Colleges still accepting applications for fall
A friend told me that her son had applied to half a dozen colleges and universities for this coming fall. She has become worried that he won’t get into any of them and should have applied to more. What can he do?
The same query was posed on a listserv by an educational consultant, who noted that the University of California may, for the first time, wait list students for the fall as officials figure out how many their financial straits will allow them to accept.
It turns out that there are scores of fine schools still accepting applications. In some cases, you have only days to finish the application, and in others, a lot longer. (See partial list below.)
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Doubt about learning styles
[This is my column for the Local Living section of Feb. 11, 2010.]
If you are in a mischievous mood and want to get a rise out of your favorite teachers or principals, send them a copy of "Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence," in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Volume 9, No. 3, December 2008. (Actually, it came out in December 2009, but for a reason understood only by academics in the timeless search for truth, its official publication date was 12 months previous.)
Here is my summary of the 15-page paper: Learning styles are hogwash.
It’s not quite that bad. The four authors agree that "people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information." Some of us consider ourselves visual learners. Some of us think we learn best if we use our hands: draw, make models, stack coins. The authors conclude, however, that "at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice."
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Fight to keep D.C. schools open fails
The last flickers of public school resistance against the weather in the Washington region faded at 4:32 Wednesday afternoon, when DCPS announced it was calling off Thursday classes.
So ends a snowbound four-day saga that began with Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee planning to open up on a two-hour delay on Monday but ended with closures that have lasted all week. (Read my previous posts on this drama here, here and here.)
But for Rhee, the surrender is not quite unconditional. She says she still hasn't decided about Friday's scheduled day of professional development for teachers. Stay tuned.
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