Can you speak mortgage-backed securities?
I've been stretching myself over the last year and a half, learning all that I can about the economy. I did not take Economics in college or high school, so this study is definitely self-directed and personally generated.
Understanding about "toxic assets," "shadow banks," "credit default swaps," and the US Government's "TARP" plan has been pulling me in directions that I could have never imagined more than eighteen months ago. Every night I put on my iPod Classic, drifting off to sleep listening to American Public Media's "Marketplace" with Kai Ryssdal.
What I have learned relates directly to Chaos Theory and how our world is truly interconnected now. When George H.W. Bush described his New World Order, perhaps he meant this world that we are in right now where when a folks in a neighborhood in Las Vegas default on their risky loans, then workers in Finland might find themselves out of a job.
Our world, this brave new world, is so woven together that we must figure it out fast, or get left behind.
What are ways that you are stretching yourself beyond what you know?
Paddy Hirsch--"leaves all of us badly needing a drink."
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
Can't Stop the Tide: Same Sex Marriages and Gay Vice Squads
The culture wars dictate that there must be losers.
In the battle over same sex marriages, the losers try to dictate what others must do. In this case, those folks who love each other and who want to solidify lives together. We're not talking civil unions here, we are talking equals before and under God.
I, like most of us who grew up in the Black Church, was taught to fear what I really didn't know. For many of my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, growing up in a small town African American community outside of Chicago--Southern Baptist inflected--in the tumultuous 1960s and '70s and being a man in love with another man or a woman who adored another woman was tantamount to existing as a social pariah, or worse. One false move, like a side-long glance at a bar or showing affection for a beloved in the privacy of your own backyard, might mean certain death.
Forty years later what has changed? Not much, really. This past fall the New York City Police Department, posing as gay men, harassed and shut down gay hang-outs.
NOW FOR THE TRIUMPH: On the other hand, Sean Penn, 'a courageous heterosexual American,' brought life and hope to his portrayal of Harvey Milk in "Milk."
So, why all the fuss about same-sex marriage? Back in my youth, the lives of the "losers" could be erased in the blink of an eye because of the people they loved--just like the lives of black people during the early part of the Twentieth Century or Jews in Nazi Germany.
Those of us who moved and escaped the "programming" of those years can claim to be more enlightened, but where are my other heterosexual brothers and sisters who are standing up against the bigotry in our time. The Prop 8s or hate ministers in the Mega-churches?
Humanity dictates that lives are sacred: all lives, all the time. No matter how bleak, no matter how black, no matter...
Today the culture wars rage on Fox News while people are huddling under viaducts with not enough to eat, sleeping in tents year 'round. W-villes. With the race-baiting, gay-hating, loser-rama's on parade, the Anne Coulters, Rush Limbaughs, and anybody that dares to take on the toxic asset that is the Republican Party circa 2009, the flood waters of history are beating against the levees of those who want to deny equality--again. Can you hear me Michael Steele? Even the extreme religious far right is beginning to moderate. They don't want to be on the wrong side of history for eternity. WWJD?
We can no longer tolerate the bigotry of those who wish to stop Humanity's rushing tide. This is not agitprop or an Obamatron talking here. It's hard to respect people who get into office by becoming turtles when the world needs giraffes, especially when all are not considered full members of the human race.
Water's rising. Can't stop, can't stop, can't hold back that rising tide.
In the battle over same sex marriages, the losers try to dictate what others must do. In this case, those folks who love each other and who want to solidify lives together. We're not talking civil unions here, we are talking equals before and under God.
I, like most of us who grew up in the Black Church, was taught to fear what I really didn't know. For many of my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, growing up in a small town African American community outside of Chicago--Southern Baptist inflected--in the tumultuous 1960s and '70s and being a man in love with another man or a woman who adored another woman was tantamount to existing as a social pariah, or worse. One false move, like a side-long glance at a bar or showing affection for a beloved in the privacy of your own backyard, might mean certain death.
Forty years later what has changed? Not much, really. This past fall the New York City Police Department, posing as gay men, harassed and shut down gay hang-outs.
