Many students have trouble with the more abstract passages on the VR section, particularly with subjects such as philosophy, literary criticism, politics, and historical scholarship. Those of you who still have several months before you take the test should practice reading abstract passages as much as possible between now and MCAT day. You are almost guaranteed to get one or two of them on your test, so you should expect it, and be ready for them.
My department is engaged in textbook selection right now. I’m fairly certain that we have decided which textbook company we would like to work with; however, I think we still need to pin down which peripherals we will order to supplement and exactly which books in the series we will use. I won’t tell you which ones we decided on here, but I will tell you two things that troubled me about this process.
First of all, my department head contacted Holt so that we could examine their series Elements of Literature. I have used this series in the past and really liked it. Unfortunately, they are not very interested in obtaining business from our school. They did not reply to my department head’s queries to visit our school and share their series with us. They did send samples of their ninth grade text. I was not very impressed with it, if I may be honest. We are a small school, and it is probably true that their energies might be better directed toward serving large districts; however, we did feel slighted. My department head and I discussed Holt’s lack of interest in selling books to us and determined that we would not be buying books from them.
Tags: Selecting, TextsWinning approach Defying trends, teacher gives a special educationBy SARAH CARR
scarr@journalsentinel.comPosted: Sept. 17, 2007
On the bottom floor of Milwaukee's Audubon Middle School, teacher Rick Drida doesn't miss a beat in a classroom full of some of the building's more hard to reach students.
Over at ETI, Tom is writing about the future of blogging in preparation for our NECC panel in a couple of weeks. I’m cross posting this back over there in response.
My take on the future of blogging differs from Tom’s in some respects. Specifically, I don’t agree that the practice of reading and writing in blogs will remain unchanged in 10 years. If fact, I would doubt that blogs in their current iteration will be around in 10 years. To compare blogs to e-mail is, I think, to say that, like e-mail, blogging has only one fairly restrictive use. I don’t think that’s the case. In fact, Tom points out correctly that blogs have already evolved from basic link lists with little annotation to a more complex form of exposition, which is, ironically, a change he’s been fighting against and I’ve been fighting for.
Tags: EdBlogging, Future, NECC, Panel-TheUWM raises ante on acreage for Innovation Park Spinoffs will need space, Santiago tells supervisorsBy STEVE SCHULTZE
sschultze@journalsentinel.comPosted: Sept. 17, 2007
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's proposal for a new engineering school and research park would require buying some 83 acres of Milwaukee County Grounds property near Highway 45 and Swan Blvd., UWM Chancellor Carlos Santiago said Monday.