Readings for Monday 4/6

Here are the readings for Monday, 4/6. Please DO NOT write a blog in response to these readings. DO NOT post to the discussion board (as we did last week). Just read them and be prepared to talk about them in class on Monday. In the meantime, get working on selecting which two of your four essays you are going to focus on revising during the last month of the semester.

Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define

Just before Valentine’s Day this year, Sunday Styles did something very unromantic: we asked college students nationwide to tell the plain truth about what love is like for them. We weren’t sure what to expect, but we thought we wouldn’t receive many essays about red roses and white tablecloths.

When the contest deadline passed seven weeks later, more than 1,200 essays had arrived, from 365 schools in 46 states and Puerto Rico. In perhaps typical collegiate fashion, nearly 700 poured in on the last day, 400 over the final hour. We counted only three red roses among them, and one was bestowed in a laundry room.

As for the more complicated stuff, and the uniquely 21st century struggles — those we got by the hundreds, covering everything from how students view communications technology (as a lifeline, a crutch or a scourge) to their ambivalence about the no-strings-attached sexual opportunism of the hookup culture.

Five of these essays will appear as the Modern Love column, starting today with Marguerite Fields’s winning entry, “Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define,” an eloquent, clear-eyed account of her generation’s often noncommittal dating scene. On the Sundays between Mother’s Day (May 11) and Father’s Day (June 15), we will publish the four runner-up essays.

(Read more "Modern Love" columns...)

Toilet Paper and Other Moral Choices

When Sheryl Crow said that people should use only one sheet of toilet paper, she was lampooned by everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Jon Stewart.

More recently, the issue of toilet paper has become less of a joke (except when celebrities express an opinion) and more of a cause: since the fluffy kind cannot be made from recycled paper, conservationists argue, consumers can do their part to protect the environment by buying the rougher stuff. There are skeptics who say the benefits of such a switch are overstated.

But looking beyond the choice of toilet paper, what are the simplest — or the biggest bang for the lowest cost — changes that Americans can adopt that would make an environmental difference?

Dear Sir Obama: Presidential Advice

Every day after school about 65 children come to our center to get help with their homework. The place is always vibrant, but on Nov. 5, 2008, the 20 tutors in the room essentially played zone defense to keep things in order. For the students, the election of Barack Obama had overturned their world.

Ending the SAT/Immigration

Ending the SAT

Findings

A new research study -- based on simulations using actual student applications at competitive colleges that require the SAT or ACT for admission -- has found that ending the requirement would lead to demonstrable gains in the percentages of black and Latino students, and working class or economically disadvantaged students, who are admitted.

These models suggest that any move away from the SAT or ACT in competitive colleges results in significant gains in ethnic and economic diversity. But the gains are greater for colleges that drop testing entirely, as opposed to just making it optional.

In terms of other measures of academic competitiveness, the study found that going SAT optional would result in classes of students with higher grade point averages. Dropping testing entirely, on the other hand, would result in higher levels of academic achievement in the entering classes at the public institutions studied, but not the privates.

One conclusion of the new study that is sure to be closely watched by admissions offices is this one: "The results show unambiguously that increased racial and socioeconomic diversity can be achieved by switching to test-optional policies."

The findings appear to confirm what SAT critics have said for years: that reliance on the SAT in college admissions favors applicants who are white and/or wealthier than other applicants.

Key Terms

SAT-optional or adopting what they called the "don't ask, don't tell" approach in which a college says that it won't look at standardized test scores.

Comments

Bob:

As noted by others, of course all of this movement toward not utilizing standardized tests is so that minorities with lesser academic abilities can be admitted. The same thing is happening with medical school admissions and I assume with other professional schools.

Jayvee:

Who should go to college? What do you mean by "the best students"? If higher education's purpose is solely to take the academically best-qualified students and make them even more academically proficient, then the SAT is a valuable tool. But if the purpose of higher education is to provide all sectors of American society with well-educated and thoughtful leaders, the net should be cast more widely...

Common Sense:

Entire post.

Shazamm:

Entire post.

DFS:

Entire post (nasty).

---

Immigration

Gordon Hanson:

Most low-skilled immigrants are able-bodied individuals who have come to the United States to improve their lives. While they might take menial jobs in our country, their skills would place them solidly in the middle of the pack back home. Many low-skilled natives, on the other hand, are individuals who are from unstable homes or grew in poor neighborhoods, or they simply do not have what it takes to succeed in a technologically sophisticated society.

Immigrants outcompete low-skilled natives for jobs because they are more motivated or because they are more productive.

Michael Fix:

Immigrants have always been more likely to move in search of a job than natives and they have proved to be more adaptable in moving across sectors of the economy (for example, from construction to agriculture). Immigrants — especially illegal immigrants — are working in jobs and sectors of the economy that natives have gradually left, may be reluctant to re-enter and to which they may have limited access because the internal networks that control information about the availability of new jobs in these sectors now operate largely within immigrant communities.

