Month: February From: Cassie Torres Book Title: Dear Evan Hansen Author(s): Val Emmich, Steven Levenson, Benj Pasek, & Justin Paul
"Have you ever told a lie? Not just a little white lie, a huge lie that consumes you to the point where it becomes your truth. No matter how much you want to break free from it there is no escaping without hurting so many others.
Dear Evan Hansen is about a lie. A lie that escalates to the point where Evan has no idea how to stop it. All of a sudden, Evan is not just another nobody; he was Connor Murphy’s best friend. Connor Murphy, who took his own life and did not have friend in the world, or so everyone thought.
The answers are in Evan’s hands. What made Connor take his life? Was it drugs? Why did no one know about this secret friendship between Evan and Connor? It becomes easy for Evan to fabricate this fake friendship and in a way you kind of root for him. He is not going along with this because he wants attention (well maybe a little), but because he wants to give Connor’s family some sort of solace during a difficult time.
I enjoyed this book because even though what Evan is doing is wrong, so much good comes from his lie. Not without destroying him first though. Sometimes we need to break down to rebuild and that is just what Evan does. "
You have a rich background of cultures and languages. Could you share some of those places and experiences?
I was born and raised as a missionary kid in Macau, China. At that time, it was still a Portuguese colony. It is right by Hong Kong, so there were some British influences as well. In general, Macau is a unique blend of East meets West. At the time, I did not realise that most places in the world probably don't have the juxtaposition of a 2,000-year-old Buddhist temple and a 400-year-old Catholic church being down the street from each other or walking on cobblestone roads seeing a pastel coloured government building next to the historical family home of Dr. Sun Yat Sen. Culture and language are always intertwined and being a missionary kid in Macau gave me exposure to Portuguese, Chinese, British, Filipino, Korean, Brazilian, and North American (US and Canada) cultures and languages. You learn to be quite comfortable hearing multiple languages, at once, whether you can understand them or not. It gave a lot of opportunity to find similarities and differences between the cultures and blend them together into my own personal culture. For me, it was mainly a blend of Chinese and American cultures, as these were the strongest two in my life growing up. I could probably talk more about all of this, but let us move on for now.
Ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral in Macau. (2009). Wikimedia Commons. https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20091003_Macau_Cathedral_of_Saint_Paul_6542.jpg
Almost all academics have personal research projects they sometimes work a lifetime on just as a matter of curiosity or passion. Do have one or more?
When I came to the US for university, I made sure to take my English 101 and 201 courses right away. In these courses, I was given the opportunity to research my own topics much of the time. I knew I wanted to be a math teacher. I had experience going to international schools with kids from many different countries and had some idea that math was taught and organised differently around the world. Pretty quickly I started to consistently research international math education. Thankfully, at that time the second Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) had just been conducted, and new data and analyses were being published. The results showed that many of the top-ranking countries for mathematics were in South East Asia. This of course piqued my interest, having grown up in SE Asia! Ever since then I have looked at studies and books that have tried to figure out why this is.
What do your read, listen to, watch, or do to keep up with your profession?
While there are a bunch of things teachers do to stay current (read books and articles on pedagogy or learning, follow #MathEd on Twitter, be part of National organisations like NCTM, go to conferences, etc.), I think what continually ends up being the most impactful in my teaching are times where I get to meet with my colleagues and discuss conferences or study a book together. It is here where we get to analyse the research and figure out how to put into action in meaningful and feasible ways for our teaching and students. Moreover, we continue to then analyse our implementation and work through the cycle of research – implement – analyse – adapt – re-implement to continually improve and grow.
As a student, when did you know you were more math than English?
This is hard to determine. I never thought of myself as being more math than English until high school. It was then when studying and learning the two became more distinct. I think it might be better said I started seeing a distinction between math and language arts. What I mean is that we could switch to compare any other language besides English and Math and I think there would be similar distinctions. English as a language in and of itself was not contrasted with math any more than Mandarin, Cantonese, or Portuguese.
To get to my point, it was in high school that I more clearly noticed how we studied math and language arts. In math, we used the same foundational truths (axioms) and logical deductions for everything we did. This meant we could follow each others’ reasonings and follow the math. Using deductive reasoning it also gave use a logical guarantee and confidence to know what are studying is true and accurate (given the presuppositions).
