Desired Things

Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence. 

As far as possible, be on good terms with all persons. 

Speak your truth quietly and clearly and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story. 

Avoid loud and aggressive persons for they are vexations to the spirit. 

Do not compare yourself with others for you will become vain or bitter, for always there will be lesser and greater persons than yourself. 

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans, keep interested in your own career however humble, it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. 

Exercise caution in your business affairs for the world is full of trickery, but do not let this blind you to what virtue there is. 

Many people strive for high ideals and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. 

Neither be cynical about love for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is perennial as the grass. 

Take kindly the council of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. 

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune but do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness, be gentle with yourself. 

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here and no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore, be at peace with god, whatever you conceive him to be and whatever your aspirations in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace with your soul. 

For all its sham drugery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. 

Be careful, strive to be happy.

Desiderata (Latin: "desired things") is a 1927 prose poem by American writer Max Ehrmann (1872–1945). Largely unknown in the author's lifetime, the text became widely known after its use in a devotional, after subsequently being found at Adlai Stevenson's deathbed in 1965, and after spoken-word recordings in 1971 and 1972.


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Enrollment Growth Projected to (Continue to) Slow Through 2021

Enrollment Growth Projected to (Continue to) Slow Through 2021

January 10, 2013 - 3:00am

Postsecondary enrollments will grow by 15 percent between 2010 and 2021, far less than the 46 percent increase that occurred between 1996 and 2010, the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics said in an annual report released Wednesday. The report, "Projections of Education Statistics Through 2021," provides a slew of data that anticipate how key K-12 and higher education indicators (enrollments, degrees conferred, etc.) will change over the next decade. By comparison, last year's report projected a 13 percent increase in college enrollments between 2009 and 2020; whether the uptick is a sign that the "completion agenda" is having an effect will be a subject for debate.

This year's report also projects a 21 percent increase in the number of associate degrees awarded by 2021-22, a 21 percent increase in the number of bachelor's degrees, a 34 percent rise in the number of master's degrees, and a 24 percent upturn in the number of doctoral degrees. In all cases those numbers are roughly half the number awarded in the 1996-97 to 2009-2010 period.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/01/10/enrollment-growth-projected-continue-slow-through-2021#ixzz2HgTg93K9
Inside Higher Ed 

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Life While-You-Wait

Life While-You-Wait.

Performance without rehearsal.

Body without alterations.

Head without premeditation.

I know nothing of the role I play.

I only know it's mine. I can't exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot

just what this play's all about.

Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,

I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.

I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.

I trip at every step over my own ignorance.

I can't conceal my hayseed manners.

My instincts are for happy histrionics.

Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.

Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can't take back,

stars you'll never get counted,

your character like a raincoat you button on the run ?

the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,

or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!

But here comes Friday with a script I haven't seen.

Is it fair, I ask

(my voice a little hoarse,

since I couldn't even clear my throat offstage).

You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz

taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.

I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is.

The props are surprisingly precise.

The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.

The farthest galaxies have been turned on.

Oh no, there's no question, this must be the premiere.

And whatever I do

will become forever what I've done.

Nobel Prize-winning poet, Wislawa Szymborska.


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Ten and Five

P.M. Forni was in town a few weeks ago at the Champaign Public Library. Several of us from Parkland were in attendance, along with approximately 50 community members.

Dr. Forni, if you have not heard, is an award-winning professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he has taught for the past twenty years. He graduated from the University of Pavia in 1974 and received his Ph.D. in Italian at UCLA in 1981. 

He has written and edited several books on the work of Giovanni Boccaccio, which he readily admits that nobody has ever read. 

On the other hand, his book Choosing Civility: The Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct (2002) has been translated into German and Italian. In 2008 he published The Civility Solution: What to Do when People Are Rude. Both are bestsellers.


Dr. Forni offers advice on defusing rude situations. To decide what those situations include, he surveyed people on what most bothered them. Here are what he calls "The Terrible Ten":

1.  Discriminating in an employment situation
2.  Driving in an erratic or aggressive way that endangers others
3.  Taking credit for someone else's work
4.  Treating service providers as inferiors
5.  Making jokes or remarks that mock another's race, gender, age, disability, sexual preference or religion
6.  Behaving aggressively toward other children or bullying them
7.  Littering (including trash, spit and pet waste)
8.  Misusing handicapped privileges
9.  Smoking in nonsmoking places or smoking in front of nonsmokers without first asking
10.  Using cell phones or text messaging during conversations or during an appointment or meeting

Which of these most bother you? What's missing entirely from this list? What would be on your personal Terrible Ten?

