Plagiarism is the most serious offense in academia. Its definition—the undocumented use of another person’s work—is straightforward, and its maximum sentences for an offense are draconian: expulsion for students, termination for professors. If the stakes are so high, why would anyone risk plagiarizing another person’s work?

Plagiarism in college

The college students that I work with, as either their teacher or tutor, often speak of the constant pressure to succeed. In order to get a decent job or get into graduate school, they need good grades. To get good grades, they need to keep up—and perform well on—their assignments. But since they’re taking five classes, they are overloaded with work, and, inevitably, they prioritize, directing their energy toward some classes and away from others. Sometimes, this means nothing more than giving slightly less than 100 percent effort, like composing a “B” paper instead of doing the typical “A”-worthy job. Other times, it can mean taking drastic shortcuts.

Throughout my experience as a teacher and a tutor, I’ve found that, when it comes to citations, a student is likely to take that shortcut. He may have learned, at some point in high school or college, that he’s not allowed to copy down an author’s text without giving it proper attribution, and that he’s not supposed to write a lengthy summary of an author’s book or directly quote long passages of text without citing them, but he’s pressed for time and might forget to cite or dismiss citing as an unnecessary formality. And, anyway, what if what the author wrote was a fact? Why should that be cited? This other question takes us into the heart of the problem with plagiarism: many students see it as a hazy gray area, while teachers and administrators treat it as a black-and-white issue.

So, too, does the publishing world—but with a wrinkle. Let’s look at two fairly recent examples of plagiarism, where each reveals how publishers handle such cases.

Plagiarism in publishing

The first case is that of the journalist Jonah Lehrer. Lehrer, who is 31 years old, wrote about neuroscience in a way that made complicated scientific topics easy for the layperson to understand. He kept a blog at Wired magazine, published successful books, and, last June, was hired as a staff writer at The New Yorker. Though Lehrer published original work, he also was caught recycling his own sentences and paragraphs—self-plagiarizing, in other words. He apologized and was allowed to continue writing for The New Yorker. Within a few months, however, Tablet magazine published an article that accused Lehrer of fabricating Bob Dylan quotations in Imagine, Lehrer’s most recent book about the neuroscience of creativity. This time, Lehrer apologized and resigned from his magazine job. Then his publishers halted the sale of Imagine, pulling all copies from shelves and online stores. Lehrer has not published any work since.

Just around the time that Lehrer was resigning from The New Yorker, Fareed Zakaria was being cleared of any wrongdoing for his plagiarism. Zakaria, Time magazine’s editor-at-large, wrote a column in which he borrowed heavily from an article in, coincidentally, The New Yorker. Like Lehrer, he apologized and admitted he made a “terrible mistake.” Like Lehrer, he was suspended by his employers (Time and CNN). But unlike Lehrer, he was allowed to keep his jobs. Why did this happen?

Here is the difference. In the case of Jonah Lehrer, the initial claims of material recycling and self-plagiarizing prompted deeper inquiries into his entire body of work. One such inquiry, commissioned by Lehrer’s editor at Wired and eventually published in Slate, yielded astonishing facts—that Lehrer had been guilty of various forms of plagiarism, from recycling his own material to stealing material from press releases to relying on questionable quotations and facts, in many different articles. In fact, the journalist who conducted the study noted that Lehrer had been recycling his own content since 2008 “and probably even earlier,” and that “it’s amazing—and disturbing—that it took so long for anyone to notice.”

Fareed Zakaria’s work was subjected to the same sort of analysis (though the details of the methodology were not made public). The result? A spokesperson for Time said that the magazine reviewed “each” of his columns in a “thorough” manner and came away “entirely satisfied” that “the language in question . . . was an unintentional error and an isolated incident for which he has apologized.”

Conclusion

Both of these examples offer us insight into how plagiarism is viewed in the 21st Century not just in publishing but in academia. First of all, it is refreshing to see that, in an era of hastily composed blog entries, which can provide the foundation for major book deals, the publishing world still holds its journalists and commentators accountable for borrowed, unattributed work. With these standards in place, we can assume that the most sacred of all information—the truthful, first-hand reported news source, whose importance to a globalized world can never be understated—is subjected to the same, if not more, rigorous treatment.

But now, perhaps more than ever, we recognize that plagiarism’s parameters are blurry, and that they are investigated on a case by case basis. The publishing world draws the line between those who knowingly and repeatedly borrow and recycle other’s (and their own) work, passing off every written word as an original idea, then play coy about their methods, and those who make an honest mistake, acknowledge their error, and serve their punishment. In my experience, I’ve found that the academic world does this as well. At MCNY, most of our students’ biggest project is the Constructive Action. The CA relies heavily on personal information (e.g. plan of action and critical logs) but also on outside sources (the literature review). Students must work with instructors and tutors to fully grasp the concepts of each, so that recycled material and incorrectly cited sources are treated with integrity.

• Letter from the Editor
• Learning the Tricks to College Life
• Learning How to Learn: Academia’s Best Kept Secret
• Learners Who Inherit the Future
• Study Skills

“The future belongs to those who are capable of being retrained again and again.”

—Daniel Burns

Salutations Readers,

Our latest issue discusses one of the most valuable skills one can possess as a student and working professional: the ability to learn. Lifelong learning is vital for those who seek success throughout their working lives. Those who can successfully acquire and apply this part skill, part survival tactic are more likely to thrive in today’s dynamic and fast-paced world. Lifelong learners embrace the idea of learning as a mechanism for improvement as professionals and human beings.