However, in language arts it seemed that outside of grammar it was never clear what our foundational truths were nor how to navigate. Most of what we studied did not have an author’s guide to explain their thinking let alone purpose. And yet, language arts expected us to figure this out. Moreover, the strategy to do this mainly consisted of inductive reasoning, a fair amount of assumptions made, and very little explicit teaching of the hermeneutics used. For me as a student at the time, it came across as we cannot know without a doubt what the author was originally intending but there is an expectation that I must come to the same conclusion as the teacher. Again, this was my perception at the time. How was the teacher supposed to be able to know and how could I trust that? How was I supposed to be able to this independently without the expertise of the teacher? I am a very literal person, so things like poetry or metaphor were much more difficult to understand, let alone justify.
To put it simply, math was studied in a way that is universal regardless of my lack of cultural understandings and with quality logic while language arts was studied in a way that seemed sloppy and extremely biased, at the very least, with no guarantees. So for me, I naturally gravitated and toward that which was accessible to me no matter who I was or where in the world I was learning it.
What book, poem, or study have you read that engaged you so deeply you were changed?
The Bible is the clear and easy answer to this question. I say this not only from a personal perspective because of the truths that change lives, but also from a more academic perspective. From the last question, you might notice that studying language arts is not something that I have really enjoyed and have struggled with in my academic life. As I have gotten older and learned more about determining and using quality hermeneutics, applying these to study the Bible has not only helped me better learn to read and understand it but also better connect to and use the skills of being a mathematician. Both theology and mathematics are axiomatic systems and can be studied systematically.
Shakespeare’s representation of weather, climate and environment : The early modern “Fated Sky”.
"While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph explores the importance of weather and changing skies in early modern England while acknowledging the fact that traditional representations and religious beliefs still fashioned people's relations to meteorological phenomena" (Chiari, 2019).
Necroclimatism in a spectral world (dis)order? Rain petitioning, climate and weather engineering in 21st century Africa.
"Deemed to constitute disposable bodies, disposable cultures, disposable polities, disposable societies, disposable epistemologies, disposable religions, disposable laws and disposable economies, the sacrificed are, in the age of climate catastrophism, once again reminded that they 'have duties to die', to become extinct in order to save the global spaceship that is sinking due to climate change and global warming." -- Project Muse
Variability of the sun and sun-like stars : from asteroseismology to space weather.
"However, we are still far from fully understanding what and how causes this variability. Why does the Sun continue to go on, on a rhythmic scale, the so-called solar cycle, without damping? How to better understand the complicated relationships between the Sun, the heliosphere and the many proxies of long-term solar activity?" - From Publisher
A hard rain: America in the 1960s, our decade of hope, possibility, and innocence lost.
"In the end, there is the disastrous Democratic National Convention of 1968, the driving from office of Lyndon Johnson, and the election of Richard Nixon. Gaillard quotes historian Todd Gitlin in commenting on the rise of violence and disenchantment as the decade dragged on: 'Rage was becoming the common coin of American culture (Esposito, 2018).
Rain shadow.
"Your heart traps mine as summits catch storms. Call this to calm the rain shadow. What will remain?" From poem The Same Mountain Twice.
A storm of witchcraft : The Salem trials and the American experience.
"Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America. Villagers--mainly young women--suffered from unseen torments that caused them to writhe, shriek, and contort their bodies, complaining of pins stuck into their flesh and of being haunted by specters." Publisher
References
Baker, E. (2015). A storm of witchcraft : The Salem trials and the American experience. Oxford University Press.
"Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection is an essential full-text database for psychologists, counselors, researchers and students. It provides hundreds of full-text psychology journals, including many indexed in PsycINFO. It offers particularly strong coverage in child and adolescent psychology and counseling.