-----------------------------------

Five lessons about the way we treat people:


1 - First Important Lesson - Cleaning Lady. 

During my second month of college, our professor gave us a pop quiz. I was a conscientious student and had breezed through the questions until I read the last one:

"What is the first name of the woman who cleans the school?"

Surely this was some kind of joke. I had seen the cleaning woman several times. She was tall,dark-haired and in her 50's, but how would I know her name?

I handed in my paper, leaving the last question blank. Just before class ended, one student asked if the last question would count toward our quiz grade.

"Absolutely, " said the professor.. "In your careers, you will meet many people. All are significant. They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say "hello.."

I've never forgotten that lesson.. I also learned her name was Dorothy. 

2. - Second Important Lesson - Pickup in the Rain 

One night, at 11:30 p.m., an older  African American woman was standing on the side of an Alabama highway trying to endure a lashing rain storm. Her car had broken down and she desperately needed a ride.

Soaking wet, she decided to flag down the next car. A young white man stopped to help her, generally unheard of in those conflict-filled 1960's. The man took her to safety, helped her get assistance and put her into a taxicab.

She seemed to be in a big hurry, but wrote down his address and thanked him. Seven days went by and a knock came on the man's door. To his surprise, a giant console color TV was delivered to his home. A special note was attached.

It read:

Thank you so much for assisting me on the highway the other night. The rain drenched not only my clothes, but also my spirits. Then you came along. Because of you, I was able to make it to my dying husband's' bedside just before he passed away.

God Bless you for helping me and unselfishly serving others.

Sincerely,
Mrs. Nat King Cole 


3 - Third Important Lesson - Always Remember those who Serve. 

In the days when an ice cream sundae cost much less, a 10-year-old boy entered a hotel coffee shop and sat at a table. A waitress put a glass of water in front of him.

"How much is an ice cream sundae?" he asked.

"Fifty cents," replied the waitress.

The little boy pulled his hand out of his pocket and studied the coins in it.

"Well, how much is a plain dish of ice cream?" he inquired.

By now more people were waiting for a table and the waitress was growing impatient..

"Thirty-five cents," she brusquely replied.

The little boy again counted his coins.

"I'll have the plain ice cream," he said.

The waitress brought the ice cream, put the bill on the table and walked away The boy finished the ice cream, paid the cashier and left. When the waitress came back, she began to cry as she wiped down the table. There, placed neatly beside the empty dish, were two nickels and five pennies..

You see, he couldn't have the sundae, because he had to have enough left to leave her a tip. 


4 - Fourth Important Lesson. - The Obstacle in our Path. 

In ancient times, a King had a boulder placed on a roadway. Then he hid himself and watched to see if anyone would remove the huge rock. Some of the King's' wealthiest merchants and courtiers came by and simply walked around it. Many loudly blamed the King for not keeping the roads clear, but none did anything about getting the stone out of the way.

Then a peasant came along carrying a load of vegetables. Upon approaching the boulder, the peasant laid down his burden and tried to move the stone to the side of the road. After much pushing and straining, he finally succeeded. After the peasant picked up his load of vegetables, he noticed a purse lying in the road where the boulder had been. The purse contained many gold coins and a note from the King indicating that the gold was for the person who removed the boulder from the roadway. The peasant learned what many of us never understand!

Every obstacle presents an opportunity to improve our condition. 

5 - Fifth Important Lesson - Giving When it Counts... 

Many years ago, when I worked as a volunteer at a hospital, I got to know a little girl named Liz who was suffering from a rare and serious disease. Her only chance of recovery appeared to be a blood transfusion from her 5-year old brother, who had miraculously survived the same disease and had developed the antibodies needed to combat the illness. The doctor explained the situation to her little brother, and asked the little boy if he would be willing to give his blood to his sister.

I saw him hesitate for only a moment before taking a deep breath and saying, "Yes I'll do it if it will save her." As the transfusion progressed, he lay in bed next to his sister and smiled, as we all did, seeing the color returning to her cheek. Then his face grew pale and his smile faded.

He looked up at the doctor and asked with a trembling voice, "Will I start to die right away".

Being young, the little boy had misunderstood the doctor; he thought he was going to have to give his sister all of his blood in order to save her.

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You are not your mind

1. You are not your mind.

The first time I heard somebody say that,  I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. What else could I be? I had taken for granted that the mental chatter in my head was the central “me” that all the experiences in my life were happening to.

I see quite clearly now that life is nothing but passing experiences, and my thoughts are just one more category of things I experience. Thoughts are no more fundamental than smells, sights and sounds. Like any experience, they arise in my awareness, they have a certain texture, and then they give way to something else.

