Education
Year of the Dog
While it is still officially the year of the pig, for us 2007 was the year of the dog. Juno was already seven months old when we met her in December of 2006, and we took over full time ownership of her in February of 2007. Young retrievers are a handful, and despite her age, […]
Wax On, Wax Off
One of my jobs at Dong Hwa is to be an advisor to half of the second year students. One student had never shown up at any of the activities I organized for my students, but he suddenly called me today because it is the last day to withdraw from school. I wasn’t in school […]
Corporal Punishment
This only thing remarkable about a recent study which showed that “52 percent of elementary and junior middle school pupils in Taiwan, around 1.45 million pupils, have experienced corporal punishment in school in the first half of this year,” is that the article about it also published the survey size and the margin of error. […]
Illiteracy
A few weeks ago Victor Mair wrote a guest post on Language Log implying that China’s high rates of illiteracy could be cured by reforming the script, replacing difficult to learn characters with phonetic spelling. There is lots of good discussion of this topic on Language Hat, and there was a good post on the […]
Testing
Scott Sommers has written a wide-ranging and thoughtful post on education in Taiwan. The ostensible topic is globalization, but far more interesting to me is his take on testing. He argues that the prevalence of centralized testing in Taiwan is not a holdover from imperial times, but a new policy implemented by the KMT to […]
ze
I know I’m not the only one who will miss Ze, as he ends his one year video blog which rocked the interweb.
I think the secret to Ze’s success is that he is a great teacher. He taught his audience how to participate and how to be creative. Here is an interview he did with […]
Inequality Roundup
I’ve been delinquent in writing up the half a dozen stories on global inequality which I’ve been meaning to blog about, so here they all are in one go:
“the richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth.”
That’s looking at wealth, rather than income, but Michael Turton sent me […]
Transistors
Graduate Student Rashi Jain is running in a marathon to raise money for a program to set up Radio Schools for rural Adivasi communities in India. Please help support her cause!
We are brought up to believe that every child has the right to education. Yet there are many children, especially those in the remote corners […]
Difficult
How hard is it to be a teacher? Malcolm Gladwell has a nice piece about how hard it is to judge the difficulty of someone else’s job.
I think that misunderstanding over degree of difficulty issues is one of the major reasons for conflict between insiders and outsiders. We bridle at the school teacher who asks […]
Elocution
Guest post by tf
With all the talk of call centers in poorer countries, one sometimes forgets that they are a booming business in the rich world. In Eugene, Oregon, Lane Community College has just reintroduced its eight week certificate program for would-be call center employees. As reported by Sherri Buri McDonald in The Register […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
