Scholarship: Nordson BUILDS Scholarship Program

Scholarship: The Farm Kids for College Scholarship

Application Deadline: April 13, 2017

Link: http://usascholarships.com/farm-kids-college-scholarship/

Biological Laboratory at Agricultural and Mechanical College in Greensboro, circa 1899.

via reddit

Share an Ice Cold Coca-Cola Sweepstakes

Deadline: August 31, 2017

http://usascholarships.com/share-ice-cold-coca-cola-sweepstakes/

U.S. student, freed from North Korea with neurological injury, was 'brutalized': father

An American university student who has suffered a "severe" neurological injury after being detained for 17 months in North Korea was "brutalized" by the reclusive regime, his father said on Thursday.

Scholarship: Forest County Potawatomi Foundation Lois Crowe Scholarship

Application Deadline: March 30, 2017

Link: http://usascholarships.com/forest-county-potawatomi-foundation-lois-crowe-scholarship/

Scholarship: Nordson BUILDS Scholarship Program

Application Deadline: May 15, 2017

Link: http://usascholarships.com/nordson-builds-scholarship-program/

I Lie About My Teaching

Here is an interesting article I came across in The Atlantic. 

The story of a Teacher and how we portray our lives to others in the field. What are your thoughts? 

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I liked Devon. We were all first and second-year teachers in that seminar—peers, in theory—but my colleague Devon struck me as a cut above. I’d gripe about a classroom problem, and without judgment or rebuke, he’d outline a thoughtful, inventive solution, as if my blundering incompetence was perhaps a matter of personal taste, and he didn’t wish to impose his own sensibilities. When it fell upon us each to share a four-minute video of our teaching, I looked forward to Devon’s. I expected a model classroom, his students as pious and well-behaved as churchgoers.

Instead, the first half of Devon’s four-minute clip showed him fiddling with an overhead projector; in the second half, he was trotting blandly through homework corrections. The kids rocked side to side, listless. For all his genuine wisdom, Devon looked a little green, a little lost.

He looked, in short, like me.

Teachers self-promote. In that, we’re no different than everyone else: proudly framing our breakthroughs, hiding our blunders in locked drawers, forever perfecting our oral résumés. This isn’t all bad. My colleagues probably have more to learn from my good habits (like the way I use pair work) than my bad ones (like my sloppy system of homework corrections), so I might as well share what’s useful. In an often-frustrating profession, we’re nourished by tales of triumph. A little positivity is healthy.

But sometimes, the classrooms we describe bear little resemblance to the classrooms where we actually teach, and that gap serves no one.

Any honest discussion between teachers must begin with the understanding that each of us mingles the good with the bad. One student may experience the epiphany of a lifetime, while her neighbor drifts quietly off to sleep. In the classroom, it’s never pure gold or pure tin; we’re all muddled alloys.

I taught once alongside a first-year teacher, Lauren, who didn’t grasp this. As a result, she compared herself unfavorably to everyone else. Every Friday, when we adjourned to the bar down the street, she’d decry her own flaws, meticulously documenting her mistakes for us, castigating herself to no end. The kids liked her. The teachers liked her. From what I’d seen, she taught as well as any first-year could. But she saw her own shortcomings too vividly and couldn’t help reporting them to anyone who’d listen.

She was fired three months into the year. You talk enough dirt about yourself and people will start to believe it.

Omission is the nature of storytelling; describing a complex space—like a classroom—requires a certain amount of simplification. Most of us prefer to leave out the failures, the mishaps, the wrong turns. Some, perhaps as a defensive posture, do the opposite: Instead of overlooking their flaws and miscues, they dwell on them, as Lauren did. The result is that two classes, equally well taught, may come across like wine and vinegar, depending on how their stories are told.

Take the first year I taught psychology. I taught one section; my colleague Erin taught the other.