Pablo Alvarado

Migrants and day laborers, like most Americans, are hard-working entrepreneurs who deserve a shot at the American Dream. They are an integral part of the United States economy that we must cherish and protect.

Comments:

We may be disappointed now that our unemployment rates do not fall as quickly as we might expect since many of these jobs may again be taken by Mexicans.

Have you forgotten Operation Wetback from the Truman Administration? This was when a great many hispanic illegal aliens were shipped back home (at US taxpayer expense) to provide for jobs for US soldiers returning from war.
Not a bad policy, eh?

#9: Black Saint

#11: Cpotato

#12:

This is nuts! I don’t normally respond to things like this, but I just couldn’t sit here any longer and be silent.

Readings for Monday 3/30

For Monday:

1. Please read the The Impact of Dropping the SAT. Please make sure you read the entire article AND all the "Comments" posted at the bottom of the article, by readers. 

2. Please read The Competition for Low-Wage Jobs. Again, please read the entire article and then read the first 25 "Comments" by readers at the bottom of the page. 

3. Please view and play around with the interactive map on this page: Immigration Explorer.

4. Once you have read the two articles and read the comments from readers on each article, please go to our google group and then click on "Discussions." Look for the discussion "threads" called SAT and Immigration. Please post one comment to each of these threads. Your comments should run 250-350 words for each article. You may write whatever you want and you may respond to what others have already said in the thread, if you like. Whatever you write, please consider your audience--everyone in our class and me. Be courteous and respectful, but also be sincere and honest. 

There are NO blog posts due (for Monday or for the rest of the semester).

A Short History of America's Garden

The Garden of Eatin': A Short History of America's Garden from roger doiron on Vimeo.

NY Times Readings about Food

Obamas to Plant Vegetable Garden at White House

WASHINGTON — Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of the South Lawn on Friday to plant a vegetable garden, the first at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets — the president does not like them — but arugula will make the cut.

Washington’s Not-So-Secret Garden

Michelle Obama announced that she would be planting a vegetable garden on the South Lawn, and digging began in earnest on Friday.

This is the first vegetable garden at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden during World War II. Though there are 18 acres to play with, no White House resident since has had the urge to dig into the dirt and, with a little hard work, enjoy the delight of harvesting peas and tomatoes off the vine.

Why are the Obamas the first in more than 60 years to put in a vegetable garden?

Op-Classic, 1991: Abolish the White House Lawn (Michael Pollan)

Three years after candidate George Bush told us he wanted to be remembered as the "environmental President," he has done little to earn that distinction -- unless one regards his catch-and-release policy on bonefishing as a major environmental initiative.

We know the excuses by heart: A Treasury that is broke, an economy too fragile to bear the weight of new environmental regulations and a skeptical chief of staff, John Sununu, who remains unperturbed by the threat of acid rain, ozone loss and the greenhouse effect.

Still, I'm inclined to take the President at his word when he voices his concern for the planet. So I want to offer him a suggestion -- a simple, constructive step that would save the Treasury money, impose no new burdens on the economy and that even Mr. Sununu might endorse.

Food, Glorious Food Myths

Foods go in and out of fashion. Sugar, a dietary pariah not too long ago, is making a comeback as a natural food – in large part as a backlash against high-fructose corn syrup, which has been subject to widespread criticism as a cause of rising obesity because it’s inexpensive and ubiquitous.

But in fact, many nutrition and obesity experts say sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are equally bad in excess, and the new view of sugar is largely marketing-driven.

What are some common misconceptions about what and how we eat?

What I'm reading...

Colleges Sweat Out Admissions This Year

As colleges weigh this year’s round of applications, high school seniors are not the only anxious ones.

Riding the Rails

SOMEWHERE on the west side of Illinois, the Amish men broke out a deck of Skip-Bo cards and I joined them as the cafe car attendant, using an iPod and a set of portable speakers, broadcast Eckhart Tolle, author of “A New Earth,” discoursing on the virtues of stillness.

When Everyone’s a Friend, Is Anything Private?

FACEBOOK has a chief privacy officer, but I doubt that the position will exist 10 years from now. That’s not because Facebook is hell-bent on stripping away privacy protections, but because the popularity of Facebook and other social networking sites has promoted the sharing of all things personal, dissolving the line that separates the private from the public.

Writing for a living: a joy or a chore?

Colm Tóibín claims he does not enjoy writing very much. Do other authors share his view?

The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity

Have American teenagers gone wild?

Obama on Spot as Rulings Aid Gay Partners

WASHINGTON — Just seven weeks into office, President Obama is being forced to confront one of the most sensitive social and political issues of the day: whether the government must provide health insurance benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.