NOW FOR THE TRIUMPH: On the other hand, Sean Penn, 'a courageous heterosexual American,' brought life and hope to his portrayal of Harvey Milk in "Milk."
So, why all the fuss about same-sex marriage? Back in my youth, the lives of the "losers" could be erased in the blink of an eye because of the people they loved--just like the lives of black people during the early part of the Twentieth Century or Jews in Nazi Germany.
Those of us who moved and escaped the "programming" of those years can claim to be more enlightened, but where are my other heterosexual brothers and sisters who are standing up against the bigotry in our time. The Prop 8s or hate ministers in the Mega-churches?
Humanity dictates that lives are sacred: all lives, all the time. No matter how bleak, no matter how black, no matter...
Today the culture wars rage on Fox News while people are huddling under viaducts with not enough to eat, sleeping in tents year 'round. W-villes. With the race-baiting, gay-hating, loser-rama's on parade, the Anne Coulters, Rush Limbaughs, and anybody that dares to take on the toxic asset that is the Republican Party circa 2009, the flood waters of history are beating against the levees of those who want to deny equality--again. Can you hear me Michael Steele? Even the extreme religious far right is beginning to moderate. They don't want to be on the wrong side of history for eternity. WWJD?
We can no longer tolerate the bigotry of those who wish to stop Humanity's rushing tide. This is not agitprop or an Obamatron talking here. It's hard to respect people who get into office by becoming turtles when the world needs giraffes, especially when all are not considered full members of the human race.
Water's rising. Can't stop, can't stop, can't hold back that rising tide.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
The Threshold: College Admissions
So, the most competitive college admissions season is nearly behind us.
What have we learned?
What has been seen by students (and families) applying this year to college is that there is no way to know for sure how colleges make admissions' decisions or who will get into what schools, or why. Neither grades, nor test scores, or even a great non-academic profile will assure students the ability to get into the more so-called elite schools.
The great counsel that I can still give students and their parents is to follow their passions regardless of the name of a specific school or schools. Don't worry about getting into one of those named brand colleges or universities because you can't predict with any certainty what colleges may want in a particular applicant or in a class that they are trying to build.
The brutal fact is that the more elite schools are only admitting about 5% of those that apply.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell posits that the so-called elite schools like Harvard, Stanford, Brown, etc. would do just as well to have a lottery to get in once students have reached a certain acceptable admissions threshold.
Perhaps schools should stop with this crazy admissions process and go to Gladwell's lottery. In fact, perhaps that's what they should call it "Gladwell's lottery." So, I can hear it now in the halls at Princeton, "We went to a Gladwellian situation." Or, "How did your Gladwell turn out this year? Did you get that squash player you wanted?"
I poke a little fun perhaps, but it is ridiculous how these "elite" colleges are dictating what the less competitive colleges must do in order to be deemed successful.
From enrollment management to endowment creation to student selection, colleges will have to become more transparent. I tell students all the time that there is "a college out there that is just right for you."
I hope they believe it.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT--Open Source: Narrowing the Divide between Education, Business, and Community
© 2009 Jim Whitehurst. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ ).
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 44, no. 1 (January/February 2009): 70–71.
BY JIM WHITEHURST
Jim Whitehurst is President and CEO of Red Hat.
Comments on this article can be sent to the author at and/or can be posted to the web via the link at the bottom of this page.
Open source is now recognized in institutions of higher education as a viable technology solution that provides superior value at a fraction of the cost of proprietary applications. That's a good thing—but that's not all it can do. Open source can be a transformative force in education. In particular, it can transform computer science curricula. Academic institutions that are consumers of open source need to reverse roles and shift gears to “preach what they practice” and place higher emphasis on integrating open source into the classroom.
Open source is an increasingly important skill set that many of today's computer science graduates are lacking. This is not because students aren't interested in open source, but because very few colleges and universities currently offer open-source classes. In addition to eager students, there are many professors who are very interested in teaching open source in their classrooms and labs.
What Is Open Source?
Open source is a collaborative software-development method that harnesses the power of peer review and transparency of process to develop code that is freely accessible. Open source draws on an ecosystem of thousands of developers and customers all over the world to drive innovation. Traditional software companies provide only binary code and withhold source code, so users can run the software but cannot study, modify, or improve it. In contrast to these proprietary models, open-source software is distributed under nonrestrictive licensing terms that generally include access to the source code.
