for-profit schools

US Senate Committee Health, Education, Labor and Pensions | Harkin: Report Reveals Troubling Realities of For-Profit Schools (link)

“In this report, you will find overwhelming documentation of overpriced tuition, predatory recruiting practices, sky-high dropout rates, billions of taxpayer dollars spent on aggressive marketing and advertising, and companies gaming regulations to maximize profits. These practices are not the exception -- they are the norm; they are systemic throughout the industry, with very few exceptions,” Harkin said.

NY Times | "Federal Rule Would Cut Funding to Some Career- Training Programs" 

The government would cut off funding to programs that consistently fall short under the "gainful employment" rule, to be published Thursday--effectively a death sentence for the programs, because a majority of their revenue comes from federal student loans and Pell grants... 

... They frequently note that as a whole, for-profit schools have low graduation rates and charge more than nonprofit schools. Their students tend to borrow more money, and former students are far more likely to default on their loans.  

For-profit schools also disproportionately serve low-income and minority students... Consumer advocacy groups say the schools simply prey on unsophisticated consumers...

middle east

Harvard Gazette | "The Islamic State of play" (link):  

“What ISIS offered was order, and people were craving order in Syria. The second thing ISIS offered was a respite from the bombing,” said Amos, noting that the Syrian government largely refrained from bombing ISIS-held territories. “If you were a Syrian and you’d been through two years of complete chaos in northern Syria, ISIS looked pretty good.”  

In Iraq, “By and large, the Iraqi Army had behaved so badly in Mosul that they [ISIS fighters] were welcomed when they first arrived,” said Amos. “So that is how they do it: They find places where there is chaos — people don’t know how to survive, they have no way to make a living — and ISIS brings order.”

NY Times | "A Town Shouldn't Fight the Islamtic State Alone" (link)

We are defending a democratic, secular society of Kurds, Arabs, Muslims and Christians who all face an imminent massacre... 

Western governments should increase their pressure on Turkey to open a corridor for Syrian Kurdish forces and their heavy weapons to reach the defenders of Kobani through the border...

The people of Kobani need the attention and help of the world.

interesting reads

1. The Atlantic | "The World's Greatest Fears, Mapped by Country" (link)

2. NY Times | "To Siri, with Love" (link)

The developers of intelligent assistants recognize their uses to those with speech and communication problems -- and some are thinking of new ways the assistants can help. According to the folks at SRI International... the next generation of virtual assistants will not just retrieve information -- they will also be able to carry on more complex conversations about a person's area of interest. "Your son will be able to proactively get information about whatever he's interested in without asking for it, because the assistant will anticipate what he likes..." 

Gus: "Siri, will you marry me?
Siri: "I'm not the marrying kind."
Gus: "I mean, not now. I'm a kid. I mean when I'm grown up."
Siri: "My end user agreement does not include marriage."
Gus: "Oh, O.K."

3. NY Times | "The Building Blocks of a Good Pre-K" (link)

While grown-ups recognize that pretending helps children find their way into the world, many adults think of play as separate from formal learning. The reality is quite different. As they play, children develop vital cognitive, linguistic, social and emotional skills.... It is so deeply formative for children that it must be at the core of our early childhood curriculum. 

What is referred to as self-regulation in preschool becomes resiliency in high school.... this trait, which she [Dr. Duckworth] famously calls grit, can make or break students, especially low-income students.... have their roots in early childhood.

the fault in our stars

“There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that.  

There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got.   

But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”

RIP michael brown, trayvon martin, oscar grant, kajieme powell, rest in peace

Mentally-speaking, what happens when you hear about another unarmed black teen killed by police/police-like officers? For me, it goes something like this: First, anger, a kind of 360-degree, completely unfocused, completely diffuse anger; but since anger is a fairly cheap emotion it fades, and sadness settles in; and then I get that familiar helpless feeling you get when you realize what you're doing is utterly rote, almost Pavlovian, but you don't know how else to deal. To put it another way: For reasons I'm still trying to parse out, I've realized that simply mourning the deaths of other young black men isn't good enough any more. 

