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

I was never concerned as to whether or not today’s school-age kids were going to be considered fully functioning adults someday; anyone who can seemingly mind-meld with a computer (or a cell phone or anything gizmo-ish), understand it, and make it work is probably going to do just fine once they’re let loose on the world.

Despite feeling that kids these days were good to go on the technology front, I was a wee bit worried that the whole writing portion of their lives was headed for much suckage. I was caught in the admittedly old-fashioned (lame!) idea that all forward progress in the land of tech can only lead to less and less well-rounded humans. The telephone, for instance, led to a severe decline in letter-writing. (Of course, the electric light bulb led to everyone staying up later and getting more work done, but let’s ignore that for the moment.)

Clive Thompson’s article in Wired has calmed me down. Thanks to all the e-mail and texting that goes on these days, kids are doing more writing than anyone has since correct cursive and perfect penmanship were qualities to strive for. Now we’ve got technologically savvy kids who can express themselves with the written/typed word like nobody’s business. I’m stoked that society will not be taking one-way trips in any hand baskets.

From the article:

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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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 don’t care how high your SAT scores are: if you’re planning to attend any institution of higher education that isn’t blatantly obvious in its accreditation (Stanford, Yale, etc.), and you don’t take the so-easy-a-monkey-could-do-it step of checking your intended school’s official accreditation status, then you’re an idiot.

Go here or here and get it done. You’ll spend hours more time texting today than you will ascertaining that your institution will hand you a valid degree after you’ve given said school your blood, sweat, tears, time, and money. Avoid this woman’s mistake.

Accreditation Resources:

Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA)
U.S. Dept. of Edu. Database of Accredited Postsecondary Institutions and Programs

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(graduation joy)

Oh, it’s coming. Denying it won’t help you. Fall Term is starting up soon whether you’re ready or not. When the first week of classes have been attended and while you’re still focusing on first chapters, small quizzes, tolerable assignments, and the finer points on your professors’ syllabi, at the very least please skim this: How to Study: A Brief Guide. Learning how to learn is, how do you say, crucial, of the essence, invaluable, indispensable and totally effing necessary.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(take notes)

Watch it, people. Just because information is second only in volume to pollution on this planet, it does not mean all info is available for you to use and then slap your name on to it like you wrote it or something. Plagiarism, for those of you who missed that day in class, is when you take someone else’s work and falsely claim it as your own. It’s very bad, and it makes you look like an ass@$%*.

The NY Times has an article up about plagiarism and the tech-savvy information generation. The lines are blurry for Gen-Y, apparently.

If you’d like to avoid being an uninformed cheating ass@#$%, the following links are helpful.

Purdue Online Writing Lab: Avoiding Plagiarism
Plagiarism.org

I must go. The line above regarding information and the volume of it is freaking me out. Can digital information have volume at all? And is it possible to measure the volume of every printed word on the planet? What about all the still-intact newspapers in old landfills? Do those count as existing information? Crap!

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Meat school! That might be it. That may be all I’ve got to say about this NPR story. Meat school. One can attend meat school. It makes sense, of course. How else would one learn to cut meat in the days of supermarkets, Styrofoam, and the possibly extinct neighborhood butcher?

Meat school, however odd it sounds, is actually a good thing. The month-long intensive certificate course at SUNY’s meat lab in Cobleskill, near Albany, teaches everything a student needs to know to run their own small meat-processing business. Graduates can then do good things, like keep well-raised, local, small-farm meats local. The farmers can send their animals to a nearby small slaughterhouse, have their meat prepared and handled by a professional.

Raising meat that has been treated well is a lot of work. In the end it’s worth it, as it’s better for the animals, the planet, and the consumer. It would be a shame, and a bit of a backward path, if the animals were raised so particularly only to be shipped off to a slaughterhouse and a market hundreds of miles away. It’s better to do all that work for yourself and your neighbors.

The phrase “meat school” is still weird. Meat school meat school meat school meat school. I’ve thought it too many times. The phrase has lost all meaning.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

We’re all in agreement that economic recessions bite, yes? Since reading this article, I’ve read nothing but articles and sound bites and commentary that all state basically the same thing: The Baby Boomers are getting old(er). Anyone working in the healthcare industry will have an excellent chance to maintain their jobs, careers, and mortgage payments despite the economic downturn. Let the healthcare-ing of the aging process begin!

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Jay Mathews from the Washington Post gives this stellar advice to prospective college students and their hyper parents: Look for fun, not facts, on your campus visits.

That’s crazy talk! That Jay guy writes a whole damn column about education (he’s for it), and I write an education blog (I’m a big fan of the learning as well). So a big yes on college and the campuses they’re attached to. And still, I totally agree with him about not sucking every ounce of fun out of a campus visit. Parents: Release! Retract! Recoil! Unclench! Attend the tour, ask real questions, get some information, then just wander around for a while, with or without your child, and let it all flow over you both. It’s not life or death, people.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Gaaah! I’ve nerded down! San Francisco: supah nerdy. Seattle: only the fifth nerdliest city in the country. Lameness!

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(via robpitingolo.org)

Not being a gambling girl by nature, I’m nonetheless fascinated by Alec Torelli’s post about ditching college to play poker. As a career. Never in a thousand years could I leave school for the gambling life. First of all, I dislike the odds. Secondly, I know way too much math to ever see gambling as anything more than a little bit of skill laced through a huge pile of less-than guaranteed luck.

I’ve gambled twice in my entire life: I bought one $2 lottery ticket and won $20, and I played my pre-decided limit of $20 in a slot machine in Vegas and won $60. Done. Never have to gamble again. Do you know what the odds are of playing twice and winning twice? Total crap. The probability of my being that far ahead again is insanely low, so there is absolutely no reason for me to hand over one cent more.

I clearly have a bad attitude about gambling and the mathematically challenged chuckleheads who continually shove their money down the toilet. That being said, I’m still somewhat impressed by Mr. Torelli’s post. He’s not an idiot, and despite myself I enjoyed reading his argument (see below).

While everyone wrote [college] off as a mandatory rite of passage that follows high school, I had my doubts. I did what I knew best and ran the numbers. I began by breaking down the cost of a standard degree at a supposedly lucrative university.

University of Southern California annual fees

Tuition: $ 40,384
Insurance: 1,040
Fees: 614
Books: 1,500
Room/Board: 11,458
Personal / Misc: 1200
Transportation: 828
Season Football Tickets: 145
Total Cost: 57,169
Estimated Hours or Opportunity Cost (including studying): 50/ week x 40 weeks = 2,000 hours

Note: For relevance, these numbers were updated for the 2009/2010 school year, copied verbatim from the USC website.

Multiply this figure by a minimum of 4 years and you get a stunning $228,676 and 8,000 hours of time. Does this sound absurd to anyone besides me? I couldn’t help but think to myself, “do you know what I could do with these resources? Shit give me the money and I won’t go to school.” More…

Who knows what his future will be like, but at this point he’s doing well and makes a decent argument for his current path in life. His numbers work out as long as he’s staying ahead, but, you know, what are the odds his luck won’t run out?

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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