Why Open Source?
We live in an increasingly global community. Gone are the days when working for a company in an office meant serving a small geographic area from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Today’s graduates will work in a matrix environment where projects cut across organizational and geographic boundaries, requiring cooperation and communication. Open source uses the power of collaboration to provide students with hands-on learning and to equip students with an expanded skill set that is very attractive to businesses.
Open source better prepares students for the business world by exposing them to real-world problems and encouraging learning through the completion of real tasks. Open source amplifies a “hands-on” approach to learning by connecting students to a community of users in an effort to solve problems. Open-source developers don’t rely on textbooks; they rely on the knowledge base of other developers with whom they connect through community forums, building off of one another’s ideas to create a solution that is eventually shared with all. To this extent, open source better prepares students for future job experiences and allows them to complete, while they're still in school, work that's being used by the global open-source community.
Open source also teaches students useful skills that can be applied across other coursework and classes. Students have the opportunity to work with many more code bases in open source than are found in traditional student projects. This strengthens skills in collaboration, project management, and testing and encourages a well-rounded computer science education, making students more marketable in the business world.
It is widely accepted (though the point is impossible to prove) that many of the most gifted programmers in the world participate in open-source projects. Those projects provide a platform for them to display their achievements and for others to learn from them. This learning process happens naturally in open-source projects, but it can be encouraged by colleges and universities. The quality of the student's educational experience will be enhanced by learning from masters of the art.
Thus it is not just higher education institutions and the business community that benefit from open source in the classroom. As students sharpen their skills, they are able to drive increased innovation across open-source communities and projects. Working on open-source projects in school can serve as a gateway for students to continue to contribute after graduation. Projects have a longer shelf life and don't end when the semester ends. Students can continue to contribute long after they finish their coursework, graduate, and move into the working world.
Open source drives innovation faster due to its collaborative nature and community-backed effort. Teaching open source encourages better communication among students and prevents them from working in a vacuum, void of input or teamwork. Classrooms become smaller communities within the larger open-source community. This benefits students by teaching collaboration with classmates, and with others from across the globe, on how to resolve issues such as bug fixes.
Open source also allows students to leverage existing software for their own research purposes, and any code they contribute will find a much larger audience within the community. Students are a welcome addition to open-source projects, since they bring a fresh perspective—one that those already working in the project might miss. Working every day in a project can desensitize people to the pain points of new contributors, a fact that students can effectively point out when they are new to a project. This input allows the open-source project to create a better experience for its current and future contributors.
Who Are the Leaders?
Some pioneers in the academic world are serving as models for success. For example, open source has become a fundamental part of the curriculum in the School of Computer Studies at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada. The school has partnered with open-source projects such as Mozilla and the Fedora Project to expose its students to the growing opportunities that open source presents. Seneca students work within the Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open-source collaboration, while learning open-source development and administration. This proven model was developed at Seneca and will be incorporated into several programs beginning with its Linux/Unix System Administration (LUX) program, an intense one-year graduate certificate.
Other higher education institutions that have distinguished themselves as leaders in the open-source world include Oregon State University (OSU) and North Carolina State University (NCSU). The OSU Open Source Lab is the home of growing, high-impact open-source communities. Its world-class hosting services enable the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the Drupal content management system, and more than fifty other leading open-source software projects to collaborate with contributors and distribute software to millions of users globally. And right here in my home state, NCSU has created the Center for Open Software Engineering, which performs basic research, education, and outreach to enable software technology gains and to bridge the gap between the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-practice of commercial software engineering.
Google's Summer of Code (GSoC) program, although not affiliated with any education system, has also been a huge success in introducing students to open source. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open-source projects. It kicked off in 2005 and has historically connected more than 1,500 students with over 130 open-source projects to create millions of lines of code. Most of the students who participate in GSoC are enrolled in college or university computer science and computer engineering programs, but many of those participants have never worked in an open-source project before their experience with GSoC. If Google can achieve these dramatic results with a three-month-long program, imagine the innovation that can take place if academic institutions across the globe bring open source into the classroom.
