Me: “Hi.”
Little boy: “Are you Mr. Superintendent?”
Me: “Yes.”
Little boy: “My dad says you are great.”
Me: “Thanks.”
Little boy” “My mom says you’re terrible.”
Me: Speechless.
My job performance is evidently 50/50. Pretty good. I’ll take it.
I stumbled across a great column by Jay Mathews today in the Washington Post regarding teaching writing in our schools. or rather, how badly our schools are at teaching writing.
Mathews says, With a few exceptions, our schools are bad at teaching writing. Students are not asked to do much of it, mostly because reading and correcting their work takes so much time. Instruction methods are often academic and lifeless.
English teachers rarely assign non-fiction reading and are even less apt to require non-fiction writing. Almost no high school students, except those in private or International Baccalaureate schools, are required to do major research papers.
Worthy attempts at reform haven’t gotten far. Writing instruction is killing our children’s natural desire to express themselves. Compare their school assignments to their e-mails and you will see what I mean.
Leading this movement is Paula Stacey, an editor and educator who has taught every level of writing instruction. Her Sept. 21 Education Week piece exposed the torture that is Composition 101. “We have the entire English department at a local high school,” Stacey wrote, “embracing a schoolwide essay format that calls for exactly three central paragraphs containing exactly eight sentences: topic sentence, detail sentence, commentary sentence, another detail sentence, another commentary sentence, a final detail sentence, a final commentary sentence, and a concluding sentence.
“At a different high school across town, a history teacher hands out zeros to students who don’t have the thesis statement as the final sentence in the opening paragraph. Meanwhile, a woman I know who teaches at an elite research university bemoans the fact that her students, among the best in the country, have mastered the five-paragraph essay, but can’t develop a complex idea in writing.”
Drawing upon my experiences in the classroom, the best examples of writing were those that enabled students to express thoughts and ideas about something real and relevant and meaningful. I agree with Mathews that teaching writing is hard work and time-consuming. But great teachers know that there is a huge ROI on that work.
One great resource to inspire great writing in the upper grades is the book, Moes Cafe. These classroom-tested prompts put students in a place or in front of a character and ask them to describe what they see. The thinking, writing, and scribbling they do for the prompts inspires them to create their own stories and poems. After writing 90-word mini-stories, students read a short story or watch a film scene to help them expand on their own creative works. For writing teachers in grades 6-12, this one is worth checking out.
, and let us know if you agree. Wed love to hear from you.
Schoodoodle.com offers a wide selection of instructional materials for language arts, writing, math, science, social studies, and early childhood.
Upon completion of online business analyst education requirements, including business analysis certification, you can work as either a business consultant or employee with both technical and business skills and knowledge.
The role of a business analyst is to help a company examine its departments or divisions and to seek ways of improving its functionality and productivity in an effective, efficient manner. As a business analyst you would evaluate the structure of a business for example marketing and sales, accounting and finance, systems management, labor and human resources management, functional management, and facilities. The goal is to take a close look at different and determine what could be refined. A systems analyst generally works for a company or organization in the computer or technical department. Their role is to assist the company in responding to changing technology by improving its computer information systems by designing and optimizing hardware and software. The role of the functional analyst is to capture, consolidate, and communicate the information from the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to the rest of the team. Hence the functional analyst is an important link between SMEs in providing the business requirements and the rest of the team trying to construct the solution.
University of Phoenix
DeVry University
Business analyst education covers a variety of business and technical courses. These business analyst courses may include basic business management as well as financial management and accounting. Programs of study also emphasize strong oral and written communication skills.
It is also important to have strong information technology skills in this field. Business analyst training may covers topics such as analyzing business needs, designing, developing, and implementing, and monitoring IT solutions, and business goals and solutions. In addition other courses are:
This might be more so in the business analyst masters degree level. Business analyst degree courses may also include, quantitative analysis, leadership and management, critical thinking, business research, economics, and managerial skills.
In addition, business analyst education courses may also include entrepreneurial management, and international business. In many business analysis masters degree programs, a concentration on the technology side is useful for functional analyst jobs as well.
