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In this presentation, I shared my impressions of living as a foreigner in Russia and working as a member of faculty at a Russian university. In it, I first shared relevant details of higher education in the United States which helped to shape the context within which I garnered my understanding of the the nature of higher education and how I defined it.

Then, I shared some of the things I noticed about higher education in Russia which I found particularly interesting and which also led to a series of “culture bumps” with my students and colleagues.

Finally, I detailed a series of adjustments I made after my first semester which helped me to better fit in to the system of which I was now a part.

Here is the link to a presentation I wrote about the history and culture of Alabama, my native state. I gave it first at the Arkhangelsk American Corner in April, 2011.

In this activity, students are divided into small groups and told that they are members of the governing legislature in a hypothetical American state. They want to reduce their population of prisoners while also not adding to the state’s budget. Students must work together to devise a plan using the information provided below.

To generate students’ background knowledge, students may also read the article, “Behind Bars,” an editorial from the March 2008 issue of Arkansas Business, attached below.

Download worksheet and pre-reading article.

The Activity

Your state has one of the largest populations of prisoners per capita in the United States. You spend 10% of your $3 billion yearly budget just to maintain your growing prison system. One prisoner costs you $30,000 per year to keep. Your task is to devise ways to reduce the prison population while doing each of the following:

1)      Not endangering the public by releasing prisoners who should stay locked up

2)      Not adding to your overall budget

3)      Keeping the public happy

How will you do it? Remember that you are elected officials. Much of what you do will be judged on the next election day (two years from now). Prepare a plan of action and share it with the class.

Here is a list of alternative programs and their cost. You may choose from this list.

1. Allowing early parole for non-violent offenders. This means releasing people from prison early for good behavior, but continuing to monitor them and restrict their travel. This can save the state up to $20 million, but it is unpopular and has shown that recidivism amongst these inmates in much higher than the average population (75% vs. 50%).
2. Investing more in schools which are located in poor areas where much of the state’s violent crime is committed. This includes hiring new teachers, building new schools and creating new after-school programs for at-risk youths. It will add about 12% to your budget, but has the potential for much greater (but unknown) future benefit.
3. Investing in more rehabilitation programs in the prisons. This includes educational opportunities, psychological counseling and job skills development for current inmates. This will add 3% to your budget, but will not show any decrease in the prison population for several years (after the next election).
4. Creating work release programs. Such a program utilizes prisoners as manual labor for government construction projects. It will add less that 1% to the budget and could save up to 5%. Labor unions in the state are opposed to this idea, however, and they will have to be convinced it is a good idea.
5. Legalizing marijuana. This will drastically reduce the number of prisoners (by up to 10%) and can also add to the state budget at least $20 million in taxes. But this is very unpopular with voters. A recent poll showed that only 15% of the population would support such a measure.
6. Building new rehabilitation facilities exclusively for non-violent offenders. Places like this are more boarding schools than prisons and isolates prisoners so that violent prisoners cannot influence non-violent ones. This will add 5% to your budget, but can show a decrease of up to 10% within 10 years.
7. Eliminating the death penalty. This will save the state up to 2% of its budget because it is vastly more expensive to keep inmates on death row than it is to incarcerate them for life. However, a recent poll showed that such a measure has the support of only 40% of the population. Young voters, however, support the measure by a factor of 85% to 15%.
8. Providing tax breaks to businesses which hire ex-cons. This would make it more attractive for state businesses to hire former prisoners. Such a measure could potentially reduce recidivism by up to 20%, but would also result in the loss of several million dollars in taxes. The long-term benefits are greater, though, as fewer and fewer ex-cons go back to prison. The tax breaks would mean that other services would have to be cut, however. Most vulnerable would be medical services for the poor and new road construction.

This is a workshop designed for teachers of English on the music of American singer-songwriter Tom Waits. The activities included are for the songs, “Hold On,” “San Diego Serenade” and “Clap Hands” and they encourage students to develop their listening and speaking skills by exploring the uniquely American themes and landscapes of Waits’ music using a combination of individual and small group work.

Download handouts here in PDF.

The Music of Tom Waits

Tom Waits was born in 1949 in California to parents who were both schoolteachers. He grew up in the 1960s, but did not identify popular American music of the day. Instead, he listened to more traditional blues, beat and jazz music. He was particularly fond of music that told stories and spoken word poetry performed in smoky night clubs after midnight.

This unique background set the stage for his very long and rebellious career. His first album, Closing Time was released in 1973. His early music is a mixture of traditional jazz and folk which, throughout the 1970s, became more and more cynical as he succumbed to the lifestyle of living on the road that had him staying in hotels, eating bad food and drinking heavily. Songs of this period include, “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me),” “(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night” and “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart.”

n the 1980s, not only did his musical style begin to change, but also his career as an actor took shape. His music began to employ less common instruments like bassoon, bagpipes, marimba and violin. His music moved more towards the blues and even including tinges of spoken word and European folk music. As an actor, he appeared in several offbeat films and plays, even doing some writing for the stage.