Government as a Facilitator?
In many parts of the world, governments have been early adopters and heavy users of open-source technologies. Governments also provide significant funding for public higher education institutions. Many governments, having understood from a user perspective the benefits of open-source technologies, play an important role by encouraging their public colleges and universities to create open-source curricula to meet the marketplace demands for well-trained students of open source. From a government funding perspective, the use of open-source technologies will help to reduce college/university IT costs, saving money that can be used to meet more critical needs of students. Governments should also encourage the use of open IT standards, which will lead to more competition in the marketplace, more opportunities for open source, and even greater reductions in IT costs at colleges and universities.
What's Next?
Today’s students live in a world of openness, transparency, and collaboration. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia are students' top websites, all of them populated by user-generated content. Open source is driven by this generation and the values they hold dear. Users can see the code, change it, learn from it, share it. And that’s exactly what we should be teaching on our college and university campuses to give this generation of workers the skills they need to succeed in a global economy.
One of my colleagues from the open-source world, Tim O'Reilly, says it best: “Innovation is no longer about who has the most gifted scientists or best equipped labs. It's about who has the best architecture of participation.” Open source is the most viable means through which a higher education institution can create this “architecture of participation.”
So, let's work together to help our colleges and universities arm students with the knowledge of open source to continue to drive innovation across the industry. If you're a professor, start a dialogue with administration about the importance of open source, and rally your colleagues around that effort. If you're a student, demand that your institution take a closer look at open source. If you're an IT administrator at an academic institution, integrate open-source technologies into IT infrastructures and share your knowledge with professors, students, and other administrators. It will take a collaborative effort, but we can make change happen and cross the chasms between open source, education, and business.
http://www.educause.edu/ER/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume44/OpenSourceNarrowingtheDividebe/163586
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ ).
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 44, no. 1 (January/February 2009): 70–71.
BY JIM WHITEHURST
Jim Whitehurst is President and CEO of Red Hat.
Comments on this article can be sent to the author at
Open source is now recognized in institutions of higher education as a viable technology solution that provides superior value at a fraction of the cost of proprietary applications. That's a good thing—but that's not all it can do. Open source can be a transformative force in education. In particular, it can transform computer science curricula. Academic institutions that are consumers of open source need to reverse roles and shift gears to “preach what they practice” and place higher emphasis on integrating open source into the classroom.
Open source is an increasingly important skill set that many of today's computer science graduates are lacking. This is not because students aren't interested in open source, but because very few colleges and universities currently offer open-source classes. In addition to eager students, there are many professors who are very interested in teaching open source in their classrooms and labs.
What Is Open Source?
Open source is a collaborative software-development method that harnesses the power of peer review and transparency of process to develop code that is freely accessible. Open source draws on an ecosystem of thousands of developers and customers all over the world to drive innovation. Traditional software companies provide only binary code and withhold source code, so users can run the software but cannot study, modify, or improve it. In contrast to these proprietary models, open-source software is distributed under nonrestrictive licensing terms that generally include access to the source code.
Why Open Source?
We live in an increasingly global community. Gone are the days when working for a company in an office meant serving a small geographic area from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Today’s graduates will work in a matrix environment where projects cut across organizational and geographic boundaries, requiring cooperation and communication. Open source uses the power of collaboration to provide students with hands-on learning and to equip students with an expanded skill set that is very attractive to businesses.
Open source better prepares students for the business world by exposing them to real-world problems and encouraging learning through the completion of real tasks. Open source amplifies a “hands-on” approach to learning by connecting students to a community of users in an effort to solve problems. Open-source developers don’t rely on textbooks; they rely on the knowledge base of other developers with whom they connect through community forums, building off of one another’s ideas to create a solution that is eventually shared with all. To this extent, open source better prepares students for future job experiences and allows them to complete, while they're still in school, work that's being used by the global open-source community.
Open source also teaches students useful skills that can be applied across other coursework and classes. Students have the opportunity to work with many more code bases in open source than are found in traditional student projects. This strengthens skills in collaboration, project management, and testing and encourages a well-rounded computer science education, making students more marketable in the business world.