The submissions from our team explore this topic from a variety of angles. Aside from providing readers with a conceptual understanding of the skill, we discuss the relevance of this ability in correlation with current workforce trends and its connection to Purpose-Centered Education. The issue features an interactive piece that explores the benefits of study skills as an effective learning strategy. Another section, dedicated to the student reader, provides insight on skills that, when mastered, can ease the challenges of college life. We’ve provided our readers with valuable insight that, in combination with a self-directed attitude and open-mind, can help anyone accomplish their most valued goals. Enjoy!

Sujey

A college education is predicated on learning, but learning need not be confined to the classroom. Indeed, there are everyday skills that comprise the college lifestyle that we are not born with. But when mastered, these everyday skills are ones that can help you with your classroom learning.

1. Learning to become organized.

Assessing the situation. One of the biggest obstacles a college student must overcome is poor organization. I cannot tell you how many times I have been unable to work with a student because he/she is frantically searching through a 5-inch-thick pile of arbitrarily put-together papers that he/she keeps in his/her book bag for a single assignment sheet. This wastes not only time but energy, as the student becomes increasingly upset and angry with the situation—a difficult mood to overcome when trying to write, say, a critical essay.

And just as you might accumulate so many pieces of physical paper, you accumulate many digital pieces of paper. Think of how many Word documents you’ve started, worked on, and forgotten about. Suddenly, it’s a month later, and you need one of these pieces of paper. Trouble is, you can’t remember for your life where you saved the file. And the even bigger problem is that you have absolutely no idea under what name you saved it. It could be buried on your laptop, on one of your six flash drives (only two of which you can locate), or on the desktop of a random computer in the library.

Learning the trick. Organization is one of the easiest problems to solve, but most people never do so. Why? Because it’s not instantaneously easy. You can’t just shove all your papers into a single manila folder or save all your files in your computer’s “documents” folder; doing so will lead to the same sorts of problems that plagued you in the first place. Organization takes planning. Not excessive amounts of planning, but you certainly have to think things through.

If you have five classes, you should have one paper folder for each class. Inside each folder, you can use paper clips, or dividers within the folder, to organize by, say, class notes, assignments, and reading materials. Now imagine the exact same system of classification applied to the computer: folders within folders within folders. If you can put names to these folders, and you can always understand what type of paper or file you need to save in the folder, you will never spend excessive amounts of time on a futile search for your materials.

2. Learning the right mindset.

Assessing the situation. College classes can be exceedingly difficult, and that makes it easy to resent your decision to attend school. Everyone who has been through at least a single semester of college is able to identify with the dreaded feeling of realizing that you have a math test, a group presentation, and two papers due on Monday . . . and it’s already Friday . . . and you still haven’t finished your homework for the week, let alone thought about the assignments. It’s a terrible situation, because there is seemingly no way out. Writing a paper? It’s a long, arduous, tedious process in and of itself, one that might take weeks, depending on the topic and the research. And now you have to write two? And memorize five different formulas? And communicate with your group members, whose email addresses you’ve misplaced?! At this point, you might as well just give up completely. Forget about everything; hang out with your friends, see a movie, sleep in. You’ll never finish everything, so just do nothing. It’s the easiest way to approach the situation. But it’s also the worst way because it is, without question, the least productive.

Learning the trick. In the midst of a seemingly impossible situation, the last thing you want to do is become overly emotional, because doing so leads to rash assertions: I’ll never finish this paper; the test material is too hard. Once you get on a roll, the defeatist attitude becomes inexorable. Next thing you know, you’re convincing yourself that you’re the kind of person who gets something in their head and can’t get it out.

Okay. If you trace the thought process of the previous paragraph back to its root, you’ll see that the entire situation gets out of hand not because of reality but because of emotions. Now, I’m not a mental health professional, so rather than talk about controlling your emotions (though that’s a noble and worthy thing to do), I’m going to focus on an alternative philosophy regarding college life: the clinical, technical perspective.

The basic thrust of this idea is that any task in the world, whether it’s related to your career, you social life, or your student days, becomes drastically easier when you view it in segments and installments, as opposed to one massive, looming entity. Pretend you’re a mountaineer. Now imagine yourself standing at the base of Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world. When you gaze up at the peak, which, set against the majestic blue sky, seems so tall, it may seem like no person could reach the summit. And it is true that until the middle of the 20th century, everyone who had attempted to climb it had failed. But then two people did it, then more, and although various factors make it a vastly difficult peak to climb, reaching the top has been proven, over and over again, to be within the realm of human possibility. If someone else can do it, can you? Of course? But you’re staring up at it—it’s so high!—how is it possible?

3. Learning time management.

Assessing the situation. Now, pretend you’re in your impossible school situation. Think it’s different than your attempt to climb Mt. Everest (snow and ice vs. books and computers)? You’re right, it is different . . . but it contains the same underlying principles.

It’s Friday night. You need to focus, just for a few minutes, on your first paper. Turns out that, after re-reading the assignment sheet and brainstorming for ten minutes (just ten minutes!), you have an idea of what you want to say and a basic structure for how to say it. You get on the computer and, over the next two hours, type out a strong rough draft. In less than three hours, you’ve completed your first task.

Looking ahead, you now have Saturday and Sunday to write a paper, study for the math test, and revise this paper. Assuming you’ve paid attention in class and completed all the assignments and done most of the readings, you will have an easier time with this work—just like how your first paper turned out not to be so difficult. So you make a study schedule for the weekend, even working in some free time for yourself, and as you check your email before bed, you see that not everyone is as clumsy as you—in fact, your group members just wrote to say that most of the project is done; all that’s left are revisions.

