This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Copyright P. Kerim Friedman.
I frequently get approached by academics who would like to find a university teaching job in Taiwan, so I thought I’d share my standard advice as a
What is at stake in the Chicago Teachers Union strike? Here are some links to articles I’ve found useful/interesting in the form of a FAQ. I will
Re-posted from Savage Minds. This is a view of the building where I work. The College of Indigenous Studies at National Dong Hwa University, in
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
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
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
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
Scott Sommers has written a wide-ranging and thoughtful post on education in Taiwan. The ostensible topic is globalization, but far more interesting
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
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
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.
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
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.
Guest post by tf Daniel Schneidermann lost his job because he spoke out. Now his associate, Judith Bernard, has had a job offer withdrawn because
Guest post by tf Fifteen percent of French students leave elementary school without being able to read properly, according to Ministry of Education
Guest post by tf Each French cabinet ministry has its own official responsible for the national defense related aspects of that ministry’s work. For
Guest post by tf Blackboard is an online system used by many universities, in the United States and elsewhere, to animate classroom discussions
Jonathan Kozol has an important article in the latest issue of Harpers. Although the magazine hasn’t made it available online, you can read it here.
One of the things I try to explain in my dissertation is the failure of Taiwan’s current educational policies. What do I mean by failure? This is a
Someone recently mentioned to me that I should see Yuan Zhang’s 1999 documentary “Crazy English.” Although the few reviews I’ve found of the film
Last September I wrote an article in Anthropology News encouraging my fellow anthropologists to get online. I was frustrated that while there are
Last year, when I was offered the opportunity to teach a course on anthropology and photography at Haverford College, I immediately knew I wanted to
The hunger strike by students supporting a guaranteed living wage at Georgetown was a success. According to the DC labor web site (where I can no
Students at Georgetown are fighting to get a living wage for the lowest paid employees at the university. Sign a petition in support of the hunger
David Goldenberg, writing in the online magazine Gelf, takes the “New” SATs to task. Most disturbing is the effect that the changes to the test are
A new ad campaign from IBM “shows a young Chinese girl asking to join a virtual classroom because her village is too far from the nearest school.”
No need to wait for the book, the curious can download my dissertation right now: Learning “Local” Languages: Passive Revolution, Language Markets,
In my last post I wrote about India’s Adivasis, or “Scheduled Tribes.” Accounting for over 85 million people, they account for the bulk of India’s
How did my Ph.D. take 10 years? First of all, that is the average for a Ph.D. in Anthropology, so it is no big deal. Secondly, it doesn’t seem that
In the comments on a recent LanguageHat post two of the most articulate, literate, and thoughtful members of the blogsphere, John Emerson (aka
There is no doubt that Bush’s attempt to deflect discussion of jobs by talking about No Child Left Behind didn’t work. And Kerry did a great job
Joi Ito just got his student I.D. card, and now he can access all those wonderful academic databases, like Lexis-Nexis. His thoughts on this are
My latest Anthropology News article, “Open Source Anthropology” is now available online as a fully editable wiki article. Please feel free to
I wanted to clarify a comment I left in my post on Koko, the guerilla whose learned to use symbols to communicate with humans. I wrote the
Last week, Kevin Drum wrote: Mark Kleiman thinks there are a few little seedlings of evidence that people are growing up and talking more honestly
A few weeks ago I asked, in regards to US concerns about the offshoring of high-tech jobs, just how many American’s were doing these jobs to begin
I once had a summer job renovating apartments in New York city. Not having much experience at this kind of thing, my Jamaican co-workers always
Last month, President Bush’s Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, called America’s largest teachers’ union a “terrorist organization.” Why? Because
Richard D. Kahlenberg and Bernard Wasow have an excellent article on “school choice” in the latest Boston Review New Democracy Forum. First, they
There has been a lot of discussion of late about the Lakoff interview on how the left needs to learn how to better “frame” issues, in order to
I wasn’t going to post anything this week — as I’m away from my broadband connection in the city. However, this study (which I heard about on NPR)
In his recent post on education Calpundit finds himself “reluctantly” siding with some very harmful views: In the Washington Post, William
So, you start a company to privatize education and take on the teachers unions. Your company fails miserably both in terms of the market and
The entire mission of “No Child Left Behind” is to eventually label every single school in this nation as “failing“—it’s a backdoor way of forcing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Copyright P. Kerim Friedman.