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Start the Weekend Right Link Series – Volume #3, Edition #1

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It has been a long time since I posted one of these Start the Weekend Right Link Series entries. But I have too many posts building up behind the scenes on this blog and in my Feedly reader so I need to start clearing them out and getting them out there for you to consume. Before you check out of work and begin whatever celebrations you’ll be involved with this Easter weekend, take a look at some of these links – I think you might enjoy this content.

Before we get to the links this week I again recommend signing up for a free Feedly account. I get absolutely no kickback for promoting Feedly, but I’m so appreciative of their product being the best RSS reader on the internet that I encourage everyone to use it. If you’re using another RSS aggregator, please consider following JerseySmarts.com at http://www.jerseysmarts.com/feed/. If you’re already on Feedly, then you can follow us by clicking here. Thanks!

No, You Are Not “Running Late,” You Are Rude And Selfish, Vitamin T
The message of this article is, as the title alludes to, that all of those times you or a coworker comes to a meeting late are not driven by outside factors, but rather by the fact that you’re a rude person. And on top of that rudeness, you’re a selfish punk who only cares about themselves. Personally, I agree with the message here, but living in New Jersey drops more than a few grains of salt on this article. When I was in college, I knew a kid who showed up to all of his classes late – and always with a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in his hand. He was a rude, selfish idiot. On the other hand, I’ve seen people arrive to work (and even meetings and appointments) over an hour late because of the completely ridiculous nature of the traffic and road construction in most of this state.

Death By Degrees, n+1
The best preview I can give for this article is this quote that is taken from it: “Like the market for skin care products, the market for credentials is inexhaustible: as the bachelor’s degree becomes democratized, the master’s degree becomes mandatory for advancement. Our elaborate, expensive system of higher education is first and foremost a system of stratification, and only secondly — and very dimly — a system for imparting knowledge.”

Manual Labor, All Night Long: The Reality of Paying for College, The Atlantic
Typically, the commentaries that The Atlantic publishes are too buried in far left talking points (and shoddy ones, no less) that I can’t find the usefulness of their content. This article is a little bit different, though I don’t take the same bleeding heart stance as some of the folks quoted in the article. In short, the article talks about how some students opt to work an overnight shift to get tuition reimbursement for their local college. I believe the writer’s stance is along the lines of how we could allow this type of near-torture for someone who wants to get a higher education. As someone with a deep history in student loans, I don’t often feel bad for others who have to go through difficulty to get a degree. My comment on this topic, though, is that we should be looking at the larger educational system and why we push nearly all high school students to pursue a college degree when many of them should be pushed towards vocational and technical schools instead.

An unusual victory for donor intent at Trinity College, The Pope Center
One of the topics that I love following is how a donor’s intent is followed – or completely ignored – by organizations that are the recipients of the donor’s financial contributions. Martin Morse Wooster details a recent victory for donors that took place at Trinity College. This is really fascinating stuff (or at least I think so). And if you’re an active donor to your church, college, or any other cause, then I encourage you to give this article a read.

Google rethinks Google+, spinning off several successful pieces, Christian Science Monitor
Goodbye, Google+! Several years ago I wrote about how I was shutting down several of my social media accounts (MySpace and LinkedIn) because it was just becoming too much to handle and all I really needed was Facebook. As the years went by and Google tried to shove Google+ down our throats, I had to open up one of their silly accounts and – like the majority of their users, apparently – I almost never used it. Now, hopefully, Google will retreat from social media and I can put that silly, useless Google+ profile to rest!

Homeless man of deep faith given funeral, burial in Vatican City, American Catholic
I just thought this was a touching story and a reminder that there are good people out there who will do good things for people of devotion. I’d like to believe that this homeless man’s soul was received into glory with the same reverence that his body was received by the Vatican.

A New Life for Dead Malls, The Atlantic
Alright, so The Atlantic gets two mentions this week because this story is just awesome. I’ve written on here in the past about how I can go nuts trying to use all of my “stuff” before buying new things. For me, it’s not a matter of frugality, but rather a matter of not generating the need to create additional products and/or waste to give me something that I already have possession of in one form or another. That’s the point of this article – that old, dead malls are actively being repurposed for a wide variety of uses – and it’s pretty cool!

7 Basic Life Hacks Men Shouldn’t Ignore, Return of Kings
Simply put – if you’re a guy and you’re reading this, then you should stop and click over to Return of Kings to read this article. It’s excellent, direct, and gives you good advice on what you should be doing to improve yourself. Some of the advice that the writer offers includes reading daily, working out, eating right, and not watching porn. Each of these “life hacks” have intensely positive outcomes for you as a man and when combined they can lead to a dramatically improved life. Take five minutes and give it a read.

Before you go, I want to recommend one more time that you consider opening a free Feedly account. You can follow JerseySmarts.com on Feedly or you can add us to your existing RSS aggregator. Enjoy!

Growing More Suspicious of the Online Classroom Setting

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The long-time readers of JerseySmarts.com know that I started teaching courses at an all-online university back in the spring. In fact, during the short time that I’ve been employed by this all-online university, I’ve instructed seven different courses. Some of you might say, “Seven courses? Good grief!” Well, that’s a proper reaction, however the courses are only two months in length and I’ve had a few courses overlap.

