[For Dale—again—whom I miss something fierce] So today is a bit unusual (though I wish more days were like this) because I’m spending a good portion of it with a bunch of young adults. I have five people coming in (and one person Skyping in over his lunch break) all Read more…
[For Candice and Nahjee] I wish you ladies could have joined me for Lisette’s talk, “Multi-contextualism and the Consumption of Higher Education,” because I know both of you would have really enjoyed it. Giving you a digest below. We can dig into all this more deeply when we see each other next, because I would love to hear your reactions.
Lisette made a very credible case for the dishearteningly low college graduation rates of the latino student population being a result of certain cultural pressures rather than a lack of academic preparedness. In other words, it’s not that latino students aren’t capable of hacking college-level courses; it’s the fact that within the latino community young people take on very adult roles within their families, and this sense of obligation—and very real responsibility—often gets in the way of attending to the competing demands of college life. If we understand young latinos’ desire for parental closeness and their role in contributing to the family income, then all of a sudden the phenomenon of high-achieving latino students dropping out of selective colleges in order to attend the community college close to home makes sense.
What enables Lisette to arrive at these insights is by considering the problem of college persistence through the lens of multi-contextualism. (more…)
Yesterday Nahjee told me that I should be a therapist. I pshawed her: I have no such training! Later on, during my shift at AlleyNYC‘s front desk, I got into a conversation with one of the guests. Within ten minutes—before we’d even traded names—I’d managed to find out about his Read more…
[For Dale] OK, so perhaps I took my aversion to reading or watching anything that debuts to great fanfare too far by avoiding Oscar Wao for this long. I just wasn’t expecting it to be that great. I mean, Drown was a solid read, but I didn’t end up thinking about Read more…
It would take a long paragraph to list out all the awards and honors that Nahjee has won, but I won’t go into any of it here because I’m convinced that the foundation of a positive self concept is not built on the external validation you get from jumping through Read more…
Someone else just accepted my invitation to guest post on this blog! Among other things, he is a beloved manager and insightful mentor and I’m hoping that he can write something about the qualities that he looks for in his proteges, and perhaps a little bit about how he works Read more…
Back at home from a full day of being out and about talking to people about exciting projects in the works, and my silly caveman brain is unsettling me. A certain wise man warned me at the very beginning (and repeatedly ever since) that dealing with uncertainty would be the Read more…
[For Lindsay] Many, many thanks for sharing your thoughts and insights on this blog. It was such an honor to host your debut. Your contributions fit in seamlessly and I loved getting a bit more of a peek into your interior life. Writing publicly can be scary, yes, but the possibility Read more…
When the lovely Lindsay Adamski from New Yorkers For Children mentioned that she’d just finished a Paul Tough book that was on my reading list, I asked her if she wouldn’t mind blogging about it. Her answer was so immediate and so enthusiastic that I went ahead and invited her to Read more…