It is widely accepted (though the point is impossible to prove) that many of the most gifted programmers in the world participate in open-source projects. Those projects provide a platform for them to display their achievements and for others to learn from them. This learning process happens naturally in open-source projects, but it can be encouraged by colleges and universities. The quality of the student's educational experience will be enhanced by learning from masters of the art.
Thus it is not just higher education institutions and the business community that benefit from open source in the classroom. As students sharpen their skills, they are able to drive increased innovation across open-source communities and projects. Working on open-source projects in school can serve as a gateway for students to continue to contribute after graduation. Projects have a longer shelf life and don't end when the semester ends. Students can continue to contribute long after they finish their coursework, graduate, and move into the working world.
Open source drives innovation faster due to its collaborative nature and community-backed effort. Teaching open source encourages better communication among students and prevents them from working in a vacuum, void of input or teamwork. Classrooms become smaller communities within the larger open-source community. This benefits students by teaching collaboration with classmates, and with others from across the globe, on how to resolve issues such as bug fixes.
Open source also allows students to leverage existing software for their own research purposes, and any code they contribute will find a much larger audience within the community. Students are a welcome addition to open-source projects, since they bring a fresh perspective—one that those already working in the project might miss. Working every day in a project can desensitize people to the pain points of new contributors, a fact that students can effectively point out when they are new to a project. This input allows the open-source project to create a better experience for its current and future contributors.
Who Are the Leaders?
Some pioneers in the academic world are serving as models for success. For example, open source has become a fundamental part of the curriculum in the School of Computer Studies at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada. The school has partnered with open-source projects such as Mozilla and the Fedora Project to expose its students to the growing opportunities that open source presents. Seneca students work within the Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open-source collaboration, while learning open-source development and administration. This proven model was developed at Seneca and will be incorporated into several programs beginning with its Linux/Unix System Administration (LUX) program, an intense one-year graduate certificate.
Other higher education institutions that have distinguished themselves as leaders in the open-source world include Oregon State University (OSU) and North Carolina State University (NCSU). The OSU Open Source Lab is the home of growing, high-impact open-source communities. Its world-class hosting services enable the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the Drupal content management system, and more than fifty other leading open-source software projects to collaborate with contributors and distribute software to millions of users globally. And right here in my home state, NCSU has created the Center for Open Software Engineering, which performs basic research, education, and outreach to enable software technology gains and to bridge the gap between the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-practice of commercial software engineering.
Google's Summer of Code (GSoC) program, although not affiliated with any education system, has also been a huge success in introducing students to open source. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open-source projects. It kicked off in 2005 and has historically connected more than 1,500 students with over 130 open-source projects to create millions of lines of code. Most of the students who participate in GSoC are enrolled in college or university computer science and computer engineering programs, but many of those participants have never worked in an open-source project before their experience with GSoC. If Google can achieve these dramatic results with a three-month-long program, imagine the innovation that can take place if academic institutions across the globe bring open source into the classroom.
Government as a Facilitator?
In many parts of the world, governments have been early adopters and heavy users of open-source technologies. Governments also provide significant funding for public higher education institutions. Many governments, having understood from a user perspective the benefits of open-source technologies, play an important role by encouraging their public colleges and universities to create open-source curricula to meet the marketplace demands for well-trained students of open source. From a government funding perspective, the use of open-source technologies will help to reduce college/university IT costs, saving money that can be used to meet more critical needs of students. Governments should also encourage the use of open IT standards, which will lead to more competition in the marketplace, more opportunities for open source, and even greater reductions in IT costs at colleges and universities.
What's Next?
Today’s students live in a world of openness, transparency, and collaboration. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia are students' top websites, all of them populated by user-generated content. Open source is driven by this generation and the values they hold dear. Users can see the code, change it, learn from it, share it. And that’s exactly what we should be teaching on our college and university campuses to give this generation of workers the skills they need to succeed in a global economy.
One of my colleagues from the open-source world, Tim O'Reilly, says it best: “Innovation is no longer about who has the most gifted scientists or best equipped labs. It's about who has the best architecture of participation.” Open source is the most viable means through which a higher education institution can create this “architecture of participation.”
