Author’s Note: I’ve re-posted this article for your reading pleasure as I am on vacation.

Kids who grow up with no television in their homes either (a) make friends quick with a kid whose family worships the ‘mote, or (b) they read a lot. My utter lack of pop culture references from the mid-seventies through the mid-nineties should do all the explaining as to which path I took.

The outcome being, I ended up with a stellar vocabulary, full of words I’d only ever seen in print and therefore usually couldn’t pronounce correctly. Whatever. At least I knew what they meant.

And there were some I knew how to say. (With feeling). When I was eight my 18-year-old babysitter burned the chicken pot pies that were to be our dinner. My mother never bought us crappy processed food, which meant my brother and I were infatuated with all sugary, well-preserved, and insanely processed foodstuffs.

I was understandably pissed when the sitter burned my only shot at packaged food for the month and filled the kitchen with smoke. To vent my anger I hollered, “What are you trying to do, asphyxiate us?!” She had no idea what that meant, and almost sent me to my room because she thought I’d called her something so horrible, not even teenager her had ever heard that particular obscenity before.

There is also the common problem, among adults and too-smart-for-their-own-good children, of only ever hearing a word or a phrase and never figuring out the correct spelling. There are so many words that sound alike but are spelled differently, and each version of the stupidly exact-sounding word means something completely different. I’ve got their, there, and they’re down cold, but it took a while for me to get affect and effect straight. The English language, in my bitchy opinion, has some definite asinine qualities.

Or perhaps I should ask more questions. Until I was in college and saw this phrase written on the board as a common mistake college sophomores made when writing papers for the professor, I had always thought “For all intents and purposes” was “For all intensive purposes.”

According to Paul Brians, author of Common Errors in English Usage, I’m not the only native English-speaker to screw that phrase up. Which made me feel better for about point seven seconds until I saw the bit where he describes the phrase as “Another example of the oral transformation of language by people who don’t read much.” Ouch, Professor Brians. That was totally uncalled for.

I read plenty, thank you. The books I read (fine literature and lots of science-y non-fiction) just haven’t ever contained that exact phrase. I am still very smart and am an excellent reader. And clearly I have nary a hang-up about the whole intents/intensive blunder.

Further Reading:

Common Errors in English Usage
Confusing Words
Grammar and Punctuation Resources

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image source)

Arjun Muralidharan, aka the Productive Student, has a list of 14 ways college students can strive for greenness on Earth. You’ll want to do them all to slow the destruction of the planet, but you’ll actually do them to save yourself some coinage.

14 Ways to Be a Greener Student (and Save Money Doing It):

-Eat less meat or go vegetarian
-Do more efficient laundry
-Buy groceries with less packaging
-Eat out less
-Buy a greener computer
-Optimize your commute
-Decompose organic waste
-Bring your own bag for shopping
-Recycle paper
-Buy recycled notepads and textbooks
-Put old and unwanted textbooks up for sale
-Use a durable water bottle
-Be conscious about lights everywhere
-Reduce and manage electronic devices

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(recycled notebooks)

I’m already certain that I absolutely must read this book: Problem Solving 101—A Simple Book for Smart People. Kyle James at .eduGuru.com reviewed it, bringing it to my attention (I’m grateful).

Japanese school kids have gained a reputation for insane adroitness in their memorization and test-taking skills while lacking a basic working knowledge of problem solving. Being ill-equipped for the solving of the problems turns out to be somewhat of an issue in the real world.

As we’ve all realized by now, s**t happens in life. You don’t even have to try to interface with s**t and it will still happen. Death, taxes, and s**t are the only guarantees we humans are given. So, avoid death, pay taxes, and prepare yourself for the s**tstorm we call life.

The book was originally written by Ken Watanabe for Japanese school kids, but ended up becoming incredibly popular among Japanese adults in the business world. It’s short, it’s simple, it’s meant for smart, less-than-fully-grown humans, and it’s practical. I’m buying it as soon as I post this.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Graduate school, should it have escaped everyone’s notice, prepares no one for reality. One learns insanely vast oceans of information, but this just means that the M-Something or the PhD in question just knows a lot of stuff—more than most other breathing bodies about one particular slice of one weensy area of reality. Knowing that much information is awesome. But a job it does not acquire. I know, I am an unnecessarily logical bitch. I get that a lot.

So, here you are, all filled up with the knowledge and no way to turn the smartness into cash money. There’s always teaching, fighting for tenure, and someday becoming a beloved professor. But that rarely works out these days. I’ve heard you have to either off someone, sell your soul, or hand over your firstborn to get a professorship. I’m going to officially state that academia may not be the best option. Which is unfortunate, as by this point, your particular topic and the world of academics are the two bits of this life you grok fully and without any doubt as to your capabilities.

