The physical training athletes constantly work at can only get them so far when the big moment comes. The body can always be trained and improved, and when the competitive sh*t is hitting the fan, an athlete’s body will have been so intensively trained that the muscles will tend to react according to the memories the muscles have stored up based on that training.

All of which should mean that if an athlete can see what’s happening during a competition and can let their minds go enough to allow their muscle-memoried bodies to do what they’ve been trained to do, everything should be golden. Too bad athletes are using their bodies so extensively that their amped-up minds have time to think and think until mentally the athlete is curled up in a corner, twitching and terrified, certain of failure at the critical moment.

In the old days, the coach gave the athlete a pep talk, a good whack on the back, and told the athlete to suck it up and take it like a man. These days, there are sports psychologists. When an athlete is physically flawless, but tends to mentally crumple when confronted with the pivotal moment of doom, a sports psychologist becomes part of his/her training team.

An article in the CS Monitor explains the ins and outs:

German biathlete Magdalena Neuner came into the Vancouver Olympics with six world championship titles in her pocket – but a history of wildly inconsistent shooting that has also left her with some poor results.

So when the young stand-out won her first of three medals so far at these Olympics – including two of Germany’s six gold medals – she had a simple answer for how she had become so much more consistent this year.
“I worked very hard, especially in the mental training,” she said, a concept she elaborated on later. “One has to understand that physical fitness alone isn’t sufficient. My mental training is very complex and it makes me believe in myself…. To control your mind is more difficult than to control your body.”

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The combination of higher education and The Office? Genius.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

It’s common knowledge that the first year of teaching for a newbie educator is awful. Having the fun and having the ability to calm the fight-or-flight response is out of the question for most. It’s really a question of survival until June, at which point the new teacher takes stock and decides whether to stay or run for the hills.

Joel over at So You Want To Teach has a list of ten interview questions he answered for a former student about his first year of teaching:

1. What discipline methods do you use? How do you get the students involved?

One of the most effective discipline techniques I have found is simply to talk less and play more. This prevents most of the misbehaviors that tend to spring up throughout the class period. Additionally, phone calls and parent contact have been invaluable tools. That also is helpful for encouraging student and parent involvement.

2. Was your first year positive? How?

The biggest positive of my first year was learning that the idealism of the university classroom is rarely the case of the reality of a struggling band program. My junior high band got straight 3s at UIL, and that was an improvement on the previous year. Classroom management was my weakest skills. I went into the year thinking that since I knew a lot about the various instruments, I would automatically be a good director.

I recorded myself teaching and would go home and listen to the recordings and be amazed at how badly the students behaved. There were times throughout my first two years that I seriously considered going back to teaching private lessons. The thing that really kept me going throughout was support and contact with some of my mentors who encouraged me that I was actually a pretty good teacher and who helped me to deal with some of the classroom management struggles I went through.

3. What have you learned that will help you in the future?

How to get students quiet and keep them quiet. I was a “good kid” and so relating to the “bad kids” was a challenge for me initially. I spent the last half of my fourth semester of teaching going through trial and error finding out how to do it.

4. How well did college prepare you for the classroom?

Pedagogically, it prepared me very well. Classroom management preparation was virtually nonexistent. I learned a whole lot more through teaching private lessons, teaching master classes, and observing a wide variety of band programs.

5. Give one piece of advice for a new graduate.

Two things. 1) You don’t know everything. When you find one of the many things you don’t know how to do or how to handle, ask questions. Ask questions from anyone who will give you an answer. Some of the best stuff I picked up came from a science teacher down the hall from me my first two years. 2) Read How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie. More…

Further Reading:

The Teachers You Remember
Which Road Do the Quality Teachers Walk In On?
The Manly Art of Teaching
If You’re Pondering a Teaching Career
Teaching the Truth
Eph Teaching Diary
Education Degree Information

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image source*)

Again with the slapping. This time it’s for the jackasses in charge of higher education in this country. If you still feel they (the schools, the loan people, and the government) aren’t lacking in smarts and high-moral-ground-standing cojones, then please read this excerpt from WSJ’s Journal Editorial Report.