Oh, of course, now you remember! You had actually done a fair amount of work on it in the past two weeks, had even completed your part; it’s just that when you realized you had four things to do, you lost all perspective and assumed the worst. Now things are looking up.

Learning the trick. What I’m advocating is a focus away from an emotional outlook (“this task just feels impossible”) and toward an industrial one (“this task requires me to do this”). Often, the reality of a situation is inversely proportional to how we perceive the situation. Yes, college can be very hard. It is designed that way, with lots of extensive, overlapping projects, and for a good reason—we don’t want slackers checking our tonsils, doing our taxes or teaching our children. If you can approach these tough situations from a clinical perspective, you can reduce their difficulty to a series of simple tasks. This is one of the first steps toward learning how to learn.

Educators aim to equip students with an array of skills and talents that essentially prepare students for the professional world. Yet arguably, the most important skill for success—the ability to learn—is not intrinsically taught in the class room. However, as alarming as that may be, there is hope for those who possess a self-directed attitude.

Learning how to learn is a byproduct of the self-directed student’s learning experience.

Over the course of my life, I’ve acquired the ability to “learn how to learn.” While there is no single moment I can attribute for the acquisition of this skill, I can credit a culmination of experiences, especially some beyond my undergraduate years.

One experience in particular serves as evidence that the ability to learn is both expected and tested upon entry into the professional world, and even more importantly that a self-directed attitude is elemental to acquiring that skill.

When I first arrived at the LEC toward the end of the spring 2011 semester, I was very eager to start working with students. The first few students I sat with had relatively simple issues concerning sentence structure, mechanics, and organization. Everything seemed to be going smoothly; that is until, I encountered the Constructive Action.

My supervisor briefly mentioned the document during my orientation, but the exact particulars were unclear. Initially it sounded like any other end-of-term paper.

My first official confrontation with the CA occurred during a session with an MBA student named Alexia*. Like most graduate students, she was concerned with the quality of her work and wanted it assessed by an expert pair of eyes. She was in her last purpose and under immense pressure. I was able to answer some of her questions, but far too often I found myself saying, “I need to get back to you on that.” It’s the best way to say that you have no clue.

Before that point, I thought I knew everything there was to know about academic writing. But here was a document that was completely foreign to me and that I knew I needed to learn more about. It’s erroneous to assume that there isn’t room for growth in one’s skill sets, even after being in a field or industry for a long time. Unconsciously, I had taken the first step in learning how to learn; keeping an open mind. Be open-minded and accept challenges even if it contests your most founded beliefs.

I now had a learning goal that I was seeking to accomplish.

Everyone has a particular learning style, and knowing one’s style is essential in accomplishing any learning goal. For me, traditional instruction has always been an effective learning strategy, and so I thought that sitting in on a CA class would be a good way for me to learn the CA. My supervisor advised me to sit in on Professor Damian’s Purpose III CA course, which focused on promoting empowerment through teaching and communication.

Now I had to take the next step: action. Wanting to do something and actually doing it are two very different things. A positive attitude alone will not help you reach your goal; action is required. The very next week I sat in Professor Damian’s class. Because practice and application helps solidify newly learned concepts, I took the next and most logical step; I wrote a CA of my own. Completing a CA turned out to be most effective learning strategy. I realized that the CA is more than just a document; it’s a record of action and implementation toward the accomplishment of a goal.

After accomplishing my goal, my sessions with students were far more productive and fruitful and I no longer dreaded student questions about the CA. The experience even helped me become a better a teacher. I remembered what it was like to be a student, struggling to learn something new.

*Names have been changed.

Looking at Living Problems

While, at first glance, this formulation of skill sets may seem especially well-suited for the business world, it is certainly applicable to other sectors. (It is noteworthy that two of the skill sets hinge on competencies in new/virtual media.) Broader and more nuanced formulations have emerged from other perspectives that can inform the above model. UNESCO’s “Revisiting Lifelong Learning” (2001) sets out a very useful “constellation of characteristics of the lifelong learner.” There is a beautiful synchronicity between these precepts and the defining vision of MCNY’s founder, Audrey Cohen, of “teach[ing] students to look at living problems in the real world in a comprehensive way”(p.6).

Let’s consider the overlap between UNESCO’s designations and MCNY’s Purpose-Centered Education model’s Constructive Action.

1. The learner as an active and creative explorer of the world

“His/her interaction with the environment is informed by his/her hypotheses, perceptions, aspirations, values, attitudes, cognitive styles, etc. The learner can also anticipate future  developments, test hypotheses and create. Learning is an interplay between the learner and his/her learning environments” (Medel-Añonuevo, Ohsako, Mauch, p9).

The MCNY Constructive Action(CA) is “a set of learning activities and a learning product designed to improve a social environment or social relations, or to foster human development or well-being. As activities, the CA is conducted within a specified social environment, allowing for supervision and feedback. As product, the CA is either a document or portfolio that includes a review of pertinent literature, a rationale for the CA, formulation of goals/objectives, selection and justification of targeted actions, a statement of findings justified by evidence, and an interpretation of findings in terms of review literature and next steps”(Grallo, 2012).

MCNY calls on all students to be active and creative explorers of the world through the CA, a “living case study” (Cohen, 1978, p. 4). The Constructive Action as a set of ‘learning activities’ undergirds many of the skills UNESCO noted, especially the Plan of Action section, where students create a short-term goal and related objectives and devise strategies for meeting the goal and evaluating their actions  within their specified social learning environment in a semester period.

