by Kendra Weinisch on November 20, 2009
With Thanksgiving weekend, we will get a preview of the winter break we can look forward to. If yours is anything like my family, there will be a lot of television-watching interrupted only by videogame-playing and arthritis-inducing text messaging. I appreciate my children’s need to relax and unwind, but the idea of such mental lethargy is a little upsetting. That’s why I was so intrigued by a friend’s story about a Maryland program that keeps students’ minds from freezing over while the weather outside is frightful.
When winter break rolls around, students at the Thornton Friends School, in Silver Spring, are invited to participate in a two-week session of extracurricular activities aimed at making the students well-rounded and expanding their “life skills.” The courses, which are taught by teachers at the school, focus on things like outdoor survival skills, art, music, home repair basics, and writing. Last year’s outdoor skills students journeyed to Joshua Tree National Monument in Southern California. They spent two weeks hiking through the park, which does not have toilets or running water, all the while carrying fifty-pound backpacks and, presumably, singing marching songs. The situation sounds a little too intense for me, actually. However, the intersession participants who stayed in Maryland stretched and painted their own canvases, created a literary magazine, or formed a rock band (all with the educational guidance of their teachers). I was particularly moved by the home repair group, which utilized its newfound drywall skills by fixing up the home of a family in need.
A program such as this one may not be available at your child’s school, but the premise is certainly easy to reproduce. I have often thought to myself about the simple things I wish I had been trained in as a young adult. I wasted so much time learning about absolute numbers and “Y” as a function of “X,” but no one ever taught me how to balance a checkbook (not even in college). Likewise, I was on my own the first time I left my headlights on and had to jumpstart my car. And while I certainly don’t want to guide my kids out to the desert to recreate basic training, a lesson on disaster preparedness would be good for the whole family. If nothing else, life-skills training is a way to get your kids off the couch and, theoretically, the juices flowing in their little heads. It’s also a way to bond with them while disproving their theory that they are smarter than you about everything. This winter break, give your kids a challenge with a homework assignment of your own—after they clean their rooms and shovel snow off the driveway, of course.
by Kendra Weinisch on November 19, 2009
“Probe of Extra Help for Men.” The headline on the Inside Higher Ed website shocked me. Could it be that the tide has shifted and that male students now require affirmative action to get into college? It seems impossible. For as long as I can remember, there have been organizations dedicated to eradicating the gender imbalance in academia (weighted, of course, toward men). Throughout school, all I heard were rallying cries for women continuing after high school, taking advantage of admissions assistance policies, and scholarship opportunities specifically for the fairer sex. Clearly, times have changed.
According to an article in the New York Times, “’for every one hundred women who graduate with a bachelor’s degree, only seventy-three men’ do so.” This describes the backend but doesn’t explain why these boys are having trouble getting in to begin with. Then I read further. Apparently, these gender imbalances—and consequent discrimination issues—are most common at small, private liberal arts schools. Okay, I can buy that. It seems that the ratio of women to men at these schools is hovering around six to four. To try to keep the balance, these schools may be favoring men in their admissions processes. Although private undergraduate universities are exempted from Title IX admissions rules regarding gender, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has launched a study to determine if the accusations of favoritism, which are often downplayed by the schools, are accurate.
Interestingly, the trend is moving into non-liberal arts schools as well, particularly research universities. The majority of bachelor degrees, fifty-eight percent, now go to women. To attract male students, schools are trying different approaches. Some are simply letting their admissions records do the talking, hoping the statistics will illustrate that they are friendly to male applicants. A study by Skidmore College, a small school in upstate New York, found that “being a male applicant raises the probability of acceptance at these schools by between 6.5 and nine percentage points.” Others schools are more creative. Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, refreshed its marketing materials with more pictures of sports and students in hands-on learning situations. Others are going farther, expanding their sports departments and fraternity rows.
Getting into college becomes more complex every year. These arguments of favoritism underscore the importance of doing your homework on prospective universities. If your son is looking for good odds on admission into college, you might want to start your search at liberal arts and research schools.