From the bright lights of the city, to the thousands of stars I loved to look at nightly from my porch, I grew up moving between city living and farm living with only a few miles spanning in between. I learned a lot living in a farm town directly outside of New Haven, Connecticut. Even though I did not live on a farm [...]
I just graduated from college, and I can guarantee that at least half my classmates were sometimes more concerned with how the football team did than with whether they could explain the thematic convolutions in Great Expectations or find the rate of flow through a wire suspended on the surface of a four-dimensional plane. (I knew that calculus class would pay off someday.) It’s expected [...]
Music may have even more benefits than many of us thought. From playing an instrument to being exposed to music during surgery, recent studies suggest that music can have positive effects on both mental and physical health. A 2011 study conducted by clinical neuropsychologist Brenda Hanna–Pladdy and cognitive psychologist Alicia McKay, PhD, measured the cognitive benefits of playing a musical instrument as a child. [...]
When I was little, I wanted to be a drifter when I grew up. Then a farmer. Then a geneticist. Let me know if you sense a trend here, because I certainly don’t—after all, now I’m interning with an educational publishing company on the opposite end of the country from where I was born (I guess I got the drifting part down, at [...]
On stage, Dr. Rupal Patel is a commanding presence. She speaks clearly and passionately about her work. Patel is an associate professor in the Department of Speech Language Pathology and Audiology at Northeastern University and the creator of the VocaliD project. She leads a team of researchers that is developing a system to create personalized synthetic voices for people with speech impairments, called target talkers by the folks at [...]
Though it has existed in the public domain for years, Thoreau’s Walden; Life in the Woods is going digital in a new way. Though the book has been easily accessible in the domain since the “Internet Age,” and text-based web pages can rewrite and place the entire book online (such as here), technology has helped enhance reading the work of Thoreau. Digital Thoreau aims to improve Thoreau discourse [...]
Lincoln Logs, Legos, Tinkertoys, K’Nex, GoldieBlox. While we may associate these names with simple creative outlets for children, more adults are seeing the opportunity to teach kids about engineering beginning at an early age. With the recent increased focus on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), new programs are emerging to keep students engaged in these subjects throughout their academic careers, beginning as early as elementary school. [...]
I distinctly remember taking the ACT my junior year of high school. I had signed up late, so my dad and I had to drive to a school nearly an hour away because it was the only available testing site left. I was exhausted from all the ordinary stresses of junior year, and I was sick with a head cold that made everything [...]
I have heard time and time again that majoring in English is the biggest waste of time and money that a college student can spend. I will never forget the looks on my family members’ faces when they first heard I switched majors to English. Their mouths gaped pricelessly: “But what are you going to do?” My family consists of many STEM (science, [...]
When I was in high school, I had a forensics teacher who spent a majority of his time nagging the administration to implement a new system for learning. It involved giving each student a laptop. “Too costly,” they would say, “This plan isn’t good enough, detailed enough, etc.” I know this because he used to vent to our class about the situation, and [...]