2. The learner as a reflexive agent

“Learning facilitates a process which enables the learner to reflect on his/her life and environment. The learner’s reflexivity cannot be sufficiently guaranteed by external learning resources or teachers and mentors alone. Lifelong learning needs to aim at building this competency through the eyes of the learner. […]Another way to promote learner reflexivity is to encourage his/her own active engagement in problems. The learner needs to self-question and critically analyze learning processes and results. Learner comprehension and self-management of learning processes and results are two important bases for the development of self-reflexivity.” (Medel-Añonuevo, Ohsako, Mauch, p. 9).

The Constructive Action is built on the very premise of engagement with real-life problems (Cohen, 1997, p.8). Students use reflection through distinct CA sections for self-assessment, assess a community or work situation and reflectively analyze the strategies implemented to affect a change.

3. The learner as a self-actualizing agent

“Self-actualization(or fulfilling one’s potential as an individual), curiosity, and exploration are lifelong drivers of human action” (Medel-Añonuevo, Ohsako, Mauch, p.10).

In each successive Constructive Action, students practice self-actualization by assessing a need or opportunity in their work or community, creatively imagining possible avenues of addressing the need, and making a plan to enact specific strategies that build on their developing personal and professional skills. As they strive to meet any need or opportunity, they must employ their best professional skills and values, always fueling an ever-deeper personal understanding of themselves and the world.

4. The learner as an integrator of learning

“The challenge for the lifelong learner is the so-called integration of thinking, feeling and action. Another aspect of integration involves managing learning opportunities, taking advantage of all the different learning settings, whether in-school or out-of-school, formal or informal, and across a wide range of learning content”(Medel-Añonuevo, Ohsako, Mauch, p.10-11).

The founder of MCNY, Audrey Cohen (1997), speaks directly to this marker of lifelong learning (26 years before the UNESCO report), noting that hers “is the one model that does not separate the mind from the body, thought from action, or the client from the professional, and that bases advancement and status on performance” (p.26). As integrators of learning, MCNY students are empowered to be agents of social change. To be empowered, “one must be informed, able to negotiate with or through the many systems which affect one’s life and capable of using these systems on one’s own behalf. One must take control of one’s own life. If there is to be social justice, citizens must act as integrating agents for their own needs” (Cohen, 1978, p. 2).

Here we see an impressive link between characteristics of life-long learners and an institutional model that actively demands that students produce new relevant skills while assessing and reflecting on self, others, systems, skill sets and values. MCNY and faculty seem to be well-poised to not only “weather” the learning revolution, but to excel and be leaders in defining what is educative and employable.

Conclusion

While most of the Institute for the Future’s work skills can neatly function within UNESCO’s four characteristics, the latter is especially rich in its consideration of the holistic learner. As a precursor to the more recent work, a 1996 UNESCO report acknowledged that

not only must [the concept of lifelong learning] adapt to changes in the nature of work, but it must also constitute a continuous process of forming whole beings—their knowledge and aptitudes, as well as the critical faculty and ability to act. It should enable people to develop awareness of themselves and their environment and encourage them to play their social role and work in the community (p.3).

While the breakneck speed of global change directly impacts the local and international workforce and the relevance of our training, it also opens up an unbelievable array of opportunities, resources and connectivity, not for the worker, but for the human. For, where “social intelligence” makes for meaningful workplace interaction, so, too, does it release nations from the grip of dictators. Where “novel and adaptive thinking” can win clients in major advertising firms, so, too, does it make for better communities when used by city councils and community boards. “Transdisciplinarity” and “cognitive load management” make for dynamic supervisors and leaders as well as helping to keep a conversation alive and meaningful at the dinner table with three teenagers. Through the practice and thoughtful application of these learning skills, our lives can be enriched and empowered on many levels.

To MCNY students and others pursuing higher education, I urge you to look beyond that which is rote or rule-based, notions that are deceptively “predictable”, and satisfaction with specialization. Instead, actively nurture all that makes you adaptive, inquisitive, humbled, driven, and absolutely fascinated by your very own questions and pursuits.

References

Cohen, A. (1997) The Third Alternative, New York: Audrey Cohen College.

Fidler, D. (Jan 24, 2012) The Re-working of “Work”. Retrieved from http://www.iftf.org/reworkingwork

Hoffer, E.(1973). Reflections on the Human Condition. Harper & Row.

Grallo, R. (2012). Personal communication.

Institute for the Future for Apollo Research Institute (2011) Future Work Skills 2020. Retrieved from            http://apolloresearchinstitute.com/sites/default/files/future_work_skills_2020_full_research_r            eport_final_1.pdf

Kamenetz, A. (January 12, 2012). The Four-Year Career. Retrieved from http://www.fastcompany.com/1802731/four-year-career

Medel-Añonuevo, C., Ohsako, T., Mauch, W. (2001). Revisiting Lifelong Learning for the 21^st Century. UNESCO Institute for Education. Retrieved from  http://www.unesco.org/education/uie/pdf/revisitingLLL.pdf

Safian, R. (January 9, 2012). This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business. Retrieved from http://www.fastcompany.com/1802732/generation-            flux-meet-pioneers-new-and-chaotic-frontier-business

As an American-born child of immigrant parents, I learned English and Spanish at the same time. I used English in school and Spanish at home and in my community. I didn’t need an ESL education, but neither did I have a strong command of the English language. I wasn’t able to fully immerse myself in one language or the other, or encouraged to mix the two like Dora and Kai-Lan do today.

Dora and Kai-Lan’s huge popularity comes as no surprise when we look at recent diversity trends in America. Current national estimates indicate that ethnic minority groups will make up an estimated 65% of the growth of the U.S population through the year 2020 (Spainer, 2004).

