Big Bend Community College William C. Bonaudi Library

Showing 6 of 6 Results

10/27/2020
profile-icon Rhonda Kitchens

Database of the Month: Business Source Elite

Why use Business Source Elite?  This database provides full-text coverage of top business, management and economics journals and periodicals. These valuable publications cover topics such as accounting, banking, finance, international business, marketing, sales and more." -- Publisher

 

 

 

Add in other databases to your Business Source Elite search...

This post has no comments.
10/26/2020
profile-icon Rhonda Kitchens
No Subjects

Book Talk:  Jennifer McCarthy
Book Title: The Testaments
Book Author:  Margaret Atwood

 

 

 

Image of cover of Margaret Atwood's Book Testaments

The Testaments (2020) is a dystopian novel of resistance.
This extremely creative and well-crafted sequel to The
Handmaid’s Tale (1985) opens with the unveiling of a statue
carved of stone to honor the still-living persona of the leader
of the Aunts who live at Ardua Hall. The Aunts are the women
who are tasked with controlling and educating the female
members of Gilead, the puritan theocracy that emerged
in the ashes of the former United States of America.
They are the Aunts who train the females in Gilead in
their respective roles in society as Wife, Martha (servant),
Econowife (left to the reader to interpret), or Handmaid
(a fertile female able to conceive and bear children for the
top echelon of men, the Commanders). The Aunts live all
together in Ardua Hall, where they alone among Gileadean
women are allowed to learn to read and write.

There is nothing straight-forward about this novel,
the characters or the plot; three separate narrative
lines serve to make reading it both a challenge and
 pleasure. The novel is told through three different
Testaments of the female experience within and
without Gilead. The first of these is that of the Aunt
who writes in secret and keeps her manuscript safely
hidden. The second and third are in the form of written
transcripts of oral testimony from two women of Gilead
who bore witness to the events.
 The stories revealed in
these three trains of narration are at times humorous,
tragic, harrowing, and incredible.

For this reader, they all highlight the power of literate
women to fight back against an oppressive regime,
to insist upon autonomy for her own body and
procreative potential, and to change the world. In
The Testaments, Margaret Atwood has published
THE novel for 2020.

 

This post has no comments.
10/26/2020
profile-icon Rhonda Kitchens

Image of Salah Abed for Down the Research Rabbit Hole

 

Tell us about your biggest, deepest dive into research.  This could be personal or academic.

Most of the academic papers I've read either deal with statistics or game theory. For the former, I feel strongly that using real-life data is more meaningful and more interesting. It's often difficult to find the exact parameters and information that I'm looking for—and to "digest" the data to suit the points that I'm trying to make in class—but it's worth it when I see students show genuine emotions in reaction to the real-life information that they're learning!

The latter is a fascinating field of math that could potentially help explain why human beings make the decisions that they make.

 

When I was a kid, my dad would tell me stories of Middle Eastern historical figures. One was Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād, the Umayyad general who initiated the Conquest of Hispania. Legend has it that when Tariq's forces invaded the Iberian peninsula, the first thing he did was burn all his own boats! That just seems like a silly thing to do, but it left his soldiers with no choice but to fight. That's where game theory gets fascinating when what's best for us can take all sorts of different forms!

What sources do you rely on to keep you up on your field?

When I teach statistics, I look at news articles on Gallup and the Pew Research Center almost every day to gather interesting data. I try to keep up with mathematics news as I encounter it, but I tend to have more interest in teaching and the neuroscience behind learning. I like to read textbooks to find alternative ways to explain concepts and different lenses to look at the same concept. I often tell my students to think of math as the old fable of the blind men and the elephant. The real goal isn't to memorize the part in front of us but to the best, clearest idea of what an elephant is!

What is the most amazing book you've ever read?  Runner ups are also OK.

Sarah Bauer recommended me this book called Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C Brown, Mark A. McDaniel, and Henry L. Roediger III. I'm not even all the way through it yet but it's changed everything I thought I knew about how the brain learns! As a student, I did a lot of what my own students do: a Sisyphean cycle of cramming and reciting. I want better for my students, and this book has given me a lot of ideas to make that happen.

My favorite fiction book is The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. It's funny, it's weird, it's irreverent, and best of all, one of the supporting characters is a six-foot-tall black cat named Behemoth!

You always bring new things and thoughts to the table.  Where do you pull these from?  Organizational membership? Journals? Social platform groups?

I appreciate that! In practice, I mostly just listen to the people who have the fewest opportunities to get listened to. Then I investigate their ideas and theories on my own and go from there. For example, I read this piece a while back by a researcher named Jessica Calarco. She mentioned her book, Negotiating Opportunities, where she chronicles her field study of middle school students and the various advantages that she observed certain students receiving because they were trained to game the system. I haven't finished that book yet either, but I strongly recommend it! When I was a student, it seemed like there was a whole body of knowledge that successful students had that had nothing to do with the classroom material. I'd like to change that.

If you could spend the rest of your life free and supported to research one topic, what would it be?

I would never have the ability to stick to just one topic! Being a mathematician has given me several habits of mind that I use every day. Perhaps the most useful has been not to take things at face value; we only know something is true for certain if we can prove that it's true. I could spend the rest of my life taking things that we (think we) know are true and figuring out why!

 

This post has no comments.
10/14/2020
profile-icon Rhonda Kitchens

Many of the Library's subscription databases now have a security screen that comes up to prevent users from going any further.  Once the user overrides the warning, that link is added as OK.  

However, for many users, the warning is frightening. We have a warning on our Databases A-Z page, but many users do not see it.

We thought this was a user side browser error, but have found we need to invest in a new level of authenticating service.

Meantime, please communicate to students it is safe to override, bypass, to go to these sites.

 

 

Google Chrome Warning

Select Advanced and proceed to the site. 

 

Warning from the databases

 

 

Firefox Warning

Accept Risk and Continue.

Firefox warning

 

 

Another Example

Go the SHOW DETAILS and select the link to the database. 

 

Image of security warning

This post has no comments.
10/08/2020
profile-icon Rhonda Kitchens

Reader:  Sasha Haechler

Book:      Regretting You

Author:   Colleen Hoover

 

Book Cover of Regretting You Regretting You is written in the perceptive of Morgan and Clara,
who are mother and daughter. The book takes you on a
journey of their relationship when dealing with a family
tragedy. As a reader, I enjoyed how each chapter was
written from a different point of view of the main characters.
This book deals with sadness, betrayal, love, and finding a
common ground. I read a lot of Colleen Hoover’s books and love the stories she creates.

 

This post has no comments.
10/08/2020
profile-icon Rhonda Kitchens

Opposing Viewpoints in Context is one of the most assigned, most suggested, and most used databases.

Why?

And did you know there are six other databases in the series?  If you know how to use Opposing Viewpoints, you also will have no problem with:

Global Issues in Context

Biography in Context

Science in Context

Student Resources in Context

U.S. History in Context

World History in Context

 

This is a ten-minute overview of how to find the library, where to find
Opposing viewpoints, how to use it, and more.

This database is hand curated for your success. 

 

This post has no comments.
Field is required.