October 2011
28 posts
My Colleges and Careers: Classes Every College Student Should Take Part 1 →
mycollegesandcareers.tumblr.com
Happy to have my advice featured in this article!
Classroom at UBC. Photo: Velkr0 on Flickr
We polled out Career Experts for suggestions on classes that every college students — including you! — should take to become more well-rounded individuals and better prepared for integration into the real world.
Speech/Communications…
2 Broke Girls' Beth Behrs Has Never Been To Williamsburg
Ha.
ifc:
2 Broke Girls likes to makes fun of the Williamsburg hipster scene. Did you ever hang out there for research?
I’ve never been to Williamsburg, but I’ve been to Park Slope. So I can kind of get a sense? And I heard that hipster scene in the east side of L.A. is sorta similar? The first place I’m going to in New York when I visit in November or December is Williamsburg.Full chat/interview here
Ugh.
Well that nails that coffin.
Lame.
The Girl Effect Blogging Campaign is Today →
opportunitiesproject.com
Today is the day of the annual blogging campaign for The Girl Effect, and organization that advocates for more investment in young women in developing countries, including education and family planning. You can click on the link to read my post on my company’s blog at The Opportunities Project
I wrote for them last year, too. It’s a great organization.
September 2011
13 posts
Teachers Make Lousy Customers →
blog.studiofellow.com
Saw this blog post in my morning EdSurge newsletter (the only newsletter that doesn’t get filtered out of my inbox) and was really affected by it. Jarrod Drysdale talks about the reasons he is closing his ed tech product, which is mainly his inability to get teachers to buy his product. He has some choice words about teachers and technology and while I don’t agree with everything he says, he has some points. Two points have stayed with me this morning.
1. It’s true that its almost impossible to bring a product into a school district these days unless you’re a well capitalized and established company. The intent of only dealing with the “big boys” may have been to protect taxpayers from having their money spent on fly-by-night products, but it now often prevents innovation from coming into the world of public schools. For us little folks who want to earn an income doing what we do well while making a difference… well, we’re mostly screwed.
2. Teachers are hard to market to, for sure. While I don’t sell to teachers, I do recruit them and they are hard to reach. There are so many, they are all over the place and don’t act like people in other professions when it comes to purchasing, training, etc. Writing about all the reasons why would require a dissertation, but none of them change the fact that they are a difficult group to create a income generating product for.
I looked around the Knack for Teachers website and like what I saw. This whole thing makes me feel sad, not just for this founder (who I don’t know), but the general state of education entrepreneurship.
Bored? Come get Job Search Tips at 7PM ET →
bigmarker.com
I’m doing a free webinar for Big Marker at 7PM on how to appear more confident in the job search. Did I say free? Yup.
In 1979, kids could roam, but not read →
joannejacobs.com
I find this blog post about entry standards for a first grade student in 1979 fascinating. I entered kindergarten in 1980 (gulp) so this brings back familiar thoughts. Here is one of the items.
8. Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home?
I remember I walked home from school every day with another six-year old. It was 3 blocks, but I wouldn’t let my child do that today.
Enter: Adulthood: Special Invitation to the Audacity Aces Webinar Series →
enteradulthood.com
great line up.
enteradulthood:
I’m inviting you to a special 7-week webinar series featuring luminaries + thought leaders in the world of career personality, business strategy, job-hunting, health + vibrancy, happiness design + sass-tastic confidence.
And guess what? I’m one of them. (And you can go to my webinar free. See…
Performance Advantage Inc: "Take us to the World Trade Center" →
anditsonlytuesday.com
Beautifully written.
The World Trade Center, August 2011
by Helen Antholis
Last month, we were in NYC and decided to go downtown to see the progress on rebuilding the WTC. We got into a cab and said “Take us to the World Trade Center.” The driver looked at us and repeated “World Trade Center?” It was as if…
Teachers and the Jobs Bill
Been skimming the edu blogs since President Obama’s speech and the usual suspects are taking the same angle on teachers and the jobs bill that they did in the past when we had ARRA money: we don’t really need more teachers and our worst districts already spend too much money.
Fair enough. And when I was on the district side, I agreed. But now that I am in the careers and economic space, I see things differently. This isn’t an education bill, no matter how politicians might spin it. It’s a jobs bill and our economy needs it, at least in the short-term.
Right or wrong, our colleges of education are graduating hundreds of thousands of young women who can’t find teaching jobs and aren’t prepared for and don’t want to do anything else. They are barely captured in the unemployment numbers because most have not worked enough quarters to qualify. I’ve written before about how the current state of the job market is impacting women here and it’s been in the NY TImes Ecomomix blog and Nate Silver has talked about it, too (can’t find the reference…grr).
The status quo does need to change, but we might need to do that while making sure this generation doesn’t become lost. Perhaps some accountability from the government on how the money is spent, as well as something to tame higher ed, might help.
9/11 and Teaching
I read this commentary from a teacher (via Joanne Jacobs) that talked about how 9.11 inspired her to be a teacher. I am surprised I haven’t read more blog posts and articles like this.
On 9/11/01, I was entering my second year as a member of the management team for the NYC Teaching Fellows, an alternative certification program for career changers who aspire to be NYC public school teachers. We were starting the recruitment process for our fifth cohort who would start teaching in fall 2002. After 9/11, we were flooded with applications- about 20,000 to be exact and more than double of what we had received the previous year. I spent much of the winter and spring reading application essays from people who wrote about how the events of that day made them want to give up their corporate career and do something “meaningful” with their lives. Applications soared at Teach for America around this time, too,
When I started my doctorate program at NYU in educational leadership in 2006, one of the topics I considered for my dissertation was the impact of 9.11 and whether enrollments increased at traditional colleges of education in NYC, too, and the impact on the teacher “shortage.” I am not sure why I abandoned that topic- it probably seemed too hard to get the data at the time. I always thought that the interest in teaching would decline as time passed, but I haven’t experienced that in my work. I think this generation of recent graduates were influenced by different values than mine, probably going back to that day. The job market influence can’t be discounted, either.
“Let’s dispense with this idea that Millennials are somehow just smarter than all the generations that have come before. When I learn that over one-third of undergraduates these days show no significant gains after four years in vital skills like critical thinking and written communication, I have trouble seeing the broad genius of Gen Y.”
—Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business Review Blog