I’m thinking you may require assistance with the prying off of your fingers from your lab table/thesis/dissertation/research notes/library carrel/desk in the windowless basement “office.” The Oxford University Press will save you: they’ve just published Jerald M. Jellison’s book, Life After Grad School: Getting From A to B. Technically still under the very edge of academia’s umbrella, but much more saturated with real life and logic.

Jellison’s book is simple; it reads like a To Do list with only the necessary explanations to go along with each item. This is not at all what I expected from a Univ. of California professor. He’s done well in academia as well as in the business world, so perhaps that combination has helped to simplify his writing. Whatever the reason, it’s comfortingly logical in its this-is-possible forward momentumness. Rarely do academics leave their world with emotional grace; they’ve invested too much to walk away easily. Jellison has broken down the horrific task of leaving one life and beginning another into absorbable and complete-able bites.

From the publisher:

There are 2.5 million graduate students across the U.S. in programs designed for a career in academics, and it is rarely acknowledged that less than five percent will realize their dream of becoming a professor. And as tenure track job openings disappear, this percentage will only shrink. The truth is that many of these students aren’t getting the support and instruction from their grad schools on pursuing a career outside academia, nor do many realize that they have the knowledge and skills that could make them a very attractive candidate for a job with a corporation, government agency, or nonprofit.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

It’s shocking. I’m overwhelmed with dumbfounded bafflement. How can this be? They went and published an anthology of science writing, and all but three of the authors are of the male persuasion. Is that even possible? Hold on! I’m thinking.

I think yes, there’s a staggeringly high chance that this could have occurred. There’s many a female science badass out there, but I can guarantee she’s spending a large portion of her time and energy trying to hold her ground in a man’s world.

It’s almost Christmas, and we’re all supposed to love each other even more because the country is littered with sparkly dead trees and overtly cheerful Muzak, so I’ll spare us all the rant. Let’s just say I’m a huge fan of DNA and its structure. It’s beautiful, it’s poetry, it actually chokes me up. I’m not kidding. I also think Watson, Crick and Wilkins were amazing. But that doesn’t change the fact that Rosalind Franklin was treated like sh*t despite her ability to kick DNA-structure ass.

I’m well aware of the fact that the Nobel folks don’t hand over the prize to dead people, and that they only allow sharing between a total of three recipients. Three living ones. So Franklin wouldn’t have been eligible regardless. However, it would be fascinating to know whether she would have been chosen to receive the 1962 Nobel Prize for physiology/medicine instead of one of the men had she been alive at the time.

It’s been almost fifty years. I would have hoped for some improvement on the equality front.

And there they went—all the diplomatic words just left my building. I will stop short of explaining exactly how much people suck. Happy holidays. Go forth and treat people fairly.

Further Reading:

The Rosalind Franklin Papers

The Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology 1962

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Have I mentioned the awesomeness that is Flat World Knowledge? I’m fairly certain that I have. They were doing good things in the textbook world back in September of 2008, and now they’re teaming up with Bookshare to provide alternative textbook options to students requiring non-traditional textbook modalities.

Students who are blind, have low vision, or have a learning disability that requires computer-generated speech and highlighted text soon will have more resources after publisher Flat World Knowledge announced Dec. 14 that it will make its content available to Bookshare, the largest web-based library for people with print disabilities.

Bookshare, which has 75,000 members worldwide, will add 11 new digital textbooks to its online library, which has been bolstered in the past year by contributions from colleges and universities hoping to bring reading material to students who can’t see standard print or can’t turn a page. More…

Further Reading:

Partnership a Boon for Alternative Textbooks
Bookshare.org: Books Without Barriers
FlatWorldKnowledge.com
Flat World Knowledge
Buying Textbooks: New, Used, Rented or Digital
Custom: Cool for Sneakers, Not for Textbooks

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Kids who grow up with no television in their homes either (a) make friends quick with a kid whose family worships the ‘mote, or (b) they read a lot. My utter lack of pop culture references from the mid-seventies through the mid-nineties should do all the explaining as to which path I took.

The outcome being, I ended up with a stellar vocabulary, full of words I’d only ever seen in print and therefore usually couldn’t pronounce correctly. Whatever. At least I knew what they meant.

And there were some I knew how to say. (With feeling). When I was eight my 18-year-old babysitter burned the chicken pot pies that were to be our dinner. My mother never bought us crappy processed food, which meant my brother and I were infatuated with all sugary, well-preserved, and insanely processed foodstuffs.

I was understandably pissed when the sitter burned my only shot at packaged food for the month and filled the kitchen with smoke. To vent my anger I hollered, “What are you trying to do, asphyxiate us?!” She had no idea what that meant, and almost sent me to my room because she thought I’d called her something so horrible, not even teenager her had ever heard that particular obscenity before.

There is also the common problem, among adults and too-smart-for-their-own-good children, of only ever hearing a word or a phrase and never figuring out the correct spelling. There are so many words that sound alike but are spelled differently, and each version of the stupidly exact-sounding word means something completely different. I’ve got their, there, and they’re down cold, but it took a while for me to get affect and effect straight. The English language, in my bitchy opinion, has some definite asinine qualities.

