Ruben Medrano was an amazing force – full of positive energy and cheerfulness. You would never guess by his enthusiasm that he battled and won herculean obstacles – every day.He came to the Social Innovation Fast Pitch event in November 2008, approached Kara and asked to be involved with what we did. Very soon after […]
I just finished Tina Seelig’s book “What I wish I knew when I was 20” and wanted to share excerpts that particularly resonated with me.. “Carlos Vignolo, a masterful professor at the University of Chile, told me that he provocatively suggests that students take classes from the worst teachers in their school because this will […]
Robyn Hightower helped develop, conduct and analyze two parent surveys (in Fall 2008 and 2009) that would help inform our decisions on how to develop programs that directly addressed our target audience’s needs in the most organic and efficient manner. Here are some key findings. Fall 2008We sampled 361 parents from eight partner schools at […]
Lately I have been reviewing a lot of resumes (both for volunteer and paid positions at Iridescent), going to career fairs and interviewing candidates and came to a few conclusions about hiring.I used to be an international graduate student not too long ago and distinctly remember the feeling of desperation when you submit your resume […]
Robyn Hightower developed and conducted a teacher survey for the teachers in 8 of our partner schools (N= 106). Here are some of the interesting correlations that we observed in the data. You can access the survey here. Effect of age The older the teacher, the more they believe that “No matter a student’s home […]
I have been reading a really interesting book on engineering called, “To engineer is human: the role of failure in successful design“. One insight from the book is that engineers naturally have or are trained to have a high tolerance for change. That is why they are always looking for better ways to design and […]
We recently had a chance to do something pretty unusual – have the students work with kits (we usually have the students build/design their models from scratch with no prepared materials). We got the BP A+ for Energy Grant to do the Energy City Project with two 6th grade classrooms. We did a Family Science […]
I read Luke Sullivan’s book Hey Whipple, Squeeze This and was amazed at how universally relevant his advice was. Here are some excerpts from the book as applied to everything important! Read, learn, memorize Tom hired me as a copywriter in January of ’79. He didn’t have much work for me during that first month, […]