Dr Flavius Akerele III's The E Team Education blog

Believe it or not, men are simple creatures when it comes to certain things. What a man simply wants is to feel pride in what he does and who he is with. You can withhold money, a promotion, and friendships, but the minute you start trying to mess with   a real man’s pride, that is when the primitive beast will come out. Never try to make a man beg for something he has earned or truly wants, not if you truly value that man. Dr Flavius Akerele III The ETeam

Professors cannot avoid internet reviews or avoid students streaming unflattering information about them across the web, so I think the best thing to do is just have fun with it and continue to do your job. “Mean Tweets, Academic Style” “In the spirit of Jimmy Kimmel’s “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets,” a Canadian university’s student newspaper posted a video this week that features professors reading aloud unflattering reviews from the website Rate My Professors.” “Professors rarely become celebrities. But they’re often accused of taking themselves too seriously. The Peak, the student-run weekly newspaper at Simon Fraser University, a 35,000-student public research university in British Columbia, sought to have the university’s faculty engage in some self-mockery.” “The newspaper’s staffers selected which Rate My Professors comments the professors would read, said Alison Roach, coordinating editor of The Peak. “We wanted them to be reading something that was...

It is often said that “it is very easy to misconstrue tone and meaning in email”, and that is true because you get so many more non-verbal cues from a face-to-face conversation (and even a traditional letter). That being said, for some people, this anonymous ambiguity and the built excuses you can use when you get caught, make email the perfect venue for their nefarious activities. Cyber-bullying is at an all time high, and that is shocking considering how new the general use of email actually is. The bullies and malcontents have caught on quick to this scheme. Email makes these dregs of society seem like Superman, when they are really the mild mannered Clark Kent. When confronted or caught, they fold and wilt like dried flowers instantly, and sometime beg for forgiveness like a little child. Do not waste your time and energy on these people, but at the same time they do need to be shut down because they can hurt those who are vulnerable to this kind of behavior. P...

This is a big player in the higher education market. “Corinthian's Phasing-Out” “Corinthian Colleges announced on Monday that it had reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education that is designed to keep the for-profit chain afloat long enough to sell off and shutter its campuses in an orderly fashion.” “The struggling Corinthian faces a dire cash shortage, due in part to a decision by the feds last week to put a 21-day hold on payments for federal financial aid and grants. While the hold remains in place, the department agreed to release $16 million in immediate payments. That was the minimal amount necessary to keep Corinthian from going bankrupt this week, according to a corporate filing .” “The department said it struck the deal to prevent the company’s “immediate closure” and the resulting disruption to students and employees, according to a written statement .” Read it all here: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/06/24/profit-...

Working in education is a privilege, especially if you take a global view on how different cultures treat education and educators. We are being trusted to help shape the next generation of learners, whether K12 or Higher Education, and that is a big responsibility. However, educators are human and succumb to the same human fallacies as everyone else; we are not superheroes (although we try to be for our students). As an educator, I have earned the right to criticize my profession on occasion, but know my criticism more often than not comes with a solution or is in search of a solution.   Sometimes in education we can be needless cruel to each other; there I said it. We can be judgmental, heavily critical, and downright mean to people we work with and serve. We develop “cliques” and “factions” within our workplaces where cruel rumors and stories can spread and thrive. We have all seen some version of this, and it is time we take a good look at ourselves if we wa...

Three stories in education news today made me ask a question: “Florida's Attorney General Ends Investigation of Kaplan” “The office of Florida's attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced on Tuesday that it had concluded a three-year investigation into the recruiting and enrollment practices of Kaplan Inc., a for-profit chain. The investigation, which focused on other for-profits as well, found no violations by Kaplan, according to a statement from the company. Kaplan also voluntarily reached an agreement with Bondi's office, under which it will disclose more details about academic programs. The company will also reimburse the attorney general's office for fees it racked up during the investigation.” Read it here: http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/06/18/floridas-attorney-general-ends-investigation-kaplan#sthash.NHEgP3Pl.dpbs “City Attorney of San Francisco Settles with EDMC” “San Francisco's city attorney, Dennis Herrera, on Tue...