It’s a conversation between Paul Gigot, Naomi Schaefer Riley, and Dan Henninger regarding the cost of college, who’s in charge of making it cost so damn much, and the three-year-degree option. It’s buried three conversations down in the transcripts, so I’m posting the conversation in its entirety.

Also, when I tried to narrow it down to just the really good, informative chunks, ninety-nine percent of the conversation made my slapping hand twitch, so I figured it needed to be posted in complete form. Not long, not boring, and full of jaw-clenching tidbits about the Orwellian state of higher education. (Spoiler alert: They’re all bastards.)

Gigot: It’s a trend that most parents are keeping an anxious eye on: the skyrocketing cost of a college education. According to a new report by the College Board, those costs continued to rise last year despite a 2.1% decline in the Consumer Price Index. Hit hard by state budget cuts, four-year public colleges raised tuition and fees by an average of 6.5%, while prices at private colleges rose 4.4%. Add room and board, and the average cost of attendance at a public four-year college is now more than $15,000 a year. At private colleges, the price tag is $35,000. The sticker shock has led some, including Tennessee senator and former education secretary Lamar Alexander, to push for a three-year degree program at the college level.

We’re back with Dan Henninger and Steve Moore. And also joining us, The Wall Street Journal’s deputy Taste Page editor, Naomi Schaefer Riley.

Naomi, why do college costs keep rising even if the price level doesn’t for everyone else?

Ms. Riley: Well, it’s a third-party-payer system. I mean basically what you have is, colleges know they can keep raising the price, and they know that the government, through financial aid programs and various grants that they give to universities, both public and private, is basically going to pick up the difference. Unfortunately, for middle-class parents, it doesn’t always work out that way. They’re not picking up all of the difference for them, but colleges keep raising the sticker price.

Gigot: Because there’s income limits on who gets the subsidies, but the subsidies are vast–I mean, the Pell Grants, direct grants for people. There are basically subsidized loans, and then there are subsidies for saving for school too, which is how a lot of middle-class parents help. Are you saying there’s a kind of chasing-your-tail quality here? The tuition goes up, subsidies follow, and then the people say, tuition can go up again, and then subsidies have to go up again?

Ms. Riley: That’s absolutely true. And then in addition to that, you also get a kind of arms race among the colleges. I mean, you get a situation where, first of all, it turns out that parents think the college is better if they raise a price. So if you see a $50,000 cost on college–which by the way, happened this year.

Gigot: Where is that?

Ms. Riley: Middlebury College. It costs $50,000 for tuition, room and board.

Gigot: In Vermont.

Ms. Riley: Yes, for this year. Vermont, you know, a very high-cost-of-living state. And, you know, but parents see that sticker price, and they assume, “Oh that must be a great college education.” So, you know, it’s–all of the wrong incentives are in place. And then colleges are spending money on things like landscaping and fancy food programs and Wi-Fi in the bathrooms and, you know, it’s really hard to sort of figure out where the quality is.

Gigot: I have a hard time imagining. I barely used a PC, Dan.

Henninger: Well, you know, it’s going to get worse, Paul. The College Board just reported that private loans last year for college dropped by 50%, while the public federally subsidized loans rose 15%. Now, we also know that the Congress has taken–is going to disadvantage the private loan program, which means that the federal program is–

Gigot: They’re going to put it out of business.

Henninger: They’re going to put it out of business, right, which means that basically colleges are going to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the federal government. You will never get countervailing price pressure under those circumstances.

Gigot: All right, Steve, is this going to lead to you want to go send your kids to college for only three years?

Moore: Well, you know, Paul, I have an 18- and 16-year-old. I’m listening to these prices that Naomi’s talking about and I’m going to need a big fat pay raise, or else my kids are going to be with me another four years, which is a nightmare.

But look, this is a real issue. It’s going to cost now $200,000 to put a kid through college. You have to start asking yourself the question, “Look, I’ll give you a $200,000 check. Maybe that’s a better way to start your life than going to college.” But Naomi put her finger on the problem. The two areas–I was looking at the inflation rates in health care and education–both of those have booming costs. Education costs have gone triple the rate of inflation over the last decade. And it’s because the people who are getting the service aren’t the ones who are paying for it, and that leads to exploding costs.

