This blog is maintained by a teacher who has decided to eat school lunches along with her students to raise awareness about what they eat.

Kevin Hartnett of The Millions reflects on the rise of Kindle and the loss of bookshelves.

A chief virtue of digital books is said to be their economical size—they take up no space at all!—but even a megabyte seems bulky compared to what can be conveyed in the few cubic feet of a bookshelf.  What other vessel is able to hold with such precision, intricacy, and economy, all the facets of your life: that you bake bread, vacationed in China, fetishize Melville, aspire to read Shakespeare, have coped with loss, and still tote around a copy of The Missing Piece as a totem of your childhood.

In the U.S. News and World Report, Kim Clark lists 10 factors to consider when determining whether a college’s financial aid offer will be large enough to meet your needs.

The Guardian features dos and don’ts from authors such as Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaimon, and Joyce Carol Oates.  The project was inspired by Elmore Leonard’s new book, 10 Rules of Writing.

This year, Tufts University offered applicants the opportunity to post a Youtube video as part of their applications.  This New York Times article has more information on the response.

Via the New York Times, ten educators weigh in on the fast-track to graduation program we wrote about yesterday.

According to Sam Dillon’s recent New York Times article, eight states plan to allow some high school students to graduate two years early if they pass a series of exams.  Those students would then be able to enroll in community college.

“The program is being organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and its goals include insuring that students have mastered a set of basic requirements and reducing the numbers of high school graduates who need remedial courses when they enroll in college. More than a million college freshmen across America must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree.”

I have mixed feelings about this plan. It is certainly true that many who enroll in community college must take developmental classes, even though high school was supposed to provide them with these basic skills.  Still, unless these exams must be passed by all students receiving diplomas, I don’t see how this new plan will prevent some from graduating without certain necessary skills.

I worry, too, that sixteen-year-olds are not emotionally ready for college.  After all, attendance is not compulsory.  Many of my students are shocked to learn that I will not chase down missing assignments or give them second chances to turn in late work, as their high school English teachers once did.  Others simply lack the  maturity necessary to ignore the many distractions of the outside world, especially the pressure placed by those friends who are not enrolled in school and thus do not need to complete three or four hours of homework each night.  These students often stop attending class, or continue to attend but fail to complete enough work to earn a passing grade. Younger students would likely struggle with this even more.

Maturity, unfortunately, cannot be measured by a battery of academic exams.  If we allow high school students to graduate early, we must ensure they are not just academically ready to move on, but emotionally ready as well.

A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article reviews research into the effect of multitasking on memory and attention span.  In “Divided Attention,” David Glenn considers the effect of media-multitasking in the classroom: those technology-wielding students who flip from screen to screen on their laptop, switching between Facebook, Freecell, and their lecture notes.  Are they able to focus as well as their peers?

“In a recent unpublished study, [Clifford I. Nass] and his colleagues found that chronic media multitaskers—people who spent several hours a day juggling multiple screen tasks—performed worse than otherwise similar peers on analytic questions drawn from the LSAT. He isn’t sure which way the causation runs here: It might be that media multitaskers are hyperdistractible people who always would have done poorly on LSAT questions, even in the pre-Internet era. But he worries that media multitasking might actually be destroying students’ capacity for reasoning.”

As an educator, I often find it difficult to keep my students on task, even without the distraction of technology.  Now that cell phones have become ubiquitous, it’s become nearly impossible: today I asked a student to put away his cell phone only to see him, moments later, reaching into his pocket, almost reflexively, to check another text message.  Was this a product of my lecture?  Or was he unable to focus because the buzzing cell phone in his pocket promised instant gratification, whereas my lecture on the importance of revision, alas, did not?   “Divided Gratification” doesn’t provide any definitive answers to these questions, but it does introduce several worthwhile theories on the matter.

Write about a promise.

Here’s  a question from the May 2006 SAT exam:

19. A container in the shape of a right circular cylinder has an inside base radius of 4 inches and an inside height of 9 inches.  This cylinder is completely filled with water. All of the water is then poured into a second right circular cylinder with a larger inside base radius of 9 inches. What must be the minimum inside height, in inches, of the second cylinder.

(A) 4/3

(B) 16/9

(C) 9/4

(D) 4

(E) 6

Don’t worry about the terminology — it’s not important that you know what a right circular cylinder is. It is, however, important to remember that any time you’re asked about a cylinder, you’re most likely being asked about volume. It’s not necessary to even memorize the volume formula since it’s given to you on the reference information portion of the section (right below the directions).  However, we at Stylus suggest you memorize the formulas anyway because it will save you the time of flipping back and forth.  Cylinder volume is fairly easy to memorize if you already know the formula for the area of a circle.  Think of a cylinder as being a circle with the added dimension of height.  Thus, the formula for volume of a cylinder is the same as that of a circle, but with height added: V = πr²h.

Since this question appears toward the end of the section, we can bet on needing to do at least two separate calculations.  One way the makers of the SAT love to make geometry equations more complex is by asking you to solve one equation and plug that solution into a second (or even a third) equation to solve for a different variable — to plug and plug again.  This equation is no different.  Eventually, we’ll need to solve for the height of the second cylinder, but before we can do that, we need to solve for the volume of the original cylinder.

Since the first cylinder is completely full, we only need to plug the given numbers into the formula to find the original volume of water: V = π(4)²(9) = π(16)(9).  Don’t bother solving this equation yet — doing so won’t give us the answer we’re looking for, and any time you avoid using a calculator to do messy calculations, you save yourself time.

Onto the second equation: If the water is poured into the second cylinder, it needs to have at least the volume of the original cylinder.  So we need to use the volume formula once again, this time using the volume from equation 1 and solving for the height of cylinder 2.

V = πr²h

π(16)(9) = π(9)²h

Divide both sides by 9π to get

16 = 9h (see why I told you not to bother with the calculator?) and then divide by 9 again to get

16/9 = h, choice B.