Colleges and universities are seeing the effects of this population trend in changing student demographics. One particular student population, made up of people who share my experience with language, likely a result of the diversification of America, is at the forefront of discussions in higher education. This student group embodies a mixture of traits from both first and second generation immigrants. They were either born outside of the U.S or immigrated at a young age, or were born in the U.S to first generation immigrants who spoke a language other than English at home. Their prior educational experiences vary, but overall, they’ve spent some, if not all, of their high school years in the U.S and have a solid background in American culture and have been speaking English for a number of years. Educational researchers have referred to this unique group of students as Generation 1.5 (Rumbaut & Ima, 1988).

Generation 1.5 students are U.S-educated English language learners who are often pigeon holed into categories that don’t define who they are and misinterpret their learning needs. They are neither remedial or ESL. Generation 1.5 writers, “with backgrounds in U.S culture and schooling, are distinct from international students and other newcomers who have been the subject of most ESL [scholarship], while at the same time these students’ status as English language learners is often treated as incidental or even misconstrued as under preparation in writing in mainstream college composition and basic writing courses” (Harklau, Losey and Siegal, 1999).

The growing presence of Generation 1.5 in the college classroom has warranted recent pedagogical discussion and inquiry. Educators want to understand the complexities of 1.5ers in order to properly cater to their learning needs. For example, unique to Generation 1.5 is the loss of the home language as collateral for learning English. In my case, with rigorous practice, I was able to master academic English. But it came at a price. The more attention I put into English, the worse my proficiency became in Spanish. Research shows a growth in this trend among Generation 1.5 students. With the right kind of help, I might have been able to excel at academic English without becoming “academically illiterate” in Spanish.

Continued awareness of the existence of Generation 1.5 will help educators develop instruction to help these students become successful college writers who won’t have to give up their home languages to excel in English. 1.5ers will someday be able to move from language to language and culture to culture as easily as Dora and Kai-Lan.

Introduction

Many recent high school graduates are experiencing certain difficulties in dealing with college undergraduate mathematics. A lot of researchers on students in college performance reveal that many first-year students are coming underprepared for college life and are frequently frustrated by sequential failure in remedial math sequence and drop out of college. “For some, it may be that their confidence has been severely dented by someone who taught them maths [sic] in a forceful or unsympathetic manner, so that they came to believe that they were ‘no good at maths [sic]’” (Fewings, 2011).

As an Adjunct Faculty for Human Services, I am working with students registered for MTH 111 math class at MCNY. My observations of in-class student performances is that students under-perform in mathematics simply because they lack the self-confidence.

Why do we need to boost self-confidence?

Students widely share the common misconception that they are no good at doing math. For many reasons, simple mathematics transform into some scary dragon-headed monster that paralyzes its victims by its horrible look. However, once students realize that the story they get used to telling themselves about their math performance is a myth, the horrible monster that has been gatekeeping their future away vanishes, leaving only a shadow of its former horror.

At the present moment, students need to complete their mathematics course. Successful completion of math classes will bring students closer to getting a degree within their chosen career field. Further, success in doing mathematics will relieve students from constant pressure and anxiety potentially affecting other non-math courses, for the greater the number of times you have achieved success, the greater your confidence is likely to be (Fewings, 2011)

How can students boost self-confidence in math?

What do students need to know and do in order to boost their math performance? Victoria Jasztal (2010) advises that students need to “practice positive self-talk.” Instead of saying “I am no good at math” say that “I can do this problem, I can solve it.” In addition to positive self-talk, students need to create and follow through with a scheduled plan and a to-do list. As Jasztal notes, “Make to-do lists, particularly in your school agenda or a notebook so you know if you are staying on top of things. It is very easy to forget to complete important things because we get caught up in other things.” Leo Babauta suggests that students need to go further than thinking positive: students need to put it in action. You are what you do, and so if you change what you do, you change what you are. Act in a positive way, take action instead of telling yourself you can’t, be positive. Talk to people in a positive way, put energy into your actions. You’ll soon start to notice a difference (Babauta, 2012).

Many articles with good recommendations on boosting your self-confidence in math are already posted online. However, I would like to provide some recommendations on how to overcome those things that hold students back from raising their self-confidence in math class. Students should be more proactive, ask more questions, and keep good class notes for further review of the problems and solutions that were done in class. They should contact their professor and ask questions outside of class about mathematical concepts and problem solving strategies. They should study and practice, because by studying more, students will empower themselves with knowledge. And by becoming more knowledgeable, students will become more confident.

Students should also set aside one hour to practice problems discussed during class. By practicing more, students will become better problem solvers and increase their competence about mathematic applications and solutions. Frequently, during in-class discussions, students encounter difficulty in understanding how the problems are solved. In these cases, students want to rely more on procedural steps rather than on understanding why they need to follow certain solution steps.

Conclusion

Sometimes math problems seem so hard, and student self-confidence is so low, that students start to complain about an instructor’s teaching style. To resolve this situation, I would like to suggest that students need to focus more on solutions instead of problems. By doing that, students will raise their confidence.

References:

Fewings, F., 2011. Developing confidence in mathematics, – BRAINBOXX http://brainboxx.co.uk/A1_MULTIPLE/pages/mathsconfidence.htm (Accessed on 9/21/2012)
Jasztal, V., 2010. Boosting Self-Confidence: A Guide for Teachers, Parents and Students. http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/classroom-solutions/2010/03/boosting-self-confidence-guide-teachers-parents-and-studentsevery-single (Accessed on 9/25/2012)
Babauta, L, 2012. 25 Killer Actions to Boost Your Self-Confidence http://zenhabits.net/25-killer-actions-to-boost-your-self-confidence/ (Accessed on 10/2/2012)

The title of this post poses what seems to be an impossible question. Yet it results in some very objective answers.

