I passed the Qualifying Exam! The dissertation work can commence, and the proposal defense will be next. This is great! In other school news, I saw this article in the NY Times this morning: Education officials classify some 5.1 million students in the United States — 1 in 10 of all those enrolled in [...]
I completed the Qualifying Exam today, and I’m relieved it’s over. Ohm.
I’m at the point where I’m done sorting through the piles and will spend tomorrow writing essay responses to what I’m hoping will be related to the questions I’ll see. This will (1) help me practice my exposition and (2) reduce my anxiety by simulating the typing I’ll need to do Monday through Wednesday. The [...]
From Hochschild and Scovronick (The American Dream and the Public Schools): “Particular groups make claims to distinctive treatment in schools for two reasons: First, those acting on behalf of children who were treated unfairly because of some shared characteristic have demanded the right to have the group recognized and treated differently, so that in the [...]
Continue reading about Qualifying Exam Readings: Connections
I’m very much appreciating this passage from Katznelson and Weir’s Schooling for All: “For far too long now, discussions about education, social structure, and politics have been dominated by a discourse, once suggestive but now stale, between traditional progressive historians, on the one hand, who have identified schools as democratizing institutions that, in relatively unproblematical [...]
Continue reading about Qualifying Exam Readings: Meta Perspectives and Links
I naturally started thinking about what questions I’ll have on my Qualifying Exam. I heard that they’re global in scope and that Day 1 is specialization, Day 2 is cognate (Construction of Social Distance), and Day 3 is Methods. I’m thinking that Day 1 will touch on the value of schooling and how detractors have [...]
Today I’m entering the study cave until the Qualifying Exam. I took annual leave and cleared my schedule to focus. In the meantime, my kinetically gifted brother is upgrading two bathrooms this week. The construction work will keep me out of the house and away from email-checking temptations. I’ve been waiting my entire life [...]
This evening I’ve been reading Lindblom’s The Science of “Muddling Through” and continuing with the Koretz text Measuring Up. From Koretz, p. 40: “. . .the inclination to apply the knowledge and skills learned in school to later endeavors certainly is an important goal. We don’t put students in school simply to do well while [...]
This past week was spent working on webinars and submitting a grant that went out on Thursday. Tomorrow marks 3 weeks until the Qualifying Exam, and I was thankfully able to clear Feb. 9-13 by using vacation days. Having off the week before will allow me to focus and breathe. I’m confident to meet this [...]
Today I’m reading the Paul, French, and Cranston-Gingras September, 2001 article Ethics and Special Education in the journal Focus on Exceptional Children. This article traces the contours of ethical approaches to special education (choice morality vs. character morality),their application to contrasting ideals of democracy (liberalism vs. communitarianism), and the construction of ethical arguments concerning the [...]
Continue reading about Historical, Ethical, and Disciplinary Foundations of Special Education