Archive for July, 2008

National Plastic Crap Day

  • July 30th, 2008
  • Posted in College

It’s that time again—the annual moving-into-the-dorms rite of passage for college freshmen. Somewhere along the line, academic and social concerns went by the wayside as the foremest contributors of butterflies in the bellies of brand spankin’ new college students. These days, the principal worry is having a big enough pile of plastic crap for the [ READ MORE ]

Epic Road Trip

The most painful impact the recent upswing in the price of gas has had for me is the impossibility of taking road trips. Because the cost of filling up our tanks is starting to match up a little more closely with all the other gas-pumping countries in the world, jumping in the car and driving [ READ MORE ]

Professor Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch passed away today. Death pisses me off, especially when the dead people are fairly young and were exceptional human beings. (Apparently that means I don’t care if old a**holes die). Anyway, Randy Pausch was a Carnegie Mellon professor who taught and researched computer science, human-computer interaction and design, and was considered one of [ READ MORE ]

The Fresh Air Fund

Matthew K. Tabor has a bit of an urgent post/note up on his blog. The Fresh Air Fund needs to place about 200 more city kids in rural homes this August. If you reside in any of these Northeastern states or provinces, you can have the opportunity to give a disadvantaged NYC kid a summer [ READ MORE ]

Special Forces or Law School

There are several points in every person’s life in which a major, life-changing decision must be made. I myself have never had to decide whether to work toward my Special Forces qualification or to go to law school, but I’ve always wondered how that thought process would go…My major life decisions were more along the [ READ MORE ]

‘Technology Reshapes America’s Classrooms’

Reuters has this article up about a middle school in Boston that has stopped using textbooks, paper and pencils in favor of laptops. The laptops are handed out to every student at the beginning of the school day, the kids use them all day for math, reading, etc., and hand them back in at the [ READ MORE ]

Unique Perspective on the GI Bill

Dr. Julie-Ann McFann over at Around the Academy wrote a beautiful post about the new GI Bill issue. She writes from the perspective of not only the daughter-in-law of a WWII veteran who benefited greatly from the GI Bill, but also as an educator who has taught students that enlisted in the military because it [ READ MORE ]

‘High Cost of Driving Ignites Online Classes Boom’

I think we (and by ‘we’ I mean Americans) used to be a little prone to taking the commuting portion of our college education for granted. That is no longer the case. There’s an article in the NY Times about the rising cost of commuting coinciding with the rising number of college students enrolling in [ READ MORE ]

Helpful Resource List From PrepPoint

PrepPoint, a test prep, academic tutoring, and college advising group, has a great list of books and resources for students in the pre-college phase of their existence. The list is long enough that I won’t regurgitate it here, but it includes several resources in the following four categories: Academic Performance Test Prep College Admissions Online [ READ MORE ]

Eye Candy and Intellectual Stimuli for Lab Geeks

When I was a college student, the courses I always felt I learned the most from, took the most away from, and enjoyed the most while I was in them were the lab courses: chemistry, physics, biology, anatomy, etc. Witnessing the tangible proof of the information the professors and the books had been spewing set [ READ MORE ]