Many authors, including the award-winning novelist John Irving, seem to agree that no one person can explain to another person how to write a convincing piece of creativity, fiction or nonfiction (like a personal essay), but that a good teacher is perfectly capable of explaining how to create a storyboard, how to structure scenes, how to pace a story, how to create a dramatic climax, how to find a voice. Then again, such advice may lead you to write a novel that is seems perfect, except that it lacks something . . . more. Just ask John McPhee, legendary nonfiction writer for The New Yorker, who petitioned his advisers at Princeton to write a novel for his senior thesis, only to create a story that he acknowledged had “good structure and was technically fine . . . [but] had no life in it at all.”

So we return to the question, but in more specific terms, and from a slightly different angle: do people become good writers because they have talent that no one else has, or do they do so because of the sheer force of their will? Clearly, I would say, it’s a combination of both. But writing is a skill as much as an art form, and the way we sharpen our skills is through practice. Therefore, if you write enough—and listen to your teachers explain how to handle tricky obstacles like time, tense, style, voice, clarity, cogency, structure, and formatting—you can become the writer you want to become.

For instance, watch these two incredible videos of Ray Bradbury, the author of Fahrenheit 451 and many other science-fiction stories. The first is a short piece where he talks about the benefits of being a persistent writer. The second is a longer and more in-depth and endearing interview where he talks about his love for books, his love for reading, and more. After watching them, you may realize that writing isn’t just about innate talent and technical persistence. It’s about the desire to put aside everything else in life to get the paper or essay or story correct. And that is a desire that cannot be faked.

This is a picture I took of a wheat-pasted poster in Manhattan in the early days of Occupy Wall Street.

Its phrase attests to the age-old struggle of the masses fighting for an equitable piece of the pie. And, though it references power struggles with which we are very familiar, it is linked to a new movement radically catalyzed by social media. Until recently, major changes in power came in part through the direction of a revolution’s leaders or figure-heads, but not so anymore; the world has borne witness to an incredible new era of power shifts.

“Bearing witness” to human struggle and social activism have been at the heart of MCNY’s vision since its founding. For this—and many reasons—I regularly use and talk about social media in my Critical Thinking classes. In our class discussions, we have found that as others’ realities become instantaneously available to us, we are met with the opportunity (and obligation, I feel) to be impacted in ways never before seen in human history. Each of our lives now becomes shaped, informed, called into question by the realities of others across the globe.

In a recent article, Revolutionizing Revolutions: Virtual Collective Consciousness and the Arab Spring, the authors discuss the “role social media play not only in igniting revolutions but also in modifying how regime change is achieved” (Marzouki and Oullier, 2011). The article considers the far-reaching impact of studies tracking the “bottom-up” approach in recent uprisings. The interpretation of these studies not only gives shape to complex systems of emergent behaviors (thousands mobilizing instantly for protests), but patterns of change that are necessarily accumulative.

What does this mean?

This means that the already democratized social media platforms are being “hijacked” from their initial use by citizens in service of unique goals shared by thousands or millions of others. This particular usage not only accelerates the rate of change, but sends out instant, accumulating waves of global reach. To grapple with this new connectivity, the authors coined the term Virtual Collective Consciousness (VCC), “referring to an internal knowledge shared by a plurality of persons. Coupled with ‘citizen media’ activism, this knowledge emerges as a new form of consciousness via communication tools” (Marzouki and Oullier, 2011).

Take a look at one visualization of the dynamic sharing of this ‘internal knowledge’ captured in the hours surrounding the fall of Egypt’s dictator, Mubarak, following only the hashtag #jan25. This is a fascinating graphic, and by the end, the throbbing cluster beautifully resembles Tahrir Square, the hotbed of the revolution itself. (Here is an additional dynamic visualization of edits to Wikipedia pages about nations where protests and revolutions occurred from December 1st to February 20th.)

It can be argued that we all learn the most about ourselves by looking into how others’ lives shape and impact our own, and college students are charged with this activity regularly. To the MCNY student in particular, you are each asked to think about connectivity on a regular basis through Purpose-Centered Education. You are expected to “accumulate change” through progressively more complex Constructive Actions and find meaning by practicing relevance (Cohen, 1997, p. 6).

Now, through social media, you have a new call to actively position yourself to “catch a wave” in the global reach of cyber-activism.

How will you/do you engage with empowered voices via social media?

How will you engage with others’ lives differently?

How will your voice travel?

Read the article yourself, and see what you make of our freshly-mediated human collective consciousness.

References

Cohen, A. (1997) The Third Alternative, New York: Audrey Cohen College.

Marzouki, Y., Oullier, O. (2011, July 17), Revolutionizing Revolutions: Virtual Collective Consciousness and the Arab Spring. Posted to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yousri-marzouki/revolutionizing-revolutio_b_1679181.html

Instead, “Keep calm and carry on”, as states the recently commercialized British government slogan.  Don’t wave the white flag and don’t call off the troops. There’s still time to save your grade!

The following grade-saving strategies will help you make the most of the remaining semester:

1. Reach out to professors

Communicating with professors is an excellent grade-saving strategy. It’s never too late to speak to the instructor. Express your desire to improve your current standing and find out exactly what is expected of you.   Professors are usually willing to work something out if you show that you’re serious and motivated.  You can haggle for some extra credit, extensions on deadlines, and resubmissions for higher marks.