So, let's work together to help our colleges and universities arm students with the knowledge of open source to continue to drive innovation across the industry. If you're a professor, start a dialogue with administration about the importance of open source, and rally your colleagues around that effort. If you're a student, demand that your institution take a closer look at open source. If you're an IT administrator at an academic institution, integrate open-source technologies into IT infrastructures and share your knowledge with professors, students, and other administrators. It will take a collaborative effort, but we can make change happen and cross the chasms between open source, education, and business.
http://www.educause.edu/ER/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume44/OpenSourceNarrowingtheDividebe/163586
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
The Big Cram for Hunter High School By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
Reprinted fromThe New York Times, January 2, 2009
While their friends played video games in pajamas or vacationed in the tropics, a dozen sixth graders spent winter break at Elite Academy in Flushing, Queens, memorizing word roots. Time was ticking as they prepared to face the thing they had talked about, dreamed about and lost sleep over for much of the past year: the Hunter College High School admissions exam, a strenuous three-hour test that weeds out about 90 percent of those who take it.
On Wednesday, the final day of test-prep boot camp before the Jan. 9 exam, there seemed to be nothing more terrifying to these 11-year-olds than the risk of failure.
Some had taken up coffee; others, crossword puzzles and cable news shows to glean vocabulary words. A few of their parents had hired private tutors and imposed strict study hours, and several had paid up to $3,000 for a few months of English and math classes at Elite, a regimen modeled on the cram schools of South Korea, China and Japan.
The five girls and seven boys at Elite on Wednesday seemed to delight in their onerous routine, unwilling or unable to imagine life any other way.
“My friends think it’s wacko to do so much preparation,” said Akira Taniguchi, an aspiring F.B.I. agent who attends the honors program at Junior High School 54 on the Upper West Side. “But now I feel I’m really focused, thanks to this academy, and way more confident than I was when I first came here.”
Patryk Wadolowski, the brown-haired, blue-eyed president of his sixth-grade class at Public School 58, chimed in: “It just prepares us for life. Any obstacle we face we’ll be able to conquer.”
In a classroom decorated with maps and illustrations of vocabulary words (a string of z’s for “dormant,” a serene plateau for “salubrious”), the squad of high-achievers spent 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. dissecting English and math questions. As they progressed from sentence completion to reading comprehension, nearly every question posed by the teacher, Elisabeth Stuveras, elicited a garden of eager hands.
The puzzle of the moment was the word “resentment.” Some students had been stumped by it on the practice test, and Ms. Stuveras asked if anyone could offer a definition.
“Like, you resent having a fight with people?” Patryk hypothesized.
No, that was “regret,” Ms. Stuveras explained. She searched for an example that might ring true for the students.
“Pretend your friends are applying to Hunter,” she said. “There’s a chance that the person who didn’t get in might feel a little resentment they didn’t get in. They are upset the other people got in, with a little jealousy.”
“ ‘Resent’ is a good word to add to your vocabulary,” Ms. Stuveras concluded. The students nodded in understanding, highlighting the word in unison.
At 1:15, they took a break, throwing aside lofty vocabulary to chat around the vending machines about their favorite rappers (Jay-Z and Kanye West) and coming school dances.
When prompted, they took a moment to reflect on why they wanted to get into Hunter. Some said it was an urge to become better students and be surrounded by bright peers; others said they had been told Hunter was a vital steppingstone to elite colleges and a successful career.
“Ever since I was in second grade, I always wanted to go to Hunter,” Patryk said. “I’ve always strived to achieve everything in every test.”
Most of the students came to the five-day winter break program at Elite after attending Saturday prep classes at the academy through the fall. Elite, which opened in 1986, is one of several cram schools in New York that has imported the year-round enrichment programs of the Far East, giving students the chance to forfeit evenings, weekends, summer break and winter vacation for test preparation.
While Elite limits advertising to Asian-language newspapers, about 50 percent of its students are non-Asian. (Asian students still predominate in the city’s top public high schools, including Hunter.)
Many of the students in the winter break program were children of immigrants — from South Korea, Japan, Poland — and most attend city schools. Few things are kept private. Scores on practice tests are posted in the front lobby, and students freely share their homework scores and edit each other’s essays. It is the first time many of them have received letter grades on assignments.