Gigot: Naomi?

Ms. Riley: Yeah, I just want to say something about the three-year college costs. You know it’s funny, if you go back to the 1970s, which we’ve been thinking about a lot lately, a lot of colleges actually reduced the length of their semesters, and they said this was to save costs for parents. But of course, the semesters stayed shorter, so kids got less education overall. And the prices never went down. So I think you also have to kind of take these big ideas from schools about saving you money with a grain of salt.

Gigot: The likelihood is that they’d find a way to charge the same amount anyway, even if you only went for three years.

Ms. Riley: Exactly. That’s exactly right.

Henninger: But you get a year earlier to start work and pay back those loans.

Gigot: That would be the benefit. It’s an opportunity cost would be lower. But Dan, the government is going to–isn’t going to change any of this. If anything, they’re increasing the subsidies. they want to make Pell Grants an entitlement. Right now, it has to be passed with annual appropriation. They want to make it automatic.

Henninger: Yeah, and, you know, there is a social aspect to this as well. It’s pretty well proven that the payoff to a college education is higher lifetime earnings. The demand for college now is tremendous. People are just going to these colleges. Probably what we need is either online colleges or more colleges to meet the supply.

Gigot: But which college doesn’t necessarily help, does it?

Ms. Riley: No, no. There are a lot of studies that show, if you are a person who got into both Harvard and, say, the University of Arkansas, and you chose the University of Arkansas, your lifetime earnings would not be that much different. Of course one solution is just improving K-12 education.

Gigot: That would help enormously. And you might get higher returns on people who then don’t go to college or go to community colleges.

Ms. Riley: Yeah, the way it used to be.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image source *)

In today’s Daily, the University of Washington’s campus paper, there’s an opinion piece that makes some persuasive arguments for increasing the online-ness of UW’s two online learning options, the College of Engineering’s EDGE Program and UW Online Learning. While the EDGE Program—which was kicking online education ass before online education was cool (since 1984, thank you very much)—has a solid list of online graduate degrees in engineering, UW Online Learning offers a few Master’s degrees and certificate programs, and nowhere at UW is an online undergraduate degree to be found.

The UW is ahead of the curve in the area of digital education. The College of Engineering’s EDGE program offers more than 50 online courses and 10 degrees, and numerous courses and certificates can be obtained via UW Online Learning.

However, UW distance-learning programs fall short of a comprehensive approach to online education. There are numerous core classes missing from the list of course offerings, and only graduate degrees are available online. There are rules limiting the number of online courses that can apply to an undergraduate degree and the amount of courses that can be taken during a quarter.

While the Daily’s columnist, Mr. Noon, is arguing for an increase in online learning options at UW, he’s fair in pointing out that not every course is conducive to an online platform. I, myself, have never been able to figure out how some of the messier science-lab courses could be done away from campus. I’m as adventurous and curious as the next science-geek gal, but I’d prefer it if cadavers and chemistry experiments stayed on campus.

There’s also the question of the technological upgrade UW would have to invest in should online education be expanded. College students tend to be among the more spoiled and savvy tech-users, and they won’t stick around for long at a school that has less than badass technology. And have we forgotten that this is the age of instantaneous information? One whiff of a school’s sub-par technology, and it will be shouted virally from the Twitter rooftops. Keep up, people.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image source

Washington State University is rounding out their already-successful business degree program with an Online MBA degree starting Fall 2009. It’ll start out as a part-time program for the first year, but by Fall 2010, it will be available as a part-time or a full-time degree program.

The program is geared toward professionals already working, so WSU has a day-job-friendly system set up for students who work all day and would have inevitable scheduling conflicts:

The Online MBA program consists of 39 semester credit hours and is comparable to WSU’s Accelerated One-Year MBA offered on the Pullman campus. Like all WSU College of Business academic programs, the Online MBA is accredited by The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). Courses are offered completely online, with no campus visits required.