Or perhaps I should ask more questions. Until I was in college and saw this phrase written on the board as a common mistake college sophomores made when writing papers for the professor, I had always thought “For all intents and purposes” was “For all intensive purposes.”

According to Paul Brians, author of Common Errors in English Usage, I’m not the only native English-speaker to screw that phrase up. Which made me feel better for about point seven seconds until I saw the bit where he describes the phrase as “Another example of the oral transformation of language by people who don’t read much.” Ouch, Professor Brians. That was totally uncalled for.

I read plenty, thank you. The books I read (fine literature and lots of science-y non-fiction) just haven’t ever contained that exact phrase. I am still very smart and am an excellent reader. And clearly I have nary a hang-up about the whole intents/intensive blunder.

Further Reading:

Common Errors in English Usage
Confusing Words
Grammar and Punctuation Resources

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image source)

Ian Ayres is a gentleman and a scholar (and a lawyer and an economist). He’s a professor at Yale, and since 2005 has been handing out cash to his students whenever he assigns one of his own books as a required text. That way, he hopes, people will understand that he wants to use his own material because it’s necessary, not because he wants some royalties action.

In addition to explaining the motivation for royalty “disgorgement,” Ayres points out that any college student who’s assigned a text written by their professor is justified in requesting a rebate on the royalties the prof is generating. One more way to decrease the feelings of impotent rage which textbook purchasing tends to bring forth.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image source)

I come from a family of intense readers and researchers who are constantly looking crap up in books. They love and worship the printed word and have a difficult time fathoming why anyone would want to part with a book. When my grandfather retired and was breaking down his lab, he parked in a clearly marked No Parking zone (he lived by his own set of rules), stole a lab cart labeled in large letters with the angry phrasing: Lab Use Only! Do Not Remove!

He took me to his office, commanded me to climb up on his desk and read out to him the titles of every one of his reference texts. Some he had had since the 1930s, when he was a student, and some he had acquired over years of teaching and research. He’d kept everything he deemed useful and “not full of sh*t.” He left the less than brilliant volumes for other researchers, and gifted me with a few dozen gorgeous reference texts and old textbooks. I still have them, and they have their own beautiful book shelf (I do not allow them to mingle with novels, no matter how high the literature content).

I have an abundance of higher education under my belt, and the stacks of textbooks to go along with all that learning. If I kept every book, we’d all be killed under piles of books the next time Seattle has an earthquake. I’m perhaps a little more reasonable than my family, and can be fairly harsh when weeding out unnecessary objects from my home. Any book I have never opened as a reference past the term I read it as a required text gets donated to the nearest college or university.

I bought all new textbooks as a freshman because it was all so new and I felt that every moment had to be crisp and perfect in the fall light. After the first year of school, I only bought new books if they were fully related to my major, and I was certain I would be using them as references later on down the line. Everything else I bought used and then sold back or donated. You don’t need new textbooks unless you plan on keeping them as part of your permanent library.

If it will help you to decide, you can stand there in the bookstore and hold the pile of this term’s books straight out in front of you. It will weigh a lot and it will start to hurt pretty quickly. Think about how many times you will move between the ages of eighteen, when you’re a freshman, and thirty, when you’re ready to buy a house and settle down. Between my freshman year and when I moved into my current house at the age of 26, I moved 14 times. Only rocks and weights are heavier than books, people.

If a required book is something you feel sure you won’t ever need to crack again once this term is over, then you might want to consider renting your books or going with the digital textbook wave of the future.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I was never good at taking advice in my teen years, but grown-up me wants to go back to the 1990s, tie teenager me to a chair, and wait while the pain-in-the-ass younger version of myself reads the above book. I also would have liked to have known of its existence yesterday, when I wrote this post about an eerily familiar topic.

It looks to be an excellent resource for any community college newbie. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Bookstore shelves are crowded with books offering advice to college students, yet—astonishingly—none of these books offer needed advice to the majority of college students in the United States … those attending community college. Of the approximately 21 million full- and part-time college students, 11 million attend community colleges.

The Community College Guide aims to help fill this huge gap. The authors of this book have decades of experience between them as professors and administrators in both two-year and four-year colleges, have written numerous books for a general readership and thoroughly understand what community college students need to know to succeed in their college careers.

From how to apply to community colleges to what to expect from your courses, from the truth about what you’ll pay to actual financial aid opportunities, The Community College Guide offers a wealth of information for the millions of American students who desire higher education at the community level.

They make a good point: Why aren’t there any good guides available for community college students? A two-year institution isn’t as capable of drowning unsuspecting freshmen, but I’m sure those brand spanking new college students would appreciate some guidance and advice.

Further Reading:

Community College vs. University

Posted by Alexa Harrington