When it was time to hand back essays, Ms. Stuveras announced that four students had earned high-passes. “Ah, yes!” Patryk exclaimed.
Did anyone fail? “Well, yes,” Ms. Stuveras explained. “You guys did pretty well, though; there were a lot of high-fails.”
Joanna Cohen, a student at the School at Columbia University who peppers her sentences with words like “amiable” and “headway” and spits out math formulas faster than the teacher can write on the board, sipped on mint tea at her desk (most of her classmates preferred Pepsi or Mountain Dew). She smiled as she looked at her high score on the practice exam.
After class, she passed around her blue grammar book and asked some classmates to write their phone numbers in the front.
Outside, in the lobby, the students exchanged study tactics and traded recommendations on dictionaries and vocabulary books. (Joanna recommends “Webster’s.”)
A few said they were going to devote their free time to the thesaurus, looking for ways to spruce up ho-hum sentences. (“Our teacher said using high-level vocab will increase your chance of passing,” Akira explained.)
And what if they were not among the fewer than 200 students who gain seats out of a pool of up to 2,000 test-takers?
“I’ll be sad,” said James Lee, a student at Intermediate School 119 in Glendale, Queens, “but there’s still Stuyvesant.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
While their friends played video games in pajamas or vacationed in the tropics, a dozen sixth graders spent winter break at Elite Academy in Flushing, Queens, memorizing word roots. Time was ticking as they prepared to face the thing they had talked about, dreamed about and lost sleep over for much of the past year: the Hunter College High School admissions exam, a strenuous three-hour test that weeds out about 90 percent of those who take it.
On Wednesday, the final day of test-prep boot camp before the Jan. 9 exam, there seemed to be nothing more terrifying to these 11-year-olds than the risk of failure.
Some had taken up coffee; others, crossword puzzles and cable news shows to glean vocabulary words. A few of their parents had hired private tutors and imposed strict study hours, and several had paid up to $3,000 for a few months of English and math classes at Elite, a regimen modeled on the cram schools of South Korea, China and Japan.
The five girls and seven boys at Elite on Wednesday seemed to delight in their onerous routine, unwilling or unable to imagine life any other way.
“My friends think it’s wacko to do so much preparation,” said Akira Taniguchi, an aspiring F.B.I. agent who attends the honors program at Junior High School 54 on the Upper West Side. “But now I feel I’m really focused, thanks to this academy, and way more confident than I was when I first came here.”
Patryk Wadolowski, the brown-haired, blue-eyed president of his sixth-grade class at Public School 58, chimed in: “It just prepares us for life. Any obstacle we face we’ll be able to conquer.”
In a classroom decorated with maps and illustrations of vocabulary words (a string of z’s for “dormant,” a serene plateau for “salubrious”), the squad of high-achievers spent 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. dissecting English and math questions. As they progressed from sentence completion to reading comprehension, nearly every question posed by the teacher, Elisabeth Stuveras, elicited a garden of eager hands.
The puzzle of the moment was the word “resentment.” Some students had been stumped by it on the practice test, and Ms. Stuveras asked if anyone could offer a definition.
“Like, you resent having a fight with people?” Patryk hypothesized.
No, that was “regret,” Ms. Stuveras explained. She searched for an example that might ring true for the students.
“Pretend your friends are applying to Hunter,” she said. “There’s a chance that the person who didn’t get in might feel a little resentment they didn’t get in. They are upset the other people got in, with a little jealousy.”
“ ‘Resent’ is a good word to add to your vocabulary,” Ms. Stuveras concluded. The students nodded in understanding, highlighting the word in unison.
At 1:15, they took a break, throwing aside lofty vocabulary to chat around the vending machines about their favorite rappers (Jay-Z and Kanye West) and coming school dances.
When prompted, they took a moment to reflect on why they wanted to get into Hunter. Some said it was an urge to become better students and be surrounded by bright peers; others said they had been told Hunter was a vital steppingstone to elite colleges and a successful career.
“Ever since I was in second grade, I always wanted to go to Hunter,” Patryk said. “I’ve always strived to achieve everything in every test.”
