Category: Education

The College of William and Mary in Virginia

King William III and Queen Mary II granted the charter to found William and Mary 321 years ago today.

The College of William & Mary is the second-oldest college in America. The original plans for the College date back to 1618—decades before Harvard—but were derailed by an “Indian uprising.” We couldn’t make this stuff up.

On February 8, 1693, King William III and Queen Mary II of England signed the charter for a “perpetual College of Divinity, Philosophy, Languages, and other good Arts and Sciences” to be founded in the Virginia Colony. And William & Mary was born.

Workers began construction on the Sir Christopher Wren Building, then known simply as the College Building in 1695, before the town of Williamsburg even existed. Over the next two centuries, the Wren Building would burn on three separate occasions, each time being re-built inside the original walls. That makes the Wren the oldest college building in America, and possibly the most flammable.

The College has been called “the Alma Mater of a Nation” because of its close ties to America’s founding fathers. A 17-year-old George Washington received his surveyor’s license through the College and would return as its first American chancellor. Thomas Jefferson received his undergraduate education here, as did presidents John Tyler and James Monroe. [And NewMexiKen daughters Jill and Emily.]

William & Mary is famous for its firsts: the first U.S. institution with a Royal Charter, the first Greek-letter society (Phi Beta Kappa, founded in 1776), the first student honor code and the first law school in America.

The College became a state-supported school in 1906 and went coed in 1918. In 1928, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. chose the Wren as the first building to be returned to its 18th-century appearance as part of the iconic Colonial Williamsburg restoration.

William & Mary – History & Traditions

ΦΒΚ

On December 5, 1776, Phi Beta Kappa, America’s most prestigious undergraduate honor society, was founded at The College of William and Mary in Virginia. Membership in the organization is based on outstanding achievement in the liberal arts and sciences and typically limited to students in the upper tenth of their graduating class.

Organized by a group of enterprising undergraduates, Phi Beta Kappa was the nation’s first Greek letter society. From 1776 to 1780, members met regularly at William and Mary to write, debate, and socialize. They also planned the organization’s expansion and established the characteristics typical of American fraternities and sororities: an oath of secrecy, a code of laws, mottoes in Greek and Latin, and an elaborate initiation ritual. When the Revolutionary War forced William and Mary to close in 1780, newly-formed chapters at Harvard and Yale directed Phi Beta Kappa’s growth and development.

Library of Congress

Could You Have Passed the 8th Grade in 1895?

This is the eighth-grade final exam in 1895 from Salina, Kansas. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smoky Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7 – 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu., deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per m?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per are, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates:
1607
1620
1800
1849
1865

Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u’.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e’. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced andindicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fermandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.

SAT

When I took the SAT we didn’t have an essay requirement.

And if we had, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been about pop culture.

But if you took the SAT March 12th, you might have written to this prompt:

Reality television programs, which feature real people engaged in real activities rather than professional actors performing scripted scenes, are increasingly popular.

These shows depict ordinary people competing in everything from singing and dancing to losing weight, or just living their everyday lives. Most people believe that the reality these shows portray is authentic, but they are being misled.

How authentic can these shows be when producers design challenges for the participants and then editors alter filmed scenes?

Do people benefit from forms of entertainment that show so-called reality, or are such forms of entertainment harmful?

But then again, I took the SAT 50 years ago this fall, so what do I know?

Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?

In a talk to the nation’s governors earlier this month, [Bill] Gates emphasized work-related learning, arguing that education investment should be aimed at academic disciplines and departments that are “well-correlated to areas that actually produce jobs.”

If this was not music to the ears of advocates of the humanities, they quickly found a soulmate in Steve Jobs. At an event unveiling new Apple products, Mr. Jobs said: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices.”

From Room for Debate, a look at college majors and employment.

Calculus is the reason I was a history major.

Waiting for Superman

I recommend glowingly the documentary Waiting for Superman, a film released this past October.

