Peter on February 28th, 2009

After a brief respite, I’m back to grant writing.  With the contracted economy, the time is now to generate FTEs (Full-Time Equivalents) to make sure there’s diverse project coverage.  I’m encouraged by multiple offers of support for project development.      I also recently heard that my Qualifying Exam results will take a few weeks to [...]

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Peter on February 18th, 2009

I completed the Qualifying Exam today, and I’m relieved it’s over.  Ohm.

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Peter on February 14th, 2009

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 [...]

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Peter on February 13th, 2009

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 [...]

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Peter on February 12th, 2009

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 [...]

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Peter on February 11th, 2009

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 [...]

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Peter on February 8th, 2009

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 [...]

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Peter on February 2nd, 2009

In yesterday’s Washington Post: In Black History Month, One-Room School Opens to Offer Lessons “The school was filled with benches, not desks, Orrison said, and blackboards were made of pieces of plywood painted black, unlike at white schools, where students had blackboard slates. ” Sitting on benches all day–yikes. Buske, J. (2009, February 1). In [...]

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Peter on February 1st, 2009

  Today I’m upgrading my iWeb blog to WordPress and trying to find the right theme template.  I lost the drop-and-drag functionality of iWeb, though I gained the ability to tag posts and manipulate the source code.   I heard the Super Bowl is happening today, though I don’t know which teams are playing.

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