[Mark] Fuller noted that WSU Online MBA courses are accessible 24/7 in an asynchronous format, allowing maximum flexibility for working professionals. “We use a variety of online tools, which allows significant interaction between faculty and students,” he said. “Those same tools allow students to participate in group projects and team presentations.”

In addition to 24/7 course access and tech support, Online MBA students will have support services, including advising, financial aid and career counseling, registration assistance and help maneuvering the WSU system.

Further Reading and Resources:

WSU Online MBA Degree
Online MBA Programs
Consider a Well-Rounded MBA

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Sometimes I wonder why the decision-makers are so backward in their thinking, and then I wonder which one of us non-decision-makers was responsible for putting them in charge in the first place. Outdoor recess and unstructured, in-classroom play time have been decreasing so as to make time for the fully structured knowledge-absorption parts of the school day. The yahoos in charge of how much time is spent learning vs. playing in elementary schools need to spend an afternoon finger-painting and remember what it was like to be a kid.

Alternatively, they could read all the research backing up the idea that kids who are given time during the school day for physical activity (the crux of the recess invention) and to play in the classroom during free choice time (they learn while they play indoors, too) are better able to sit down at their desks and absorb more info when it comes time for the focusing.

I’m a big recess fan, so I’ve always been cranky about the slow but sure disappearance of primary school recess times. But there’s also an entire portion of in-classroom free time, also known as child-directed educational play, which is being squeezed out in favor of fully structured, sit-still-and-absorb-the-information learning.

The traditional kindergarten classroom that most adults remember from childhood—with plenty of space and time for unstructured play and discovery, art and music, practicing social skills, and learning to enjoy learning—has largely disappeared. The results of three new studies, supported by the Alliance for Childhood and described in this report, suggest that time for play in most public kindergartens has dwindled to the vanishing point, replaced by lengthy lessons and standardized testing.

The studies were conducted by researchers from U.C.L.A., Long Island University and Sarah Lawrence College in New York. The researchers found that

• On a typical day, kindergartners in Los Angeles and New York City spend four to six times as long being
instructed and tested in literacy and math (two to three hours per day) as in free play or “choice time” (30 minutes or less).

• Standardized testing and preparation for tests are now a daily activity in most of the kindergartens studied, despite the fact that most uses of such tests with children under age eight are of questionable validity and can lead to harmful labeling.

• Classic play materials like blocks, sand and water tables, and props for dramatic play have largely disappeared from the 268 full-day kindergarten classrooms studied.

• In many kindergarten classrooms there is no play- time at all. Teachers say the curriculum does not
incorporate play, there isn’t time for it, and many school administrators do not value it.

Kindergartners are now under great pressure to meet inappropriate expectations, including academic standards
that until recently were reserved for first grade. At the same time, they are being denied the benefits of play—a major stress reliever.

If teachers were in charge, I can guarantee there would be more free time in the classroom for the kids to engage in child-directed, imagination-saturated, problem-solving, cognition-developing play. Anyone who has learned anything about the psychology of kiddos and their brain wiring knows that they are learning even when they are playing, and that they learn better during the in-desk formal learning part of their school day if they’ve have a chance to blow off some steam and decompress a little.

Someone with a conscience and the proverbial balls to use their powers for good needs to get some official documentation of their qualification to tell the powers that be what it is, exactly, that kids require to be happy and healthy. (The answer is: More play, on and off the monkey bars.)

I think educational psychology carries some excellent potential for bureaucratic ass-kicking. Educational psychologists understand the whys and hows of who is learning what, how they’re learning in any given situation, and who is teaching and what makes those educators tick, and why the curriculum is or isn’t working for all parties involved. They’re the ones who grok the whole educational picture of a school and can use torrents of gorgeous vocabulary to explain to the policymakers why recess matters. Someone go to it and save our kids.

Further Reading and Resources:

Physically Fit Kids Do Better In School
Physical Activity May Strengthen Children’s Ability To Pay Attention
Educational Psychology Careers and Degrees
About Educational Psychology
Telling the Stories of Educational Psychology
American Psychological Association

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image sources: classroom and playground

CertificationMap.com was just launched as a resource for educator-hopefuls. The site is simple and clean of line (I dislike chaotic websites) and conveys the pertinent information in a zippy manner. If I were planning on pursuing a career as a teacher in the State of Washington, for instance, I would click on the Washington blob on the map (I live here, so I totally know what my state looks like) and would be shown a list of all that would be required of me education-, certification-, and red-tape-wise.