2. Visit the Learning Enhancement Center (LEC)

Specialists at the LEC can help you create a plan to optimize your productivity for the remaining semester. We can assist students with upcoming or overdue assignments, projects, presentations and papers. Some professors even offer extra credit for working with an LEC specialist.

3. Ace the rest of the semester

Strive for excellent marks on any remaining exams and assignments. Anything you submit should be high quality work. In addition to coursework, make sure your attendance/participation is stellar in the remaining weeks. These last efforts in the final stretch won’t go unnoticed. Professors will have that impression of you when it comes time to submit grades.

Introduction

The hottest discussion topic among mathematic educators within Metropolitan College of New York revolves around the idea of what mathematic skills our students should have. The biggest concern arises when students face failure with fraction concepts. The advancement from secondary to post-secondary education demands that students should have already mastered these skills in elementary school and demonstrated computational proficiency during the Accuplacer entry examination. However, newly admitted and even some continuing students continue to struggle with concepts of fraction addition and fraction subtraction. So, many students believe that mastery of fraction skills will never be achieved. This belief is a myth.

How the story goes

Recognizing that these days the average MCNY student is usually a parent who works a full-time job and has very little time to spend on academic preparation for college courses, MCNY began to offer mentoring and LEC academic support services to help students recover and develop the skills necessary to succeed in college life. Further, many of these students return to post-secondary education after decades of being away from any type of formal learning environments, and, as a result, they require more time spent on mathematic remediation.

Where it leads

In my math classes and at the LEC, I often encounter students who need help with basic fraction addition and subtraction. For many students, fractions seem like ancient history and halfway-forgotten meaningless procedures. When students are asked to face this old foe, their historical anxieties are provoked, thus fueling the myth that mastery of skills involving fraction addition and fraction subtraction can never be achieved.

My Advice

To become more proficient in any mathematic problem solving concepts it is important to realize that success in mastery of problem solution skills always relies on closely observing the challenging problem. For example, if we have to solve 1 + ½, there is no need to represent 1 as ²/₂ and do²/_{2 +} ½ = ²⁺¹/ ₂ =  ³ / ₂ = 1 ¹/_2.

In fact 1 + ½ could be represented as 1 + 0.5 = 1.5

So, 1 + ½ = 1 ¹/₂

How did we solve this problem in decimal notation? We just added the fractional part to the whole part. We can also separate whole part and fractional part like this:

1.5 = 1 ¹/₂ = 1 + 0.5 = 1 + ½

Advancing to a more challenging problem, we can perform arithmetic separately with whole parts and fractional parts, and then combine them together.

Let’s look at this example: 3 ¹/₃ – 1 ¹/₂

Working separately with whole parts and fractional parts we will see the following:

3 – 1 = 2

¹/₃ – ¹/₂ = ^{×2/ 1}/₃ – ^{×3/ 1}/₂ = ²/₆ – ³/₆ = ^{2 – 3}/₆ = – ¹/₆

2 + (- ¹/₆) = 1 + 1 – ¹/₆ = 1 + ⁶/₆ – ¹/₆ = 1+ ^{6 – 1}/₆ = 1+ ⁵/₆ = 1⁵/₆

Thus, 3 ¹/₃ – 1 ¹/₂ = 1⁵/₆

If you are not yet convinced, try to solve any following problem involving fraction addition or subtraction.

Try It Out

For your convenience I would like to offer few exercise samples.

5 ¹/₂ + 1 ¹/₄ =

7 ¹/₂ – 1 ¹/₃ =

9 – 1 ¹/₂ =

4 ¹/₃ + 2 =

Solutions will be included in my next post. Keep up your good work!

Challenge

Holding onto negative stories about our learning puts needless blocks and limits on what we can accomplish. Question and re-write the stories you tell yourself about who you are as a learner!

The New York Times has always been good at coming up with intellectually relatable witty titles for the articles it posts to its website, and University of Delaware Professor Ben Yagoda’s recent post, “The Most Comma Mistakes,” is no exception. Now, before you do anything else, take a second look at the sentence you just read. You will notice that it is rather long (40 words) but that it contains only three commas. “How can that be?” you might wonder. “The longer a sentence is, the more commas it needs, right?” Well, that isn’t necessarily incorrect, but it’s not correct either. In fact, it’s one of those things people think is true when they don’t actually have any idea about what they’re talking about. For the truth is that if everyone took a moment to learn the basic rules of comma usage, they would find that it’s not all that difficult to master.

This is the point of Yagoda’s post—to dispel certain myths about commas that he knows people believe in because he sees people consistently making them. He highlights a number of errors, categorizes them accordingly, and gives plenty of simple examples. He also writes in clear language and avoids tricky grammatical terms that, though technically correct, typically end up confusing students. If you want to know his suggestions, you might as well read the post. It’s easy to follow primarily due to his conversational tone. Rather than sound like an archaic textbook that throws information at you, Yagoda sounds like a wise old friend who just wants you to listen because he knows what’s best for you.

So go and read him—but don’t leave my post yet. We still have to examine my first sentence. (Go ahead, reread it.) The first comma in the sentence appears after the word “website.” The function of this comma is to split up the two independent clauses that comprise the sentence. By definition, a sentence expresses a complete thought. To express a complete thought, we need a subject and verb, and if we have a subject and a verb, we have an independent clause—a clause that can, by virtue of its expression of an independent thought, stand alone. Often times when we are writing, we want to string together two independent clauses, especially if they are thematically linked, which is a fancy way of saying they “go together.”

