Tag: books

Teaching difficult texts (via jay.blog)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

I talk about this a lot myself. My primary gripes are that teachers often teach unimportant things because they are easy to grade. Sometimes, I see meaningless questions asked because they lend themselves well to an easily gradable format. Here’s a disguised version of one I saw –

The Social Security Act was passed by Congress in ….
A. 1935
B. 1936
C. 1937
or D. 1928.

If your career and life depend on knowing the year that social security passed in the format of a Jeopardy question, that would be a good question. In every other way it is useless.

How should the questions be phrased? Like this –

The Social Security Act was passed by Congress in …
A. The first few years of the Roosevelt Administration.
B. The last years of the Hoover Administration.
C. As one of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the mid-sixties.
or D. With the founding of the Constitution.

This places the Social Security Act in historical perspective, and it allows reasoning to be used. You can use what you learned in a variety of venues to determine if the act would have been something that the founding fathers or Herbert Hoover would have done.

I believe in teaching difficult subjects. I believe my students can handle difficult material. And I believe that teaching is an art whose highest practitioners can rise to meet the challenges of complexity and ambiguity.

James Pilant

Just a short post that got me thinking about this. In our Inquiry Education class, we read Wintergirls, a novel about a young girl, Lia, who has anorexia. It takes place in the days, weeks and months after her "best friend," Cassie, who had bulimia, died. It's an intense book with a lot of touchy and sometimes controversial events. In a nutshell, it's the book you want kids to open up and read but you don't want to teach it because of the subject … Read More

via jay.blog

John Ensign Ethics Report: Hot Off the Press (via NotionsCapital)

On By southwerkIn business ethics1 Comment

You should probably read the report and get your fill of the seamy side of capital hill. The combination of power and sexual access is intoxicating. It is hard to do the right thing when there is just so much money and so much temptation. That, of course, is not an excuse.

James Pilant

Special thanks to NotionsCaptital.

John Ensign Ethics Report: Hot Off the Press Adulterous Nevada Republican John Ensign resigned his U.S. Senate seat before the Senate Ethics Committee issued a report that would have led to his expulsion. The last time the U.S. Senate expelled a member: 1862. The Ensign ethics report is out, so add it to your summer reading list. Some may think it’s not a romance novel, but Mr. Ensign’s web of deceit involved a long-term affair with His Neighbor’s Wife (an employee and spouse of an employee … Read More

via NotionsCapital

“Visionary works of art inspired by blind rage” (via NewSong40)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

This is a really fascinating post from an obviously well read author. The insights there are very appealing and display a clever imagination.

But you might go there just to see the picture (thumbnail below). That was my first thought. I have another from this set of artists on my wall in the living room of my home.

James Pilant

Special thanks to NewSong40.

"Visionary works of art inspired by blind rage" So ran the headline of the advertising blurb for a documentary by Andrew Lloyd Webber in last week’s TV guide. The documentary was part of ITV’s “Perspectives” season and was entitled A passion for the pre-Raphaelites. “The Industrial Revolution:” the blurb continued, “A turning point for mankind but not necessarily for the better. Mass productivity went together with mass poverty. Soaring profits saw soaring prostitution. And increasing mechanis … Read More

via NewSong40

Student Borrowing Increases Dramatically

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, ethics

Here are the key findings from the Pew Research Center Analysis.

* One-quarter (24%) of 2008 bachelor’s degree graduates at for-profit schools borrowed more than $40,000, compared with 5% of graduates at public institutions and 14% at not-for-profit schools.
* Roughly one-in-four recipients of an associate’s degree or certificate borrowed more than $20,000 at both private for-profit and private not-for-profit schools, compared with 5% of graduates of public schools.
* Graduates of private for-profit schools are demographically different from graduates in other sectors. Generally, private for-profit school graduates have lower incomes, and are older, more likely to be from minority groups, more likely to be female, more likely to be independent of their parents and more likely to have their own dependents.
* Although private for-profit schools specialize in different fields of study than do public and private not-for-profit schools, the differences in borrowing patterns persist within fields of study. For almost every field of study at every level, students at private for-profit schools are more likely to borrow and tend to borrow larger amounts than students at public and private not-for-profit schools.

Here’s some more from the report –

Undergraduate college student borrowing has risen dramatically in recent years. Graduates who received a bachelor’s degree in 2008 borrowed 50% more (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than their counterparts who graduated in 1996, while graduates who earned an associate’s degree or undergraduate certificate in 2008 borrowed more than twice what their counterparts in 1996 had borrowed, according to a new analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data by the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project.

I’m sure there are people who look at this and say these young people are borrowing too much money and that may often be true. But if you follow the costs of going to college, tuition, books, etc., you come to a different conclusion. Since students can borrow money to a guarenteed level, tuition and fees will rise toward that level each year. When the level is raised, the college and university costs start their inexorable increase to get all the loan money possible. When the top borrowing amount no longer works for a number of institutions, the borrowing cap is raised and it starts all over again.

Tuition costs have increased at twice the level of medical costs increases over the last decade. That’s right. Even the insurance companies couldn’t keep up with the colleges and universities of the United States.

James Pilant