It’s a useful list to be sure. However, I can almost guarantee that I, personally, will never be implementing it as a checklist because I will sell snow cones in extremely cold underworldy sorts of places before I would be patient enough to become an educator of humans who haven’t yet reached their full adult status.

I have gallons of respect for the people who can withstand the insanity, the mayhem and the politics such that they can relay information and knowledge to our children. I can handle lots of things, but I have a strict four-kid limit (and two of them have to be my own). I can’t see ever getting a classroom population like that, so no teaching career for me.

Seriously, I don’t know how teachers do it. I dislike pandemonium, interruptions, and people telling me what to do. I would last maybe three hours before I’d launch myself out the first available window. Some people are really good at dealing with multiple crises while imparting knowledge, and always with an audience watching. Those people should teach.

More Helpful Resources:

BLS Guide: Teacher
Traditional Education Degree Programs
Online and Hybrid Education Degree Programs
U.S. Dept. of Education: Become a Teacher
Teachers Support Network: Tools and Advice
Teacher Certification Map Press Release

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image source

Jane Hart over at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies has compiled some great lists for e-learning tools. The lists are geared more toward educators, but I think a decent majority of the items are relevant for students as well, especially grad students who spend their days walking that line between penniless student and underpaid educator.

There’s the Top 25 Free Tools List, which is awesome for its no-charge-ness:

1. Firefox plus extensions—web browser
2. delicious—social bookmarking tool
3. Google Reader—rss reader
4. Gmail–webmail
5. Skype—instant messenger
6. Google Calendar—online calendar
7. Google Docs—online office suite
8. Slideshare—presentation sharing tool
9. flickr—image hosting and sharing tool
10. Voicethread—collaborative slideshow tool
11. Wordpress—blogging tool
12. Audacity—audio/podcasting tool
13. YouTube—video hosting and sharing tool
14. Jing—screencasting tool
15. PBwiki—wiki tool
16. PollDaddy—polling tool
17. Nvu—web authoring tool
18. Yugma—web meeting tool
19. Ustream—live broadcasting tool
20. Ning—(private) social networking tool
21. Freemind—mind mapping tool
22. Moodle—course management system
23. eXe—course authoring tool
24. iGoogle—personal start page tool
25. twitter—microblogging tool

And there’s the slide show below of the Top 100 Tools For Learning 2008:

Posted by Alexa Harrington

There is nothing ignoble or invalid about taking online courses or pursuing an online degree for purely time- and money-saving reasons. However, I would say that slightly more admirable are the motivations of the veterans taking online courses while their bodies and minds do some necessary mending.

It seems like it would be great fun attending classes and jumping right into the whole college campus scenario when your previously perfect body is newly broken and just won’t work the way you want it to and your mind is dealing with a sucky case of PTSD, but it’s probably nowhere near as good a time as it sounds. There are a plethora of solid arguments for online education; this is one of the better ones.

As far as online education advice goes: Again I say, if the student is self-motivated and is fine with not being involved with some or all of the college campus experience, then online classes and/or an online degree can be an excellent option. Taking everything online is possible for some degrees; taking some combination of on-campus and online coursework works, too. That’s kind of the best of both worlds.

Anyone cogitating on the online degree possibilities should always, always, always check up on the accreditation status of the college or university in question, especially if it’s a fully online school.

You’re usually safe signing up for online courses at a well-established brick-and-mortar school, but if there’s even a whisper of doubt, I promise it will be worth the five minutes it will take you to check. You can verify your prospective school’s accreditation status with the U.S. Dept. of Education’s database of accredited postsecondary institutions and programs, or with the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

If you require more information and advice, these guys have a lot of information about online education, as well as a long damn list of accredited schools (all the schools listed on their site are accredited, which makes it easy).

Posted by Alexa Harrington

photo credit: Steve Sokolic, Associated Press