCI.)
RG,
28A (Poetic Imagination) is an intro class focusing on historical structures and styles. The class is taught by a PhD candidate. My quote wasn't a knock on him, he seems like a good dude, and a knowledgeable instructor (I like him). In fact, his quote was rather humorous (after discussing Billy Collins' Sweet Talk, and his reading of it on YouTube).
I have not discovered the Disorientation Manual, but I am VERY MUCH interested. Can you email me a link, or will simple google search yield me the results?
RB,
I agree that Norby's conclusion is whack, and you are correct (ha, like you need to hear it from me!) in the generally obvious nature of terrible cafeteria food. My unresearched guess is that some giant corporation got an "in" to make huge profits by pushing their junk onto kids, where a more socially and health conscious company would cost more.
But back to health. Kids simply need more exercise to offset that increase in fatty, sugary calories. A body in motion burns more calories than one which is not in motion. I ate the same crap as a youngster as kids do today. I also ran twenty miles a week, and played year-round baseball. All caloric consumption and economic factors being considered, active children will be more healthy than inactive children.
Let us not compare Robert Hass with Billy Collins.
(Different poet laureates do things differently, I guess - I know Hass took the charge quite seriously.)
You shoudl check out his work.
I think you can google the RSU - but I'll see what I can find.
Post a Comment