I don't mean for this to sound melodramatic, because my emotions don't really matter; or, they matter less than a murdered black boy whose body was left in the street. But what I'm trying to describe here is something real, a sinking-in-quicksand feeling familiar to anyone who is tired of the terror—which is the only really truly appropriate term—police officers exact on young black men. When an unarmed black boy is killed by a police officer, again, and some loud-talking reporter is interviewing the boy's mother, again, and you can see his mother's shoulders slumped until they can't slump any more, and she's been crying so much she's gotten to the point of simply not bothering to wipe the tears away, and you watch her as she tries to look into every camera and speak into every microphone, and watch her as she suddenly gets the spectacle of all of this, and starts listing all of the good things her boy ever was, so that everyone can remember him the way she's remembering him right then, in that moment—when will we decide this is not okay?...

Aren't we all tired yet? We know that what happened to Michael Brown was not a unique incident but part of a larger phenomenon—and that it will happen again, soon. Which means we know an even deeper truth: that to be black in this country means constantly paying a tax on your life. Some of us pay in dignity, some of us pay in blood. What I'm trying to say is this: Never again will I pay with my dignity.

-Lanre Akinsiku, "The Price of Blackness" 

http://gawker.com/the-price-of-blackness-1622972582

the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers

Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, 

the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... 

you can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, 

because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

 - Steve Jobs

St. Thomas Aquinas (1923)

*

Pour forth a ray of Your brightness

 into the darkened places of my mind;

 disperse from my soul

 the twofold darkness

 into which I was born:

 sin and ignorance.

You make eloquent the tongues of infants.

Refine my speech and pour forth upon my lips

 the goodness of Your blessing.

Grant to me keenness of mind,

 capacity to remember,

 skill in learning,

 subtlety to interpret,

 and eloquence in speech.

May You

guide the beginning of my work,

direct its progress,

and bring it to completion.

You Who are true God and true Man,

 Who live and reign, world without end.

Amen 

*

man's search for meaning

Phil shared this beautiful excerpt from man's search for meaning with me

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way — an honorable way — in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

--Viktor Frankl 

the opposite of loneliness

i read this girl's lovely piece a few years ago, and it felt refreshing to read it again today-- i appreciate the purity of her idealism, courage and passions, and hope that i, too, can keep alive my once-idealistic heart as i enter the 'real' world [again]. 

"... For most of us, however, we’re somewhat lost in this sea of liberal arts. Not quite sure what road we’re on and whether we should have taken it. If only I had majored in biology…if only I’d gotten involved in journalism as a freshman…if only I’d thought to apply for this or for that… What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have. 

In the heart of a winter Friday night my freshman year, I was dazed and confused when I got a call from my friends to meet them at EST EST EST. Dazedly and confusedly, I began trudging to SSS, probably the point on campus farthest away. Remarkably, it wasn’t until I arrived at the door that I questioned how and why exactly my friends were partying in Yale’s administrative building. Of course, they weren’t. But it was cold and my ID somehow worked so I went inside SSS to pull out my phone. It was quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass. And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe.  

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled, scared. And we don’t have to lose that. We’re in this together, 2012. Let’s make something happen to this world."

-Marina Keegan

the best use of life is love, 

the best expression of love is time, 
the best time to love is now

 -rick warren

*

the weight of the world is love

under the burden of solitude, 

under the burden of dissatisfaction 

the weight, 

the weight we carry 

is love. 

 -allen ginsberg

snowflakes

On snowflakes:

"Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty;and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others.  Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated.When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind."

-Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley

for the midnight bike riders trying to fly

anis mojgani's "shake the dust"

archaeology & happy beginnings

...you must dig yourself up, exhume the contents of your mind and soul for the other to sift through so that you might be known to him, and you, too, must spend days and years wading through all that he excavates for you alone, the archaeology of his being --n.krauss, great house

"morning jane!

yes it was nice to see your smiling face again last night... were their usual selves and will continue to be that way...
i think having a positive attitude to life helps tremendously and...
every day, despite its challenges, almost seems like a holiday."

what a beautiful mind, isn't it?

the death of ivan ilyich, leo tolstoy

... it occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. it occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. and his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. he tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. there was nothing to defend...

... "it is finished!" said someone near him.

he heard these words and repeated them in his soul.

"death is finished, he said to himself. "it is no more!"

he drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.

there is no reason not to follow your heart

... almost everything-- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. remembering that you are going to die is the best way i know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. you are already naked. there is no reason not to follow your heart.