When I talked to Erin that semester, she’d glow about her class. Kids often approached her in the afternoons to follow up on questions, and to thank her for teaching their favorite course. Her students kept illustrated vocab journals totaling hundreds of words. They drew posters of neurons, crafted behaviorist training regimes, and designed imaginative “sixth senses” for the human body. Erin’s mentor teacher visited monthly and dubbed it an “amazing class” with “incredible teaching.”

Catch me in an honest mood, and I’ll admit that I bombed the semester. I lectured every day from text-filled overhead slides. Several of my strongest students told me that they hated the class and begged for alternative work. I wasted three weeks on a narrow, confining research assignment, demanding heavy work with little payoff. One student openly plagiarized another. I wound up failing several students who, in hindsight, I should have passed. Yet I know that this apparent train wreck of a class was, in truth, no worse than Erin’s.

That’s because I made Erin up. The two classes described above were the same class: mine. Each description is true, and neither, of course, is wholly honest.

I’m as guilty as anyone of distorting my teaching. When talking to other teachers, I often play up the progressive elements: Student-led discussions. Creative projects. Guided discovery activities. I mumble through the minor, inconvenient fact that my pedagogy is, at its core, deeply traditional. I let my walk and my talk drift apart. Not only does this thwart other teachers in their attempts to honestly evaluate my approach, but it blocks my own self-evaluation. I can’t grow properly unless I see my own work with eyes that are sympathetic, but clear and unyielding.

I had a private theme song my first year teaching: “Wear and Tear,” by Pete Yorn. It was my alarm in the mornings, my iPod jam on the commute home. The chorus ended with a simple line that spun through my head in idle moments and captured the essence of a year I spent making mistake after rookie mistake: Can I say what I do?

It’s no easy task for teachers. But I think we owe it, to ourselves if to no one else, to tell the most honest stories that we can. I’ll only advance as a teacher, and offer something of value to those around me, if I’m able to say what I do.

Source: The Atlantic

Share some feedback. What are your thoughts of the article? 

Scholarship: The No Bull Sports scholarship

Application Deadline: March 1st, 2017

Link: http://usascholarships.com/no-bull-sports-scholarship/

Ivy students watching a Harvard - Yale football game in the 60s

Young American Creative Patriotic Art Scholarship

Application Deadline is March 31, 2017.

http://usascholarships.com/young-american-creative-patriotic-art-scholarship/

SCHOLARSHIP!!!

Hey everyone I really need money for college so if you would vote for me here: http://schooltutoring.com/scholarship/ that would be awesome. My name is Carson Hlavacek so please vote for me the essay I wrote is full of potato jokes

Scholarship: The CM CARES Religious Scholars Program

Application Deadline: April 15th, 2017

Link: http://usascholarships.com/cm-cares-religious-scholars-program/

When you factor in tuition, room and board, books and other fees, this is what going to a top 10 school will run you yearly. And this photoset doesn’t even include the most expensive school of the top 10. Yes, it gets worse.

VSGC Community College STEM Scholarship

Application Deadline is February 13, 2017.

http://usascholarships.com/vsgc-community-college-stem-scholarship/

Just applied for 3 scholarships!

Wish me luck in getting some financial aid because I’m already so in the hole from my previous college that it’s not funny…

MedEvac Foundation International Children’s Scholarship

Deadline is July 31, 2017

http://usascholarships.com/medevac-foundation-international-childrens-scholarship/

14.4.16 Flowers are finally beginning to bloom on my campus.

xx Sunny

Scholarship: Accenture Student Veterans Scholarship

Application Deadline: March 31, 2017

Link: http://usascholarships.com/accenture-student-veterans-scholarship/

Heroic Army Veteran Stood Up To School Shooter, Got Shot 5 Times

Stories of bravery have started to surface amid the terrible tragedy that left 10 dead and seven more injured at an Oregon community college.Students in Roseburg were starting their fourth day of classes at Umpqua Community College when shots rang out Thursday. 

“It’s my son’s birthday today,” the 30-year-old told the shooter.