Joe Bonamassa: played at the Saroyan Theater in Fresno, CA. I attended his concert and it was great! The energy, the music, his complete mastery of the guitar and his band, especially the drummer, made for an awesome 2 hour concert. He started on time and played the entire 2 hours, even though he gave his drummer, keyboard player and other guitarist a break!
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Tommy Emmanuel-Guitarist
He’s even better live! I attended his concert at the Tower Theater on February 17. Amazing guitarist and a caring human being!
Painful News About Women & Pain
A recent study about pain attempts to debunk the commonly held belief that women have a higher pain tolerance than men. In a recent blog post, Dan Ariely, reported on a study whose conclusion, based on patients’ self reports, that women rate pain 20% higher than men.
To me, this does not debunk the commonly held belief about women and pain primarily because these are self reports. Women may be more willing to admit pain & less willing to “tough it out.” Second, men may be willing to underreport the amount of pain in order to not seem weak. So I continue to agree with Dr. Ariel’s teacher that women have a higher tolerance for pain.
Can I see your ID card please? Our President who is Black….
I happened to turn on the news yesterday morning and watched in amazement while President Obama released additional birth certificate documents.
It is disheartening to see that important issues, among those, helping students develop skills to become critical thinkers so that they can help manage issues now and in the future, have been disregarded by media figures who persist in attacking the president through subtle and not so subtle challenges to the President’s bona fides. It smacks of the type of racism that is most difficult to combat-racism that is covered in a veneer of civility. The following video from Rachel Maddow’s show The racist roots of ‘birtherism.‘
I hope that this is the end of challenges to President Obama’s bona fides. It is a very frustrating and sobering look at education’s failure to educate media and the public about a true critical analysis and debate.
Building University Initiatives
Change seems to be an issue for many people.
I must admit that I feel trepidation whenever I have to/need to/want to make a change or do something differently. Yet I tend to embrace the change if it is something that I think will help me do my job better. That’s especially so because teaching and improving learning is somewhat imprecise and isn’t represented by a tangible object that can be easily measured.
It’s interesting to watch others’ response to proposed change. The variations in response always surprise me, even though by now I should expect it. Although I think of educators as thinkers and innovators, not all are. Many are content to do what they’ve always done, just as others in non-education fields can be content.
A colleague once told me that when we redesign courses, we should not only look at those courses where the failure rate is high. We should also examine the courses (especially when they are the same courses) where the pass rate is extremely high. The issue might be that the standards in the course where the pass rate is extremely high either have answers that can be passed along or that that particular instructor is not holding students to high standards.
Ida's Blog 