-steve jobs

the king's speech

those poor young blokes had cried out in fear, & no-one was listening to them.

my job was to give them faith in their voice and let them know that a friend was listening.

the things they carried, tim o'brien

in a way, i guess, she's right: i should forget it. but the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. you take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. the memory--traffic feeds into a rotary up in your head, where it goes in circles for awhile, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. as a writer, all you can do is pick up a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. that's the real obsession. all those stories.

...and sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. that's what stories are for. stories are for joining the past to the future. stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller

What great gravity is this that drew my soul toward yours? What great force, that though I went falsely, went kicking, went disguising myself to earn your love, also disguised, to earn your keeping, your resting, your staying, your will fleshed into mine, rasped by a slowly revealed truth, the barter of my soul, the soul that I fear, the soul that I loathe, the soul that: if you will love, I will love. I will redeem you, if you will redeem me? Is this our purpose, you and I together to pacify each other, to lead each other toward the lie that we are good, that we are noble, that we need not redemption, save the one that you and I invented of our own clay?

I am not scared of you, my love, I am scared of me.


I went looking, I wrote out a list, I drew and image, I bled a poem of you. You were pretty, and my friends believed I was worthy of you. You were clever, but I was smarter, perhaps the only one smarter, the only one able to lead you. You see, love, I did not love you, I loved me. And you were only a tool that I used to fix myself, to fool myself, to redeem myself. And though I have taught you to lay your lily hand in mine, I walk alone, for I cannot talk to you , lest you talk it back to me, lest I believe that I am not worthy, not deserving, not redeemed.


I want desperately for you to be my friend. But you are not my friend; you have slid up warmly to the man I wanted to be, the man I pretended to be, and I was your Jesus and, you were mine. Should I show you who I am, we may crumble. I am not scared of you, my love, I am scared of me.


I want to be known and loved anyway. Can you do this? I trust by your easy breathing that you are human, like me. My love, do I know you? What is this great gravity that pulls us so painfully toward each other? Why do we not connect? Will we be forever in fleshing this out? And how will we with words, narrow words, come into the knowing of each other? Is this God's way of meriting grace, of teaching us the labyrinth of His love for us, teaching us, in degrees, that which He is sacrificing to join ourselves to Him? Or better yet, has he formed our being fractional so that we might conclude one great hope, plodding and sighing and breathing into one another in such a great push that we might break through into the known and being loved, only to cave into a greater perdition and fall down at His throne still begging for our acceptance? Begging for our completion?


We were fools to believe that we would redeem each other.


Were I some sleeping Adam, to wake and find you resting at my rib, to share these things that God has done, to walk you through the garden, to counsel your timid steps, your bewildered eye, your heart so slow to love, so careful to love, so sheepish that I stepped up my aim and became a man. Is this what God intended? That though He made you from my rib, it is you who is making me, humbling me, destroying me, and in so doing revealing Him.


Will we be in ashes before we are one?


What great gravity is this that drew my heart towards yours? What great force collapsed in my orbit, my lonesome state? What is this that wants in me the want in you? Don't we go at each other with yielded eyes, with cumbered hands and feet, with clunky tongues? This deed is unattainable! We cannot know each other!


I am quiting this thing, but not what you think. I am not going away.


I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer. I will love you, as sure as He loved me. I will discover what I can discover and though you remain a mystery in the warmest chamber of my heart, the very chamber where God has stowed Himself in me. And I will do this to my death, and to death it may bring me.


I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin it is time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again.


God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.

Nobody Is Thinking About You, by Roger Rosenblatt

nobody is thinking about you.

yes, i know you are certain that your friends are becoming

your enemies; that your grocer, garbageman, clergyman,

sister-in-law, and your dog are all of the opinion that

you have put on weight, that you have lost your touch,

that you have lost your mind; furthermore, you are convinced

that everyone spends two-thirds of every day commenting

on your disintegration, denigrating your work, plotting your

assassination.

i promise you: nobody is thinking about you.

they are thinking about themselves--

just like you

we are all connected

thought of you

i thought of you and where you'd gone,

and let the world spin madly on.

here's to the future

here she comes: the future.

forget about the past.

we're gonna celebrate the future.

seeing as it's new year's day,

you probably expect me to get all sentimental, yeah?

well you're exactly right.

here's to the future.

the only limitations are the limits of our imagaintion.

dream up the kind of world you want to live in.

dream out loud at high volume.

that's what we do for a living.