Business analysis certification can be attained at the master’s degree level. The master certificate in business analysis is designed to help business and IT professionals already working in the world of business learn how to accurately change, evaluate, and analyze present business practices so as to improve satisfaction and productivity using information systems. The programs concentrate on utilizing new technology to analyze business in order to come up with solutions.
Most systems analyst training programs are design to teach students how to design, implement and manage enterprise applications and infrastructure. This helps graduates to be able to design, deploy, and manage data communication infrastructures and systems in business or technical setting.
What is a business analyst? A business analyst examines business change needs and assesses the impact of forecasted changes. I.T. processionals who choose business analyst education, systems analyst training, or functional analyst training paths tend to pursue consulting or full time positions as computer system or business analysts.
Graduates with a master’s certificate in business analysis tend to have several options on where to work in small, medium, or large corporations and business. Although job output varies by the industry and specific job requirement requisite skills normally include business planning, issues management risk assessment, business economics, reporting, finance and accounting. Possible career options are:
A computer systems analyst is an essential bridge between non-technical personnel in a company, and enterprise systems. This requires good analytical sense, a broad knowledge base in computer systems and databases, and the ability to understand and analyze business problems.
Job opportunities for systems analysts exist in most businesses and industries that rely on computers and information technology. Opportunities also include database administration, computer security, and computer programming.
The job outlook for financial managers is positive with employment growth expected to remain steady as businesses continue to integrate technology into their business practices. According to the United States Department of Labor (BLS), the median annual salary is around $82,000 year.The median expected salary for a Business Systems Analyst as of 2011 was $50,856.
The employment of management analysts is expected to grow 24% between 2008 and 2018 according to the BLS, Jobs with business analyst education or certification are categorized under the field of financial management and business analysis consultant average about $90 an hour.
These three straightforward questions are comprehensive and wide ranging in effect. They give the Stanford Sloan MiM adcom both factual information about you such as your current work responsibilities, your goals, and details of work experiences, and also insight into your thought process, self-evaluation skills, and ability to synthesize and draw conclusions. The questions reflect the adcom’s interest in admitting people with the requisite experience who are movers-and-shakers in their current context and who will be path-breaking leaders in the future. While no work or page length is specified, the instructions say to “use separate sheets of paper to answer the following questions.”
When I reflect on our many successful Stanford clients, initiative in the face of need is the common thread among them. They are always the ones who revealed, especially in Essay A, that they do not turn away or see a problem or need for action. They grab the initiative when they recognize an opportunity to contribute. They are comfortable expressing emotion and their values, and their actions reflect both, but particularly the latter. Think purpose-driven, principle-driven lives.
Essay 1: Tell us about your current duties and responsibilities, including references to the total number of people you supervise and/or the amount of assets you manage. Describe one or two of your major accomplishments and explain why they are meaningful to you.
In describing duties and responsibilities, focus on those that have a higher level component and/or large scale. Be selective; don’t detail every single thing you are responsible for. Also, do highlight the breadth of your work – include your people management (not just number of reports but their professional levels and scope), strategic role, operational role, key decision-making responsibilities, P&L responsibility, global involvement. In selecting accomplishments, I suggest using two, ideally representing different types of skills/capabilities. At least one should be fairly recent. In describing why they are meaningful to you, avoid generalities like “from this experience I learned how to lead large global teams” – to make this statement meaningful you’d add some words about exactly HOW you DO lead large global teams.
Essay 2: What educational and personal objectives do you hope to satisfy through the Sloan Program? What type and level of work do you expect to be engaged in five years from now?
This essay will show that you are focused and that your objectives align with the program’s offerings. You might start sketching your answer by addressing the last part first (regardless of how you structure your final essay) – clarifying your professional plans for five years hence will reveal development needs both educational and personal. Describing that target role and industry, you will naturally see the challenges of getting from where you are now to that future place and doing it well. These developmental needs create your educational and personal objectives. Finally, discuss in concrete terms how the Sloan program will address them, providing details and examples.
Essay 3: Describe a situation that challenged your leadership skills and explain what you learned about your strengths and weaknesses.