-Nearly 480 full-text journals
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Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection provides access to hundreds of full-text journals and offers particularly strong coverage in child and adolescent psychology and various areas of counseling." - From EBSCO
Covering more than 500 years of the African-American experience, African-American History offers a fresh way to explore the full spectrum of African-American history and culture. Includes articles, sharable slideshows, videos, primary sources, and more—that provides a study guide for a particular subject or era. -- From Infobase
Subjects covered include:
Abolitionist Movement
Underground Railroad
Emancipation Proclamation
Great Black Migrations
Harlem Renaissance
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Eras covered include:
Africa, Colonization, and the Slave Trade: Beginnings–1819
Compromise and Conflict over Slavery: 1820–1860
The Civil War and Reconstruction: 1861–1876
Segregation, Migration and the Beginnings of Protest: 1877–1928
The Great Depression and the New Deal: 1929–1940
World War II and the Start of Desegregation: 1941–1954
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Exclusive features, including Topic Finder,and a mobile-optimized interface, support and enhance the search experience." - From Publisher
"A must-have for social science, history and liberal arts coursework, the Gale OneFile: Diversity Studies explores cultural differences, contributions and influences in the global community. This collection includes more than 2.7 million articles from 150 journals, updated daily. Exclusive features, including Topic Finder,and a mobile-optimized interface, support and enhance the search experience." - From Publisher
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May 11:eHRAF (Human Resources Files) World Cultures
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"Offers fast access to more than 15,000 years of culture and history, covering more than 600 Native American groups, through tablet/mobile-friendly videos and slideshows, images, biographies of key people, event and topic entries, primary sources, maps and graphs, and timelines. With a user-friendly interface, this award-winning database allows for an interactive, multifaceted look at the indigenous peoples of the Americas. An important feature is full cross-searchability across all the Infobase history databases for an even more comprehensive view of history." From Publisher
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May 13: Articles First - Not Full Text - Use to Request Full-Text Articles
Use this to request articles you cannot find in full text. "The ArticleFirst® database describes items listed on the table of contents pages of individual issues of over 12,000 journals, describing one article, news story, letter, or other item from a journal." From Publisher.
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"Online Encyclopedia. Explore the fact-checked online encyclopedia from Encyclopaedia Britannica with hundreds of thousands of objective articles, biographies, videos, and images." From Publisher
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"Poetry & Short Story Reference Center is a rich full-text database of hundreds of thousands of classic and contemporary poems, plus thousands of short stories, biographies, essays, lesson plans and learning guides. It also includes high-quality videos and audio recordings from the Academy of American Poets and other sources."- From Publisher
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"Biomedical Research Database is designed for doctors, research scientists, students and clinical specialists, Biomedical Reference Collection: Basic Edition provides full-text, indexing and abstracts for top biomedical journals. It covers a range of subjects, including medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine and pre-clinical sciences.:-from Publisher
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"Published annually by the federal government since 1878, the Statistical Abstract of the United States is the best known statistical reference publication in the country, and perhaps the world. You’ll find it behind nearly every reference desk in U.S. libraries as the authoritative go-to source. Librarians value the Statistical Abstract as both an answer book and a guide to statistical sources. As a comprehensive collection of statistics on the social, political, and economic conditions of the United States, it is a snapshot of America and its people."-From Publisher
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"Gale OnFile: Gardening and Horticulture serves horticultural enthusiasts of all levels with more than 3.6 million articles from more than 100 journals, as well as more than 20 reference titles from Delmar, including Handbook of Flowers; Foliage and Creative Design; Computer Graphics for Landscape Architects; and more. Exclusive features, including Topic Finder, InterLink, and a mobile-optimized interface, support and enhance the search experience." - From Publisher
"Containing bibliographic records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Library, AGRICOLA provides millions of citations relating to the field of agriculture. Citations are comprised of journal articles, book chapters, theses, patents, software, audiovisual materials and technical reports to support agricultural research." From Publisher. To find full text that's available in this extensive records, select Linked Full Text on the left.
"With bibliographic records covering family dynamics topics, Family Studies Abstracts is an excellent source for family studies researchers. Scholars can access unique content and highly regarded works. Subjects include: Divorce , Family therapy. Marriage, and Family dynamics." - From Publisher. To find full text, use LINKED FULL TEXT to the left of search results.
We only have a trial on this until June 30.! "EBSCO Faculty Select empowers academic libraries to directly support textbook affordability efforts. Through a single interface, faculty can search and access quality open textbooks, Open Educational Resources (OER), and request access to unrestricted library e-books from top academic publishers. By leveraging free open materials and low-cost library-licensed resources, faculty can transform their courses and reduce the cost burden for students. " By Publisher
"The New York Times (sometimes abbreviated as the NYT and NYTimes) is an American newspaper based in New York City with worldwide influence and readership.[6][7][8] Founded in 1851, the paper has won 130 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper.[9][10] The Times is ranked 18th in the world by circulation and 3rd in the U.S.[11] Nicknamed "The Gray Lady",[12] the Times has long been regarded within the industry as a national "newspaper of record".[13] The paper's motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print", appears in the upper left-hand corner of the front page." From Wikipedia
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