U2

@1989 lovetown tour

& again,

all of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming - a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness

de saint-exupéry

the street of crocodiles

"On those luminous mornings Adela returned from the market, like Pomona emerging from the flames of day, spilling from her basket the colorful beauty of the sun--the shiny pink cherries full of juice under their transparent skins, the mysterious black morellos that smelled so much better than they tasted, apricots in whose golden pulp lay the core of long afternoons. And next to that pure poetry of fruit, she unloaded sides of meat with their keyboard of ribs swollen with energy and strength, and seaweeds of vegetables like dead octopuses and squids--the raw material of meals with a yet undefined taste, the vegetative and terrestrial ingredient of dinner, exuding a wild and rustic smell."

-Bruno Schulz

big sur

"...no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that's it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters only, in fact, in Milan, Paris, just talk to waiters, walk around, no more self imposed agony... it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time...

There are immeasurable star misty aeons of universe more numerous than the sands in all the galaxies, multiplied by a billion lightyears of multiplication...Macrocosms and microcosms and chillicosms and microbes and finally you got all these marvelous books a man aint even got time to read em all, what you gonna do in this already piled up multiple world when you have to think of the Book of Songs, Faulkner, Cesar Birotteau, Shakespeare, Satyricons, Dantes... We all agree it's too big to keep up with, that we're surrounded by life, that we'll never understand it..."

-Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

" i had forgotten the world could be so lovely,
i had become so accustomed to living within myself "

-herman hesse

ignorant before the heavens of my life

ignorant before the heavens of my life,
i stand and gaze in wonder. oh the vastness
of the stars. their rising and descent. how still.
as if I didn't exist. do I have any
share in this? have i somehow dispensed with
their pure effect? does my blood's ebb and flow
change their changes? let me put aside
every desire, every relationship
except this one, so that my heart grows used to
its farthest spaces. better that it live
fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than
as if protected, soothed by what is near.

-rainer maria rilke

"Optical" pluralism or "perspectivism" does not preclude the existence of an objective reality. It does, however, tie the validity of the different "views" of that reality to particular standpoints rather than to some absolute Truth. As such, it underscores the inherent futility of any attempt to compare different cognitive outlooks to one another in terms of their "correctness."

-Social Mindscapes (Zerubavel)

All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming--a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Wind, Sand and Stars)

no one belongs here more than you, miranda july

"If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his."

"That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it."

"We had loved people we really shouldn't have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond."

"What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real."

"They hold this person's hand and tell this person how hard it was to pretend to get mad and drive off and never come back. This person almost can't believe it, it seemed so real, this person's heart was broken and has healed and now this person hardly knows what to think."

cyranose de bergerac

a kiss, when all is said, - what is it?
an oath that's ratified, - a sealed promise,
a heart's avowal claiming confirmation, -
a rose-dot on the 'i' of 'adoration,' -
a secret that to mouth, not ear, is whispered, -
brush of a bee's wing, that makes time eternal, -
communion perfumed like the spring's wild flowers, -
the heart's relieving in the heart's outbreathing,
when to the lips the soul's flood rises, brimming!

emma goldman

"I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things."

[I read this quote while waiting outside of my professor's door today. I look up who Emma Goldman is, and turns out she is an anarchist O_o!]

have no envy, no fear

some are reaching.
few are there.
wandering from a hero's chair.
some are scared to fly so high.
well this is how we have to try.

have no envy, and no fear.
have no envy, no fear.

...everyday we try to find we search our hearts and our minds.
the place we used to call our home can'tbe found when we're alone.

have no envy, no fear.
have no envy, no fear.

-joshua radin

jane eyre

"after a youth and manhood passed half in unutterable misery and half in drear solitude, i have for the first time found what can truly love- i have found you. you are my sympathy - my better self- my good angel. i am bound to you with a strong attachment. i think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my eart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wraps my existence about you, and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one." -mr. rochester


"whether is it better, i ask, to be a slave in a fool's paradise at marseilles- fevered with delusive bliss one hour- suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next- or to be a village school-mistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of england?" - jane eyre

feverish, impassioned cries to jump-start passive hearts!