How to Avoid Being a Helicopter Professor. For years there has been talk about shifting a professor’s role from the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side.” But as some teachers leave the center stage, they may not move to the side as guides. Instead, they may find themselves hovering above students as helicopter parents hover over their children. While a complete lack of guidance is not a good idea, excessive guiding could turn constructivist scaffolds into new forms of crutches. Here are a few suggestions for providing students with the proper balance of challenge and support. Allow chaos. Students should learn to tolerate some uncertainty and vagueness in the learning process.
Embrace desirable difficulty. Increase accountability. Reduce redundancy. Remove crutches. Mix pull and push. I understand that educators walk a tightrope between supporting students and challenging them to be more self-directed learners. References: Brown, P. Deresiewicz, P. Books - Just Leave Them Behind. Rising Above I.Q. In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks — and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us. Asian-Americans are renowned — or notorious — for ruining grade curves in schools across the land, and as a result they constitute about 20 percent of students at Harvard College.
As for Jews, they have received about one-third of all Nobel Prizes in science received by Americans. One survey found that a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole. West Indian blacks, those like Colin Powell whose roots are in the Caribbean, are one-third more likely to graduate from college than African-Americans as a whole, and their median household income is almost one-third higher. These three groups may help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect, for they represent three different races and histories. America's Worst Charities. National Veterans Service Fund notes on its website that "war does not end on the battlefield.
" Instead, the site goes on to say, American veterans and their families have been left without the help they need to overcome critical health and psychological problems at home. National Veterans Service Fund says it offers guidance to veterans to help them qualify for aid they otherwise would go without. It also touts the "limited medical assistance" the charity hands out to needy veterans. Those promises have helped persuade donors contacted over the phone and in mailers to give $70 million over the past decade.
The percent going to professional solicitors has increased over time. Philip Kraft, president of National Veterans Service Fund, said his charity buys wheelchairs, provides grocery store gift cards and pays rent for needy veterans. The only cash grant mentioned in the charity's 2011 IRS filing is a $60,000 donation to a children's birth defect group in Orlando. I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why. If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building. Some might call my approach to grammar extreme, but I prefer Lynne Truss’s more cuddly phraseology: I am a grammar “stickler.”
And, like Truss — author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves — I have a “zero tolerance approach” to grammar mistakes that make people look stupid. Now, Truss and I disagree on what it means to have “zero tolerance.” She thinks that people who mix up their itses “deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave,” while I just think they deserve to be passed over for a job — even if they are otherwise qualified for the position. But grammar is relevant for all companies. Wrong. The Unpatchable Malware That Infects USBs Is Now on the Loose. It’s been just two months since researcher Karsten Nohl demonstrated an attack he called BadUSB to a standing-room-only crowd at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, showing that it’s possible to corrupt any USB device with insidious, undetectable malware. Given the severity of that security problem—and the lack of any easy patch—Nohl has held back on releasing the code he used to pull off the attack.
But at least two of Nohl’s fellow researchers aren’t waiting any longer. In a talk at the Derbycon hacker conference in Louisville, Kentucky last week, researchers Adam Caudill and Brandon Wilson showed that they’ve reverse engineered the same USB firmware as Nohl’s SR Labs, reproducing some of Nohl’s BadUSB tricks. And unlike Nohl, the hacker pair has also published the code for those attacks on Github, raising the stakes for USB makers to either fix the problem or leave hundreds of millions of users vulnerable. “The belief we have is that all of this should be public. Lifehacker - Tips and downloads for getting things done.