The bulk of this essay should be a straightforward narrative – tell the story of a time when your leadership skills were challenged. In selecting the content, keep in mind the accomplishments you discussed in essay 1 in order to avoid redundancy. This essay provides another opportunity to show you working in an interesting context, dealing with high level and/or high stakes issues, interacting with significant decision makers. Conclude the essay with a frank discussion – don’t focus only on strengths and skim over weaknesses. Show how learning about the stated weakness has helped you by providing a very brief (even one sentence) example of how you’ve applied that learning. Alternatively, you can link the weakness to the objectives in the previous essay.
Deadline: December 15, 2011
Decisions by: mid-January 2012
The school buses that transport Arlington Public Schools students are under “a great strain” and reaching a “breaking point,” according to an independent report.
The problem, said Management Partnerships Inc., is that the school system has addressed problems with individual routes — adding a bus here, reducing the number of runs there — rather than focusing on a systemwide solution. As a result, many buses are critically underused, and others are tardy on typical days, making the system vulnerable to weather and safety emergencies.
“It is the assessment of the MPS that, absent action, there will be a breakdown of service and that this would prove costly of time and resources to correct once it has occurred,” the report says.
More than 45 percent of APS students get to school by bus, an option for elementary students with more than a mile to walk to school and for older students living 1.5 miles or more from their classrooms.
“As you can imagine, it is a tremendous challenge to plan for the transportation needs of so many students, including those who attend a neighborhood school as well as students with a longer ride to a countywide school,” said Gregory Sutton, director of transportation services for APS, in a letter to parents at the school year’s start.
According to the report, the buses’ cost and performance is currently up to standard, but that status is “tenuous,” highly dependent on key staffers and other variable factors.
The firm recommends APS completely rethink and restructure bus routes, and even look into shaking up the schools’ starting times. Elementary, middle and high schools start at times too close together to maximize a bus’ number of runs (the average per day is 5.5) without compromising on-time arrivals.
“This, coupled with the complexity of traffic and slow travel speeds, greatly constrains the system’s [efficiency],” says the report.
On average, APS buses operate at only 45 percent capacity, compared with the typical standard of 60 to 80 percent.
About 94.5 percent of afternoon buses arrived on time, during a sample day last June. Although a good rate, this concerned the auditors, who said it was “illustrative of a system under strain from a timeliness perspective, with any unplanned event likely to cause a systemwide problem.”
But the firm’s primary concern was the way the department was organized, calling for a more specialized, hierarchical structure. “Everything works, but only because of the personalities involved together with the experience and tenure of many individual staff members,” the report says. “In the experience of MPS, this is the environment that can lead to major service breakdowns.”
The firm told APS that it can accomplish its top priorities by the time the 2012-2013 school year starts, and that it will take a minimum of two years to overhaul the entire system.
George Harwood Phillips, a scholar known for his significant research on Southern California Indians, will speak at UC Riverside on Tuesday, Nov. 29, from 2 to 3 p.m.
Phillips’ lecture, “Labor and Survival Among Southern California Indians,” is part of the continuing Rupert Costo Lecture series and will focus on Indian labor in 18th and 19th centuries. The event is free and open to the public, and will be held in the Costo Library on the fourth floor of the Tomás Rivera Library. Parking costs $6.
Phillips is professor emeritus of history at the University of Colorado and previously taught at UC Riverside, where he was the second scholar named to the endowed Rupert Costo Chair in American Indian Affairs in the late 1980s.
“George Harwood Phillips is considered to be the most important historian of the Indians of Southern California,” said Cliff Trafzer, UCR professor of history and Rupert Costo Chair in American Indian Affairs. “We are pleased to welcome him back to the campus.”
Among the books Phillips has written are “Vineyards and Vaqueros: Indian Labor and the Economic Expansion of Southern California, 1771-1877,” “Chiefs and Challengers: Indian Resistance and Cooperation in Southern California,” and “Indians and Indian Agents: The Origins of the Reservation System in California, 1849-1852.”
The lecture is sponsored by the Rupert Costo Endowment, California Center for Native Nations, and the UCR Department of History.