In the 1990s, his acting career continued to flourish and his music now included elements of gospel music and even electronic music. His most successful album to date, Mule Variations, was released in 1999. His most recent collection of songs is the live recording, Glitter and Doom Live, from 2009.

Still relatively unknown in the United States, Waits has recorded more than 20 albums and is best known from the songs he wrote but are performed by other artists. Still, he has yet to gain the popularity at home which he has achieved in Europe and other parts of the world.

His music can be both horrifying and beautiful and is often about sad or lonely people who are between stages of their lives or wandering through the world with no direction. The characters in his songs lament about love gained and lost and opportunities never taken, about dreams unfulfilled and promises never kept. He sings about America as seen through the backseat window of a ’55 Chevy.

For more information, please see the following websites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Waits

http://www.allmusic.com

http://www.tomwaitslibrary.com

http://www.anti.com/artists/view/1

Reading an American newspaper is a unique skill, and your mastery of the genre can help you a great deal in your studies.

Most notable when discussing newspaper literacy is your ability to locate useful and/or interesting information. This means you have an understanding of the organizational structure of the American newspaper. Just as native speakers know that the table of contents for a book in English is located on the first few pages (and not at the end as in, for example, books written in Russian), they also know what to expect when they pick up a newspaper. For example:

Contents/Organization of a Newspaper
1) A newspaper is divided into sections that may or may not include national, international, local, entertainment, business, features and sports news.
2) A newspaper can have more than one edition, each of which may contain different articles or different versions of the same article.
3) Articles on the front pages of sections typically contain a jump at which the reader is directed to turn to a different page in the same section in order to finish the story.
4) Other sections of the newspaper may include: classifieds, comics, car pages, real estate articles, book reviews, film/television reviews, TV listings, obituaries, shopping guides, real estate listings, letters to the editor, editorials, corrections, contact information, stock prices, weather or advice columns.
5) Newspapers contain an index on page 1 or 2 with page numbers of different sections.
6) Articles on the upper fold of the front page are considered more important than those on the lower fold.
7) Opinion pieces can only be found in one section and are always grouped together.
8) The front page can contain stories on any topic, while the inside of the first section typically only contains national and international news.
9) Opinion pieces and editorials can be found together, but editorials are never signed and are considered the opinion of the entire newspaper.

Contents of Articles
1) Headlines and sub-heads are mini-summaries of articles and are always written in present tense.
2) Different types of articles have different structures.
3) Articles tend to use quotes more than paraphrases.
4) All information that is not considered general knowledge is attributed. For example, shared knowledge of history or daily events do not need to cited. In general, if you don’t need to look it up, you probably don’t need to cite it.
5) Reporters typically try to include more than one point of view on a topic when possible.
6) Articles have a dateline that informs the reader as to where the events in the article take place.
7) The name typed above the article is the person who researched and wrote the article.
8) The most important information in a news article is usually at the very beginning and almost always before the jump.
9) Sources are named using their first and last names upon first mention, and then with only their last names on all subsequent mentions.
10) Journalists tend to use quotes more often than paraphrases, but usually paraphrase when they want to shorten a long quote or combine more than one.

General Knowledge about Newspapers
1) Newspapers can be known for having a political slant in one direction or another, despite their statements of objectivity.
2) Newspapers generally publish new stories on their websites before they are printed.
3) Newspaper editors generally have a wide variety of stories from which to choose and must decide every day which articles to include and where to place them.
4) Newspapers make the bulk of their money by selling advertisements, not by selling newspapers.

Newspaper Reading Strategies
1) Choosing an article to read: A great deal of information about an article can be found by simply reading it’s headline, lead and photo caption (cutline) and by also looking at its photo(s). This is a good way to get the main idea of an article and also to decide if you want to read more of it.
2) Evaluating the reliability of information: Journalists are trained to provide only the most reliable information possible and to give an objective view of the topic or event about which they are writing, but this does not always happen. We can evaluate the reliability of information they provide by asking the following questions about it:
a. is the source of the information knowledgeable on the subject matter?
b. is the source of the information trustworthy or might he/she have an ulterior motive (i.e. to sway public opinion in a certain direction or to protect himself)?
c. are there any opposing pieces of information or opinions presented, or does the reporter only give one side to the story?
d. does the article contain any information that presupposes a certain prejudice about a group of people on the part of the reader?
3) Skimming/Scanning articles: When we read newspaper articles, it is rarely necessary to read every word. A skilled reader will skim the first few words of every paragraph to get the main idea and also scan portions of the article for key words or phrases that might be interesting or relevant.
4) Knowing the basic structure of a newspaper article: While there is no steadfast structure for every newspaper article, there are some elements a skilled reader will know to expect:
*News Articles: The lead (first sentence) of every news article contains either the main idea of the article or the most important piece of information in the article. What follows is generally an account of relevant information starting with the most relevant and ending with the least.
*Feature Articles: These articles typically tell the reader a story and tend to have a beginning, middle and end. The lead will generally be written to attract your attention, not provide relevant information.

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Glossary of Newspaper Literacy PDF