Directed by Davis Guggenheim, who also directed the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for Superman describes the larger failure of American education through the stories of five young students — Anthony, Bianca, Daisy, Emily and Francisco. The children are each promising; the likelihood of their getting a good education not so promising. While much is simplified to make a complex subject digestible, the movie will still leave you angry, frustrated, saddened and charmed.

Waiting for Superman won the Audience award at the Sundance Film Festival. We watched on Netflix Blu-Ray.

What You’ll Wish You’d Known

First posted here six years ago.

What You’ll Wish You’d Known, a possible talk for high schoolers by Paul Graham. Interesting reading.

I’ll start by telling you something you don’t have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you’re supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.

Like Paula Poundstone, NewMexiKen thought adults asked kids what they wanted to be because the adults were still searching for ideas.

… If you’d asked me in high school what the difference was between high school kids and adults, I’d have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong. It’s that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it.

… It’s dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it’s not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart.

… If you think it’s restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.

… What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college.

Best line indicating need for what is asked

“You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?”

Message sent to The Shadow Scholar as reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Shadow Scholar writes college papers for other people.

I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

Fascinating article. He claims he will make $66,000 this year.

Most Beautiful College Libraries

No major introduction needed here, as a picture is worth a thousand words. Here we take a look at some of the most magnificent university libraries across the country.

Comfort and atmosphere play a huge role in getting in a quality study session. The problem is that some of these libraries are so beautiful that they almost become too distracting to study in.

Most Beautiful College Libraries

Some stunning buildings and photographs.

The magic moment

Author Pat Conroy is 65 today. Conroy has written several bestselling novels, most notably The Water Is Wide, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides. Byron, one of two official sons-in-law of NewMexiKen, sent me this story about Conroy in 2004 (in part because the tale it tells concerns Byron’s own high school alma mater).

Mr. Conroy’s latest book, ”My Losing Season,” published this month by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, is ostensibly a memoir of his senior year playing basketball at the Citadel.

But the book’s most gripping moment, for those readers interested in education, may be the three and a half pages set inside Room 2A, the classroom of Joseph A. Monte at Gonzaga High School, a Jesuit institution in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Monte was Mr. Conroy’s sophomore-year English instructor, and in describing how Mr. Monte taught him to read Faulkner that year, Mr. Conroy has provided a bonus for all those devoted teachers in his audience: he has captured that elusive moment when a teacher succeeds in firing the imagination of a student.

Mr. Monte’s mantra was: ”Read the great books, gentlemen, just the great ones. Ignore the others. There’s not enough time.” To that end, in November 1960, Mr. Conroy received a personal assignment to read ”The Sound and the Fury.”

After studying the first 90 pages, Mr. Conroy said he felt as if he was ”reading the book underwater.” Even after rereading those 90 pages, he did not understand a word.

When Mr. Conroy approached his teacher in the cafeteria to tell him of his despair, Mr. Monte sent him scurrying in a different direction: the scene in ”Macbeth” when Macbeth learns of the death of his queen.

”There you will find the key to your dilemma,” the future novelist was told, ”if, Mr. Conroy, you’re the student I think you are.”

The critical passage, Mr. Conroy discovered, was when Macbeth says, ”It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Mr. Conroy realized that ”The Sound and the Fury” was also told by an ”idiot,” Benjy.

”That’s why I was confused,” Mr. Conroy writes in his new book. ”It was surfaces and shadows and what Benjy thought he was seeing. Faulkner was writing through Benjy’s eyes . . . through an idiot’s eyes.”

The lesson, according to Mr. Monte: ”Sometimes literature is direct and straightforward. Sometimes it makes you work.”

For his trouble, Mr. Conroy received an ”A+, double credit” in Mr. Monte’s ever-present grade book.

”This is a good moment in the life of your mind,” Mr. Conroy recalls his teacher saying. ”It’s a good moment in my life as a teacher. We should both cherish it.”

The article by Jacques Steinberg originally appeared in The New York Times in 2002.