Most of the students came to the five-day winter break program at Elite after attending Saturday prep classes at the academy through the fall. Elite, which opened in 1986, is one of several cram schools in New York that has imported the year-round enrichment programs of the Far East, giving students the chance to forfeit evenings, weekends, summer break and winter vacation for test preparation.
While Elite limits advertising to Asian-language newspapers, about 50 percent of its students are non-Asian. (Asian students still predominate in the city’s top public high schools, including Hunter.)
Many of the students in the winter break program were children of immigrants — from South Korea, Japan, Poland — and most attend city schools. Few things are kept private. Scores on practice tests are posted in the front lobby, and students freely share their homework scores and edit each other’s essays. It is the first time many of them have received letter grades on assignments.
When it was time to hand back essays, Ms. Stuveras announced that four students had earned high-passes. “Ah, yes!” Patryk exclaimed.
Did anyone fail? “Well, yes,” Ms. Stuveras explained. “You guys did pretty well, though; there were a lot of high-fails.”
Joanna Cohen, a student at the School at Columbia University who peppers her sentences with words like “amiable” and “headway” and spits out math formulas faster than the teacher can write on the board, sipped on mint tea at her desk (most of her classmates preferred Pepsi or Mountain Dew). She smiled as she looked at her high score on the practice exam.
After class, she passed around her blue grammar book and asked some classmates to write their phone numbers in the front.
Outside, in the lobby, the students exchanged study tactics and traded recommendations on dictionaries and vocabulary books. (Joanna recommends “Webster’s.”)
A few said they were going to devote their free time to the thesaurus, looking for ways to spruce up ho-hum sentences. (“Our teacher said using high-level vocab will increase your chance of passing,” Akira explained.)
And what if they were not among the fewer than 200 students who gain seats out of a pool of up to 2,000 test-takers?
“I’ll be sad,” said James Lee, a student at Intermediate School 119 in Glendale, Queens, “but there’s still Stuyvesant.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Sunday, January 04, 2009
ROLAND BURRIS: THE POST-CIVIL RIGHTS BLACK MAN BLUES
Burris is no idiot. In fact, he's crazy like a fox.
Roland Burris is right in line with the other "grabbers" in Chicago and Illinois politics. Burris sees an opportunity and he's going for it. What else would a 71 year old man want from a political career that was the envy of many but also dull, dull, dull.
Roland Burris is acting out a REVENGE OF THE NERDS psychology that will have people talking about him long after this end game has played out. Burris never had that as Illinois Attorney General or as Illinois Comptroller. This is his moment in the national spotlight, his fifteen minutes of fame in DC. It must have burned his hide to see an uppity upstart like Barack Obama become a US Senator and then President-elect of the United States.
Like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and other Civil Rights and post-Civil Rights era Black men, Burris sees what was denied him rather than what he effectively laid the groundwork for by being the first African American elected to statewide office.
Burris is through with playing the good Negro and now is going after what is "rightfully" his.
Is he deluded in accepting Blagojevich's offer? Absolutely!
Will he back down now that he has the national spotlight? Hell No!
Get the popcorn ready, Marge. This week is going to be good watching.
Roland Burris is right in line with the other "grabbers" in Chicago and Illinois politics. Burris sees an opportunity and he's going for it. What else would a 71 year old man want from a political career that was the envy of many but also dull, dull, dull.
Roland Burris is acting out a REVENGE OF THE NERDS psychology that will have people talking about him long after this end game has played out. Burris never had that as Illinois Attorney General or as Illinois Comptroller. This is his moment in the national spotlight, his fifteen minutes of fame in DC. It must have burned his hide to see an uppity upstart like Barack Obama become a US Senator and then President-elect of the United States.
Like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and other Civil Rights and post-Civil Rights era Black men, Burris sees what was denied him rather than what he effectively laid the groundwork for by being the first African American elected to statewide office.
Burris is through with playing the good Negro and now is going after what is "rightfully" his.
Is he deluded in accepting Blagojevich's offer? Absolutely!
Will he back down now that he has the national spotlight? Hell No!
Get the popcorn ready, Marge. This week is going to be good watching.
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