8 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2019
    1. Policymakers have begun to wrangle with the definition of “first generation,” which, according to Maureen Hoyler, president of the Council for Opportunity in Education, entered the legislative lexicon in 1980 as a better way to identify disadvantaged students without referring to race or ethnicity.

      I don't think the differing definitions for what makes somebody "first generation" should matter as much as what is required to help students that are struggling. It's unfortunate that people are focusing as much on how much people are disadvantaged instead of what could be done to help each student succeed.

    2. “I was just shocked,” said Ms. Weingarten, who would identify the college only as a prominent engineering school. “To me, that boy was first gen all the way. He wasn’t raised by his father.”

      I think this statement shows a personal example of how the education system, as well as certain programs for minority groups need to be improved. It clearly isn't fair that the school didn't classify the student as a first generation student.

    1. I might as well have been my non-English-speaking grandmother trying to read and understand them: The language felt that foreign. I called my mom at work and in tears told her that I had to come home, that I’d made a terrible mistake.

      This statement really engages me and makes we want to read the rest of the article. I'm curious to know how the writer overcomes this struggle, as well as how they were able to get into Cornell in the first place. This reminds me a bit of my mother, because English is not her first language, yet she managed to teach Japanese at Cornell. I'm curious to know if her experiences and the writer's experiences are similar.

    2. Every afternoon during that week, we had to go back to the only department store we could find, the now-defunct Ames, for some stupid thing we hadn’t known was a necessity, something not in our budget: shower shoes, extra-long twin sheets, mesh laundry bags.

      I can relate to this confusion as a non first generation college student so I can only imagine how stressful preparing for college was for the writer. I really like how they manage to include this personal yet relatable aspect of their experience preparing for college.

    1. Published Wednesday, the study tracked students from nearly every college in the country (including those who failed to graduate), measuring their earnings years after they left campus.

      The study measured the student's salaries. I find it interesting that they measure the college's efficiency based off of how much money the alumni from each school received. Can a school still be efficient at teaching without guaranteeing careers?

    2. More recently, these universities have seemed to struggle, with unprepared students, squeezed budgets and high dropout rates. To some New Yorkers, “City College” is now mostly a byword for nostalgia.

      I'm curious to know what the writer means when they state how universities struggle with "unprepared students". Does this mean that college acceptance rates are higher? Or does it mean that high schools are becoming worse at preparing students for college? Im going to keep this in mind as I read because I'm curious to know what the writer claims is causing this.

    1. Husmann says the most important thing, for anyone looking to learn something new, is just to really focus on the material—that’s what the most successful students from her study did.

      I believe this is a very good reminder for all students. As time goes on, people will always try to find innovative ways to improve their learning, and as a result, many of these techniques have the potential to be gimmicks. This statement connects to the surprising study revealed earlier in the article by providing an explanation to why prioritizing each person's learning style doesn't improve their test scores. At the core, school is about learning the material itself, and not about the ways people can manipulate the process to make retaining information easier for them.

    2. That same year, a Journal of Educational Psychology paper found no relationship between the study subjects’ learning-style preference (visual or auditory) and their performance on reading- or listening-comprehension tests. Instead, the visual learners performed best on all kinds of tests. Therefore, the authors concluded, teachers should stop trying to gear some lessons toward “auditory learners.”

      This finding is extremely interesting and contradicts everything about learning styles I've been told in school. The statement: " teachers should stop trying to gear some lessons toward auditory learners" gives me the idea that all students are visual learners to an extent, and teachers should instead be incorporating more visual learning techniques into their lectures, instead of justifying their use non-visual lessons, which in my experience only makes their lectures less engaging as a result.