If you can observe your thoughts just like you can observe other objects, who’s doing the observing? Don’t answer too quickly. This question, and its unspeakable answer, are at the centre of all the great religions and spiritual traditions.

2. Life unfolds only in moments.

Of course! I once called this the most important thing I ever learned. Nobody has ever experienced anything that wasn’t part of a single moment unfolding. That means life’s only challenge is dealing with the single moment you are having right now. Before I recognized this, I was constantly trying to solve my entire life — battling problems that weren’t actually happening. Anyone can summon the resolve to deal with a single, present moment, as long as they are truly aware that it’s their only point of contact with life, and therefore there is nothing else one can do that can possibly be useful. Nobody can deal with the past or future, because, both only exist as thoughts, in the present. But we can kill ourselves trying.

3. Quality of life is determined by how you deal with your moments, not which moments happen and which don’t.

I now consider this truth to be Happiness 101, but it’s amazing how tempting it still is to grasp at control of every circumstance to try to make sure I get exactly what I want. To encounter an undesirable situation and work with it willingly is the mark of a wise and happy person. Imagine getting a flat tire, falling ill at a bad time, or knocking something over and breaking it — and suffering nothing from it. There is nothing to fear if you agree with yourself to deal willingly with adversity whenever it does show up. That is how to make life better. The typical, low-leverage method is to hope that you eventually accumulate power over your circumstances so that you can get what you want more often. There’s an excellent line in a Modest Mouse song, celebrating this side-effect of wisdom: As life gets longer, awful feels softer.

4. Most of life is imaginary.

Human beings have a habit of compulsive thinking that is so pervasive that we lose sight of the fact that we are nearly always thinking. Most of what we interact with is not the world itself, but our beliefs about it, our expectations of it, and our personal interests in it. We have a very difficult time observing something without confusing it with the thoughts we have about it, and so the bulk of what we experience in life is imaginary things. As Mark Twain said: “I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” The best treatment I’ve found? Cultivating mindfulness.

5. Human beings have evolved to suffer, and we are better at suffering than anything else.

Yikes. It doesn’t sound like a very liberating discovery. I used to believe that if I was suffering it meant that there was something wrong with me — that I was doing life “wrong.” Suffering is completely human and completely normal, and there is a very good reason for its existence. Life’s persistent background hum of “this isn’t quite okay, I need to improve this,” coupled with occasional intense flashes of horror and adrenaline are what kept human beings alive for millions of years. This urge to change or escape the present moment drives nearly all of our behaviour. It’s a simple and ruthless survival mechanism which works exceedingly well for keeping us alive, but it has a horrific side effect: human beings suffer greatly by their very nature. This, for me, redefined every one of life’s problems as some tendril of the human condition. As grim as it sounds, this insight is liberating because it means: 1) that suffering does not necessarily mean my life is going wrong, 2) that the ball is always in my court, so the degree to which I suffer is ultimately up to me, and 3) that all problems have the same cause and the same solution.

6. Emotions exist to make us biased.

This discovery was a complete 180 from my old understanding of emotions. I used to think my emotions were reliable indicators of the state of my life — of whether I’m on the right track or not. Your passing emotional states can’t be trusted for measuring your self-worth or your position in life, but they are great at teaching you what it is you can’t let go of. The trouble is that emotions make us both more biased and more forceful at the same time. Another survival mechanism  with nasty side-effects.

7. All people operate from the same two motivations: to fulfil their desires and to escape their suffering.

Learning this allowed me to finally make sense of how people can hurt each other so badly. The best explanation I had before this was that some people are just bad. What a cop-out. No matter what kind of behaviour other people exhibit, they are acting in the most effective way they are capable of (at that moment) to fulfill a desire or to relieve their suffering. These are motives we can all understand; we only vary in method, and the methods each of us has at our disposal depend on our upbringing and our experiences in life, as well as our state of consciousness. Some methods are skilful and helpful to others, others are unskilful and destructive, and almost all destructive behaviour is unconscious. So there is no good and evil, only smart and dumb (or wise and foolish.) Understanding this completely shook my long-held notions of morality and justice.

8. Beliefs are nothing to be proud of.

Believing something is not an accomplishment. I grew up thinking that beliefs are something to be proud of, but they’re really nothing but opinions one refuses to reconsider. Beliefs are easy. The stronger your beliefs are, the less open you are to growth and wisdom, because “strength of belief” is only the intensity with which you resist questioning yourself. As soon as you are proud of a belief, as soon as you think it adds something to who you are, then you’ve made it a part of your ego. Listen to any “die-hard” conservative or liberal talk about their deepest beliefs and you are listening to somebody who will never hear what you say on any matter that matters to them — unless you believe the same. It is gratifying to speak forcefully, it is gratifying to be agreed with, and this high is what the die-hards are chasing. Wherever there is a belief, there is a closed door. Take on the beliefs that stand up to your most honest, humble scrutiny, and never be afraid to lose them.

