Thanks for the follow up. I'd be curious who the professors are, and what their backgrounds are. Oh, and how many professors do they intend to hire? Obviously, with STEM, you want the professor to be up-to-date, but you also want them to be able to teach. I've certainly come a long way in honing my teaching craft, and just because someone is an expert in any given field, doesn't mean that they will be good at teaching it. Maybe it's just me, but I'd be a little miffed that academics seem to be so low priority here that right now they know for certain that each dorm room will have a flat screen TV, but don't know what Math classes will be offered.

The right way is whatever works for you. For us, for verbs, one side would be "laudo, laudare, laudavi, laudatum" (with macrons) and the other side would just be "to praise". If the verb is a special verb which takes the dative or ablative, I have them mark that on the Latin side, eg. "credo, credere, credidi, creditum (+ dat.)". A noun might have on one side: "agricola, -ae (m)" and on the other "farmer". Sometimes we go Latin to English, other times English to Latin. If you know the vocab both ways, you've really got it down cold. I find flashcards work best for vocab, but for memorize paradigms, just making the students write them out in order is the best way, once or twice a day, every day, until they have it down. It is tiresome, but effective. I couldn't get flashcards to work well for paradigms. I like to think of grammar and the paradigms as separate things. Grammar is rules that control which paradigms you use in which situations. So, for the grammar section, I might write out things like, Nominative case: subject, predicate nominative e.g. casa lacunam habet. casa est casa alba. Genitive case: possession, partitive genitive, genitive of value, etc. ... and things like when to use which tenses, etc.

(double post).

For flashcards, even if we aren't doing composition, I make the students study them Latin -> English and English -> Latin. For the verb laudo, there's just one card, which would have all four principle parts. Make sure the English side has the full form of the infinitive on it ("to praise", instead of "praise"), so you won't get confused if you also have the related noun in the deck. Make sure the nouns list their genitive form and gender, so you know what declension they are. I would rename your section called "grammar", "paradigms", and just write them out, without the translations. For the grammar section, I would have one section for each of the noun cases, and list their main uses. I would also have one section for each tense, voice and mood, and describe when they are used, with a big section on all the uses of the subjunctive.

And, according to the article, the US mean is 27.5, so ??? Furthermore, I wonder if median is a better way to summarize the scores a school receives.

There's a lot of the opposite problem around here -- lots of minimum wage retail and fast food jobs only offer 10 to 15 hours a week.

The sad truth is that many Division I football programs actually lose money. Most college athletic departments as a whole do.

My solution to the problem is to give each student athlete a four years of sports eligibility, with room & board, and a scholarship for four years of school that can start after their athletic career is over. Academics are a farce for many of these athletes, and there is so much money involved that no college will do anything to stem the flow of cash. But for those who really want an education, give them the opportunity to be full-time students.

I've got a lot of facebook posts about people burning themselves with the frozen water trick, when not all of the water freezes. Don't throw it straight up or into the wind.

This just seems ridiculous. For those whose primary wages come from tips, even if patrons don't tip well, more patrons mean more tips. Now, I do know for a fact that hostesses are encouraged to estimate wait times on the long side, just to be sure. And whatever happened to the idea of reservations?

We read "The Long Winter", and are thankful for how easy we have it now.

I think now that book reports are a bit of a crutch used by public school teacher to just check that their large schoolroom of kids is actually reading without the time-consuming step of just talking with each student about the books they are reading. I know that mine are reading, and what they are reading, and how much time they are reading in a week just by being around. I'd rather have a conversation with the younger ones about what they are reading, and use that as a starting point for other discussions, and helping them find more reading.

If you have bike helmets, I'd make the kids wear them. For the littles or first timers, it can be more fun if you have a small wooden chair they can push around the ice, and have something to lean on.

I'd have to look at the particular university in pretty close detail, but this one raises a lot of red flags. As of now, it seems they have hired one full time professor (who hasn't been employed as a professor before), and one adjunct. If you go to the "Staff directory" under "about" on their web page, they seem to have lots of business people, but very few academics. I don't see anyone who looks like a Dean or department head. If they want to start classes next fall, I would think that you'd need these people to do academic planning. The list of academic subjects looks trendy and flashy, but the information about each one is awfully shallow. For example, under academics, there's "Magnetics", which apparently one can get either a BS or MS in, and is in the department of Electrical Engineering. No professors are listed who might specialize in "Magnetics", nor are any courses listed for this major, or degree requirements, or prerequisites, or sample class schedules that freshmen might take. I don't see any courses mentioned at all on the webpage, which seems like something an incoming student might like to see. Seems to me like the first few years at least will be shaky.

As always, even the best educational strategy is worthless with a bad teacher. No teacher should ever just ask "any questions", and hearing none, assume that everyone understands everything. A half decent teacher would they ask probing question, ideally of each student in the class. The students would know that they are "on the hook" for reading the material beforehand, and that there is no shame in asking good questions. To put a finer point on what I said earlier -- if I'm paying good money for direct interaction with a subject matter expert, I want to maximize the amount of time that person is doing what can't be done by any other means. I don't want to pay $40k per year to learn definitions and background information that I could get from a reading. I don't want the teacher to waste their time proctoring quizes and exams. I want the teachers to teach. I think we've got it stuck in our collective heads that "teaching" is standing in front of a whiteboard reading from notes (or even worse, from powerpoint slides).

You'd think that if anything would prepare a student for college classes, it would be taking college classes in high school. I'm curious if this was Community College or University classes that he took in high school?

Totally agree. On of my pet peeves is how the word "innovative", which just means "new", has become a synonym for "better".

I'm a bit confused -- if there are no good undergraduate places nearby, presumably you'd need to move anyway to do graduate work, right? So why not move earlier, or twice?

If you are really trying to get into a difficult graduate school, I'd also consider transferring to a more reputable undergraduate institution.

For the Humanities, what you need to do is learn to write well, in the academic style of your discipline. I would find the minor journals that graduate students in your chosen field are publishing in, and start reading them now, going back several years. This could be a multi-year project. Unlike the sciences, I would think the history articles should be relatively accessible.

I saw that Sears is going to spin off Land's End back into an independent company again. I think they started going down hill as soon as Sears bought them out. Here's hoping they will turn around!

Not really a safety issue, but my pet peeve is hotel alarm clocks that aren't even close to the correct time!

I'm afraid most of my wants and needs cost money: more books, more hours, nicer spaces, more ILL. However, I know my library runs a report every year, looking for books which haven't been checked out in a long time, and gets rid of those books. I wonder if it is possible to do such a search, but instead of getting rid of books, use it as a way to highlight overlooked classics. e.g. if the Guiness Book of World Records 1976 hasn't been checked out in a while, fine, get rid of that, but, if the Betsy-Tacy books haven't been checked out in a year, how about pull those out, and put them on display.

As a sole degree, finding a job with just a Classics major, especially in the field, is going to be difficult. However, classics as a second major may be very useful, even if it doesn't get used directly. I would think that an employer trying to choose between someone with, say, just a chemistry degree, and a chemistry and Latin double major is going to see the later as someone more driven and capable, all other things being equal. I would recommend to try to find another major she likes, but if she's close, keep going to get the second degree.

How many seniors are there -- could you let them all speak?