That’s what happened in the opening sentence of this blog post: the first independent clause is about how the NY Times creates good titles; the second independent clause is about a recent blog post on the Times being a good example of this. Since the first clause sort of “leads into” the second clause, rather than have the two clauses be their own sentences (and therefore separated by a period), and rather than placing them in the same sentence but separating them with a semicolon (which, in my opinion, would have made the sentence clunky), I joined them together with the “connector” word “and” (technically called a “coordinating conjunction”). Finally, to avoid making my long sentence difficult to understand, I finished things off by placing a comma before “and,” which is what we are required to do in this situation. This way, I adhered to the rules of grammar.

But even if I didn’t understand the rules of grammar, you know how I would have known to put a comma before “and”? Because of the natural pause in the sentence. Indeed, no matter how long a sentence is, when it is read correctly (i.e. when the reader picks up on the author’s intent and reads with the correct rhythm), the natural pauses become quite obvious, and that’s your clue to put in a comma. This rule isn’t 100% (few things in grammar are), but if you follow it, you’ll be better off than not.

As for the final two commas in that opening sentence? The ones after “post” and mistakes”? Well, those are just there to satisfy the rule of the appositive, which involves a renaming of a noun. If you look at the sentence one last time, you’ll see that it wasn’t essential for me to include the name of (i.e. to “rename”) “Ben Yagoda’s recent post” but that I did so because I wanted you to read the post. This required me to “set off” (to put commas around) the name of the post. And now it is requiring you to read that post.

($10 to whoever can name the antecedent of the preceding sentence’s “it.”)

Since the beginning of time humanity has been looking at the surrounding world as a book of nature and continually trying to study it through different views and approaches, which later in time, developed into sciences like mathematics, physics and chemistry etc. Over time, many scientific discoveries were made and many theories aiming to explain these scientific advances emerged.

Why should we care?

It is important to note that the cluster of classical sciences is deeply interconnected and one theory in physics echoes accompanying theories in mathematics and chemistry. If modern technology presents data that disproves theory in one field of scientific studies, then the other fields, in light of the latest discoveries, are being revised as well.

This whole discussion started on January 12, 2012. I also remember this day for it was the first cold day of rain and wind in January! I was referred by Nathan Schiller, my colleague, to the article “Annals of Mathematics Manifold Destiny: A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it” written by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber. The article’s main topic is revolving around Poincare conjecture and its proof. This article focused my attention on the Poincare question itself. Poincare questioned whether a 3-manifold with the homology of a 3-sphere and also trivial fundamental group had to be a 3-sphere. Poincare’s new condition, also known as trivial fundamental group, “can be restated as every loop can be shrunk to a point” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_conjecture).

Furthmore, in differential geometry and topology, a manifold is a “topological space that, on a small enough scale, resembles the Euclidean space of a specific dimension, called the dimension of the manifold. Thus, a line and a circle are one-dimensional manifolds, a plane and sphere (the surface of a ball) are two-dimensional manifolds, and so on into high-dimensional space […] The concept of manifolds is central to many parts of geometry and modern mathematical physics because it allows more complicated structures to be expressed and understood in terms of the relatively well-understood properties of simpler spaces. For example, a manifold is typically endowed with a differentiable structure that allows one to do calculus and a Riemannian metric that allows one to measure distances and angles. Symplectic manifolds serve as the phase spaces in the Hamiltonian formalism of classical mechanics, while four-dimensional Lorentzian manifolds model space-time in general relativity” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold).

However, recent discoveries made by OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus) uncover facts about fundamental particles known as neutrinos which can travel faster than light (Geoff Brumfiel, 2011). This recent announcement spanned dozens of studies all aiming into exploration of this question whose answer could shake the foundations of physics: What if this anomaly is real? “That might seem impossible, given the universal speed limit set by Albert Einstein’s long-standing and well-tested special theory of relativity, but neutrinos have proved chock full of surprises over the years” (Choi, 2011, p.1). “The discovery of superluminal neutrinos present the biggest revolution to fundamental physics in about a century. A multitude of studies have already popped up to address the OPERA results, including some that suggest new physics to explain the findings” (Geoff Brumfiel, 2011; Charles Q. Choi, 2011).

Overall, the big picture presents that we may never be able to grasp that reality. The universe and its ingredients may be impossible to describe unambiguously. Over a few more years we will see a great example of science in action. “It is either a fantastic discovery which seemingly cannot but have huge and as yet unknown consequences or it is a mistake” (Choi, C, 2011). For certain, there will be deliberations of new unique physical theories which would require new mathematical theories to be built in order to support these physical theories. In my next post I will be commenting on  streaming shifts that occur in mathematical field regarding new challenges in the unfolding great drama of life. Stay tuned!

References:

Nasar, S., Gruber, D. (2006). Annals of Mathematics Manifold Destiny: A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it. The New Yorker. Retrieved from:  http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/28/060828fa_fact2

Poincare Conjecture. Retrieved from:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_conjecture

Manifold. Retrieved from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold

Brumfiel, G. (2011). Particles Found to Travel Faster Than Speed of Light Neutrino results challenge a cornerstone of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which itself forms the foundation of modern physics. Scientific American, Nature magazine. Retrieved from: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=particles-found-to-travel

 Choi, C. Q. (2011). Leading Light: What Would Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos Mean for Physics? Most physicists are betting against the idea that neutrinos can pierce the cosmic speed limit, but that has not stopped some researchers from exploring the implications. Scientific American. Retrieved from: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ftl-neutrinos-new-physics-implications