But the point of this entry is that I’m beginning to grow suspicious of this all-online university setting and I’ll tell you why…

A few months ago I popped into an online discussion board populated by professors from this all-online university. Among the many interesting and engaging discussions was the poor writing quality of the student population, in general. This was a problem that I noticed in my classes, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it because of the demographic composition of my students. They’re mostly older students that ended their education during or immediately after high school and then entered the working world. Then ten, twenty, thirty, and even forty and fifty years later they decide that they want to get a Bachelor’s Degree and enroll in the all-online university where I teach some classes. With that type of background, the class instructor (me) needs to be able to process and ultimately comprehend a different writing style.

I’m fine with that – believe me.

But reading through these discussions (and the one cited above, particularly) led me to start thinking about what type of student was actually enrolling in this school. However, as with most “deep thoughts” that I’ve had recently, I put it aside and worried about the work at hand that I needed to complete before whatever deadline hit. Most of you know how it is with deadlines.

But then I began teaching another section of my course and within two weeks of the class starting, half of the students were not responding to e-mails or participating in the online discussions. When you’re enrolled in an all-online university, you must participate in the online discussions – it’s how you’re graded for goodness sake! Like any educator would be, this lack of engagement made me pretty concerned. I tried contacting each of the students that chose not to participate in any of the assignments and I received three responses. Two of the students said that they planned on completing all of the work, but they were a little busy at the moment and to stay tuned because they would submit all of their work on-time. I didn’t hear from them again until, well, read on. The third student, however, was a real eye-opener for me. The third student told me that she was enrolled in 54 credits through December.

Repeat: FIFTY-FOUR CREDITS THROUGH DECEMBER!

Folks, that is absolutely obscene. For this all-online university to allow a student to register for 18 classes in a five month period is disgusting. For comparison’s sake, in a bricks-and-mortar college semester (which is about three and a half months) the typical student takes between 4 and 6 classes. And those students who opt to take 6 classes during the semester know that they are getting themselves ready for an extremely busy three and a half months! Yet, the all-online university where I teach some classes allowed a student to take three times the amount of classes that a traditional university would allow.

That’s ridiculous and the all-online university should be ashamed of itself.

I advised the student to drop my class since it was not feasible for her to submit the required information in an appropriate timeframe. She agreed and dropped the class and actually thanked me for giving her such good, sound advice. Look, I should probably be advising students to stay in my classes because then I get paid more, but I couldn’t do that to the student. It’s just not right.

That was about six weeks ago when the class was just getting started. Now let’s fast-forward to last week when the class ended. Guess who I heard from all of a sudden? That’s right – I heard from those two students who told me that they would have everything submitted on time. Since they didn’t complete all of the required work during the required timeframes (or even the grace periods), they scored a “0” on each item which led them both to fail the class miserably. However, two days before the class was scheduled to end (I’m not exaggerating, it was two days prior to the class ending) they contacted me, separately, and asked if they could submit all of the past due material.

My mind when I read those e-mails: “Really? Really? You didn’t have time to do the required work during the two months that the class was in session, but now you’re going to do two months worth of work in two days? Really? Do I really have a sign on my virtual forehead that says, ‘Moron!’? Really? You’d have been kicked out of the course already in a bricks-and-mortar university.”

However, one of the tenets of this all-online university is that we cater to our students’ professional lives and personal needs. So I had no choice but to tell these students that I would accept their late work and grade it, replacing their “0” grades with whatever they earned. But I have to tell you this – the work they submitted was rushed and really poorly done. They didn’t score well at all and, in truth, they should have been removed from the course as soon as they didn’t submit the required work on time (or a day or two late).

So this latest experience mixed with the generally mediocre-at-best writing skills of my students has me growing more suspicious of this all-online university stuff. I’m not sure where this is going to put me at this particular institute of higher education as I continue to build and expand my professional teaching resume, but at this point – I’m very concerned about my students and whether or not they are capable of the type of quality that the job market expects from a Bachelor’s Degree holder.

Another Student Loan Milestone…

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Well, I had a great entry to post to the blog today about my cable company and the craziness of big-time cable operators in a “user-friendly” and “customer-gentle” world, but I’ll save that for tomorrow. Instead, I received my student loan statements today and I’ve hit another milestone.

For those of you that don’t know, I started repaying my student loans about three years ago after I graduated from graduate school. In total, I racked up around $121,000 in student loan debt. That’s a pretty ridiculous number when you consider that the average student loan debt ranges between $15,000 and $35,000 (it depends on whether you get a bachelor’s degree or you go on for the masters and if you’re in-state vs. out-of-state). Anyway, my student loan debt is clearly head and shoulders above the averages.

But I’ve become pretty proficient with money and making money work for me in the last few years and, as a result, I’ve been able to overpay most of my monthly payments. So the big milestone that I hit is that my student loan debt is now “down” to $100,000! That’s some pretty impressive improvement when it was at $121,000 less than three years ago.

What’s frightening to think about is that if I didn’t have to pay rent since I graduated and if my old truck didn’t consistently breakdown before I donated it, I would have been able to overpay my student loans by another $30,000.. But hey, no reason to look back at that stuff when there is so much positive in the future.

Be on the lookout for another student loan milestone post coming soon when I break the six figure barrier and land in the five figure debt zone ($99,999 in debt). It’s coming quick!