 I thought this article I read today was worth sharing. It should make for an interesting discussion. Here some excerpts: “Presidents, Do Right by Athletes and Adjuncts” “Dear College President: A disturbing pattern in higher education has come to my attention, and that of my colleagues on the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Our committee has been examining recent efforts by both adjunct professors and college athletes to organize and bargain for better working conditions.” “Colleges and universities should stand as pillars of fairness and honor in their communities, with missions to expand knowledge and opportunity for all, but we have instead seen that many colleges are increasingly exploiting cheap labor in the classroom and on the athletic field. And when campus workers try to band together to improve their lives, administrators’ responses generally range from trying to scuttle the workers’ efforts to repeating old promises of change—...

 Latest and greatest: “Reprieve for CCSF” “City College of San Francisco may get two more years to work on keeping its accreditation, thanks to a shift by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges.” “The college is facing termination of accreditation by the commission in July, with a reprieve until October, when a legal challenge is scheduled for trial. The threat of that possible death blow has roiled City College, which enrolls 77,000 students.” Read the rest here: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/06/12/accreditors-possible-extension-city-college-san-francisco#sthash.Gsk25IvY.dpbs So a question I need to ask here is: are they truly “too big to fail”, or are they getting special treatment? Dr Flavius A B Akerele III The ETeam

There are some things that need to be acknowledged: Teacher bashing is alive and well, they get blamed for a myriad of problems not of their creation Teaching is a hard profession There are bad teachers who have been teaching for a long time The teaching profession can and should be improved Teachers should be at the forefront of change in their profession “Teacher Protections Violate Student Rights, Calif. Judge Finds” “California’s laws governing teacher tenure and dismissal unfairly saddle disadvantaged and minority students with weak teachers, infringing on those students’ right under the state constitution to an equitable education, a state superior court judge ruled June 10.” “The tentative ruling in the high-profile case strikes down the laws in question. It will be finalized within 30 days, and spells what appears to be a complete victory for the plaintiffs, nine California students and their families.” “The landmark decisi...

I have been noticing many internet articles recently about “reverse racism” and such; funny term since there is no such thing. Racism is racism. What the folks who are writing and spreading these articles are trying to say is that black people (and that is who is being targeted specifically in these articles) have racists as well. Of course they do! Every culture does, what kind of deep insight is that? That is called being human. We in America like to think that we are post racial when we are not even close. We forget that slavery is still within living memory of many families. The last known living slave died in 1971 and that is within my lifetime, not to mention that the last known children of slaves died as recently as 2011, so that means there are many people around right now whose grandparents where slaves. This is what I am mean by living memory. The struggle of African Americans has two main parts to it, with poverty being the number one factor and lingering racis...

Before I share an article I read this morning, I want to remind everyone of an issue occurring daily on college campuses: and that is rape. Do you realize there are some campuses nicknamed “rape factories”, and that the advice given is all to women about “how not to get raped”? Let us try a radical approach and teach our young men to not rape. There should be no confusion, if she says no, changes her mind, and there is more than one of you holding her down, that is rape. “Only Yes Means Yes” “A bill that's passed the California Senate with the backing of a powerful lawmaker would require many of California's 2.3 million college students to make sure they have a "yes" -- not just not a "no" -- before they have sex.” “The proposal would shift the burden of proof in campus sexual assault cases in which the accused cites consent as the defense to those accused, rather than those making the allegations.” Read it here: http://www.ins...

“Saving Face (sociological concept) an idiom for one's honor or prestige” Sometimes we so want to “save face” in education that we do or say dumb things. Case in point: “Letters Praising Corinthian Came From Corinthian” “At least nine letters sent to the Education Department and Congress, allegedly from business owners who had hired Corinthian Colleges graduates and praising the for-profit chain, were actually written by Corinthian employees, The Orange County Register reported. The letters were part of a lobbying campaign against new rules proposed by the Obama administration. A Corinthian spokesman said that there had been no intent to deceive and that the employees made a mistake. He said that the record would be corrected.” Read here: http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/06/04/letters-praising-corinthian-came-corinthian#sthash.k2rrzoD1.dpbs When you get caught, you lose even more face, so just do not do it! Dr Flavius A B ...