Marc Perry in The Chronicle of Higher Education writes about a new online program at a technical college in Kentucky, in which students can begin and end the semester whenever they want.

One student, desperate to graduate, knocked off 113 quizzes and six writing assignments for a humanities course in 46 sleepless hours.But there is a downside to this convenience, and it’s deeper than bleary eyes. The open format of Jefferson’s program, called Learn Anytime, means students don’t move through classes in groups. None of Mr. Smith’s 400 online students will have a discussion or do a group project with classmates.

There’s a lot to digest in this article.  Some criticize the model; after all, true learning takes immersion and time.  Students do receive individualized attention, but it is largely automated.   On the other hand, the model is cost effective–for both administration and the instructors themselves, who are compensated per student, rather than receiving a flat fee per class.  For adjuncts, this can add up to more than even tenured faculty make (although instructors are essentially expected to work  around the clock).   Nevertheless, nearly 1300 students at Jefferson Community & Technical College have signed up.  Is this the future of higher education?

Today’s writing prompt is: WHY NOW?

“The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.”

In his Washington Post column, Gene Weingarten muses about the death of the English language.  Bonus points to any students who can explain the specific grammatical errors he bemoans.

““Please, please, please,” whispered the boy sitting to my left in the crowded auditorium, clenching his fists. Clearly too young for the sixth grade, he seemed to be praying for his brother, who sat nearby. If the brother’s name was called from the podium, he would begin sixth grade next year at Democracy Prep, a four-year-old Harlem charter school. The odds were against it: a few days earlier, the 205 names being announced had been randomly drawn from a pool of 1,250 applicants. But finally it happened. “Yes!” the boys’ mother yelped, smothering Democracy Prep’s newest student in a bear hug. The younger brother beamed.”

In this recent City Journal article, Marcus A. Winters argues in favor of charter schools and illustrates the ways in which lives are selectively changed by the charter school lottery system.

More from U.S. News and World Report: For our recent high school graduates, here is some advice on what NOT to do in college.

From U.S. News & World Report, here are eight rules for maximizing merit scholarships (as opposed to need-based aid).

Summer may be over, but this collection of summer short stories from The Guardian is still worth checking out.

“Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex — a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to.”

In the New York Times, Guy Deutscher explores the ways in which the language we grew up speaking alters our way of thinking about the world.

“”Beach reading” only bugs me because it makes reading in general sound like a chore, and because it drapes a fake aura of naughtiness over mass market books, which sell millions of copies anyway and don’t need the bad publicity. It’s like calling a hot fudge sundae “decadent.”

It’s not decadent: it’s a sundae.”

From Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic, here is a column that argues against the concept of “beach reading.”

This New York Times article explores the ways in which colleges separate “superinvolved parents” from their children on move-in day.