9. Objectivity is subjective.

Life is a subjective experience and that cannot be escaped. Every experience I have comes through my own, personal, un-sharable viewpoint. There can be no peer reviews of my direct experience, no real corroboration. This has some major implications for how I live my life. The most immediate one is that I realize I must trust my own personal experience, because nobody else has this angle, and I only have this angle. Another is that I feel more wonder for the world around me, knowing that any “objective” understanding I claim to have of the world is built entirely from scratch, by me. What I do build depends on the books I’ve read, the people I’ve met, and the experiences I’ve had. It means I will never see the world quite like anyone else, which means I will never live in quite the same world as anyone else — and therefore I mustn’t let outside observers be the authority on who I am or what life is really like for me. Subjectivity is primary experience — it is real life, and objectivity is something each of us builds on top of it in our minds, privately, in order to explain it all. This truth has world-shattering implications for the roles of religion and science in the lives of those who grasp it.

From: http://www.raptitude.com/2010/10/9-mind-bending-epiphanies-that-turned-my-world-upside-down/

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National data on completion

More news on completion rates from the CEO of the American Association of  Community College Trustees:

A new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center examines pathways that students take toward college completion.  The "new and improved data," according to

Inside Higher Ed, "show that America is doing better on college completion than had previously been revealed."  The report reveals important and sometimes surprising findings. 

Among the study's findings:

• Within six years, 12 percent of first-time students completed a degree or certificate at an institution other than the one where they started, raising the overall completion rate from 42 to 54 percent.
• More than one in five students who completed a degree did so at an institution other than the one where they started - students whose successful outcomes are invisible to traditional graduation rate calculations.
• Out of the full starting cohort, 3.5 percent received a degree within six years in a state different from where they started representing 6.5 percent of all completions.
• Overall, 15 percent of two-year starters completed a degree at a four-year institution within six years, and nearly two-thirds of those did so without first obtaining a two-year degree.
• Gains from completions elsewhere were greater for traditional-age students (age 24 or younger at first entry) than for older students (age over 24 at first entry).
• Older students who enrolled exclusively part time actually had a higher completion rate than traditional-age part-time students.

The complete Signature Report includes detailed summaries on the various pathways to completion and related tables; color charts broken down by enrollment intensity, age at first entry, type of institution, including the completion rates at the starting institution and elsewhere; and insight and future recommendations from the authors.

Click here to access the report, and be sure to share the information with your college.  

Keep in mind that the report is one piece of the enormously complex completion puzzle.  ACCT will keep you informed of other new findings, resources, and tools as they are developed.


Sincerely, 

 
J. Noah Brown, President and CEO
Association of Community College Trustees

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International Education Week

It's International Education Week.

From the IEW website:

International Education Week is an opportunity to celebrate the benefits of international education and exchange worldwide. This joint initiative of the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education is part of our efforts to promote programs that prepare Americans for a global environment and attract future leaders from abroad to study, learn, and exchange experiences in the United States. 

• A joint initiative of the U.S. Departments of State and Education, International Education Week (IEW) was first held in 2000 and today, is celebrated in more than 100 countries worldwide.
• IEW is an opportunity to celebrate the benefits of international education and exchange worldwide. This annual initiative aims to promote international understanding and build support for international educational exchange by encouraging the development of programs that prepare Americans to live and work in a global environment and attract future leaders from abroad to study in the United States.
• Exchanges are critical to developing mutual understanding and respect, building leadership abroad, fostering an appreciation for the U.S., and investing in the future relationship between Americans and people around the world.
• According to Open Doors, 270,604 U.S. students studied abroad in 2009/10.
• International education prepares U.S. citizens to live, work, and compete in the global economy.
• International education is also a vital service industry, bringing more than $21 billion into the U.S. economy in 2010/11.
• According to Open Doors, 723,277 international students studied in the U.S. in 2010/11.
• The more than 40,000 students, scholars and other exchange participants that the Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs supports are in the vanguard of the hundreds of thousands of students and scholars who come to the United States and study abroad each year.
• International cooperation on education contributes to education reform and education solutions for the U.S. and for our partner nations.

In case you were wondering, here is some financial impact data courtesy of Joy Garling Prud'homme, Assistant Director for International Student Services.

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