Best line to make you think you really ought to see this movie

“So kudos to the new documentary ‘Waiting for Superman’ for ratcheting up the interest level. It follows the fortunes of five achingly adorable children and their hopeful, dedicated, worried parents in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., as they try to gain entrance to high-performing charter schools. Not everybody gets in, and by the time you leave the theater you are so sad and angry you just want to find something to burn down.”

Gail Collins

Collins has more than just this line. Go read it all.

The World University Rankings 2010

From the Times of London, Top 200.

Our rankings of the top universities across the globe employ 13 separate performance indicators designed to capture the full range of university activities, from teaching to research to knowledge transfer. These 13 elements are brought together into five headline categories, which are:

  • Teaching — the learning environment (worth 30 per cent of the overall ranking score)
  • Research — volume, income and reputation (worth 30 per cent)
  • Citations — research influence (worth 32.5 per cent)
  • Industry income — innovation (worth 2.5 per cent)
  • International mix — staff and students (worth 5 per cent).

72 are in the United States.

America’s real school-safety problem

Last fall, a Delaware student was suspended from school after bringing a knife into his classroom. Because of his school’s zero-tolerance weapons policy, he was suspended for 45 days and forced to attend an alternative school. Swift justice? Perhaps — except that the student, Zachary Christie, was a first grader at the time and the “weapon” was his Cub Scout-issued fork-spoon-knife tool.

A researcher and author argues that we are teaching kids to take a police state for granted; that there may be better and certainly less draconian ways to prevent violence.

Not encouraging line of the day

“New Mexico ranks 47th among states [and D.C.] in the number of 25 to 34 year olds with an associate’s degree or higher …”.

New Mexico Independent

“[R]oughly 28.5 percent of New Mexicans aged 25 to 34 possess an associate’s degree or higher, which compares unfavorably to the national average — 41.6 percent.”

Only West Virginia, Nevada, Louisiana and Arkansas have a lower percentage. Massachusetts is the best state with 53.4%. The District of Columbia is 63.5%.

Why are professors teaching courses on The Wire?

From Drake Bennett at Slate Magazine, Why so many colleges are teaching The Wire. An excerpt:

Academics, on the other hand, can’t seem to get enough of The Wire. Barely two years after the show’s final episode aired—and with Simon’s new show, Treme, premiering next month on HBO—there have already been academic conferences, essay anthologies, and special issues of journals dedicated to the series. Not content to write about it and discuss it among themselves, academics are starting to teach it, as well. Professors at Harvard, U.C.—Berkeley, Duke, and Middlebury are now offering courses on the show.

Interestingly, the classes aren’t just in film studies or media studies departments; they’re turning up in social science disciplines as well, places where the preferred method of inquiry is the field study or the survey, not the HBO series, even one that is routinely called the best television show ever. Some sociologists and social anthropologists, it turns out, believe The Wire has something to teach their students about poverty, class, bureaucracy, and the social ramifications of economic change.

Best line of the day

“But isn’t it convenient that once again it turns out that the problem isn’t us, and the fix is something that doesn’t require us to change our behavior or spend any money. It’s so simple: Fire the bad teachers, hire good ones from some undisclosed location, and hey, while we’re at it let’s cut taxes more. It’s the kind of comprehensive educational solution that could only come from a completely ignorant people.”

Bill Maher

New Plan Would Let High Schoolers Graduate Early

From The New York Times:

Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.

Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said. Students who fail the 10th grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but other subjects like science and history.

The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, Finland, England, France and Singapore.

Yeah, but are they ready for the drinking games?

New Mexico is among the eight states participating.

Easily should have been a C+

But both authors tell the story of Gregory Watson, a University of Texas undergraduate who wrote a paper on one of the amendments proposed at the time of the Bill of Rights but not adopted. It would have made Congressional pay raises effective only after the next election. Watson started a letter-writing campaign, noting that in this case there was no deadline for ratification. The upshot was the most recent amendment, the 27th, ratified in 1992.

Characteristically, it is Lipsky who includes the killer detail. Watson’s professor, unconvinced that the amendment was still pending, gave him a C.

From an Adam Liptak review of Annotated Versions of the Constitution from Seth Lipsky and Jack N. Rakove