Author Archives: pamela j. stubbart

"The Start-up of You," or The Future and Its Friends

Last week, I devoured Reid Hoff­man & Ben Cas­nocha’s brand new book, “The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Your­self, and Trans­form your Career.” It couldn’t have come out at a more appro­pri­ate time for me per­son­ally, given that I have aban­doned aca­d­e­mic aspi­ra­tions, left grad school, quit a bor­ing pub­lish­ing job,

Huffington Post!

Dear read­ers, In case you hadn’t seen this on Twit­ter or Face­book or G+ already, just wanted to give you a heads up that I’ll now be shar­ing most of my education-related con­tent over at the Huff­in­g­ton Post. Occa­sional book reviews and other mis­cel­lany will still appear here. Thanks for following! pjs

Putting NH's new alternative curricula law in context

Recently, my good buddy Jason Becker shared this arti­cle with me over here. An excerpt: New Hampshire’s Republican-dominated Leg­is­la­ture over­rode Demo­c­ra­tic Gov. John Lynch’s veto Wednes­day to enact a law let­ting par­ents request an alter­na­tive cur­ricu­lum for any sub­ject they object to, leg­is­la­tion that crit­ics say could limit children’s access to a com­pre­hen­sive and qual­ity edu­ca­tion. H.B. 542

Seligman on happiness: authentic or by definition?

I’m almost done with Mar­tin Seligman’s well-known book of pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy, Authen­tic Hap­pi­ness (2003). It’s been a very good read — although I was famil­iar with many of the rel­e­vant research find­ings, from my var­i­ous inter­net trav­els (and Bark­ing Up The Wrong Tree in par­tic­u­lar), Selig­man puts it all together and lays it out in

"teaching to the situation"

I have another post up at Kos­mos: “Teach­ing Advice: Teach­ing to the Situation”

social welfare, the handicapped, and special education

Com­mon sense may sug­gest that increases in social wel­fare are more eas­ily obtained by focus­ing resources on the men­tally and/or phys­i­cally hand­i­capped, rather than using those resources instead to mar­gin­ally improve non-handicapped indi­vid­u­als’ lives. The capa­bil­i­ties approach, as devel­oped by Amartya Sen and Martha Nuss­baum, would also imply that resources are well-spent when devoted to

book review: Vivian Gornick's "Revolution as a Way of Life"

Last month, I read the arti­cle “Love and Anar­chy” by Vivan Gor­nick in The Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion. It was adapted from a recently released book titled “Emma Gold­man: Rev­o­lu­tion as a Way of Life” by the same author. Because the essay was intrigu­ing and, hon­estly, quite sexy, I quickly pur­chased the full book on

transferring graduate schools: making it or breaking it

In case you missed it, I had another guest post up at Kos­mos recently on the topic of trans­fer­ring grad­u­ate schools.

thinking about academia like an economist

Today, some grad school advice I wrote for Kos­mos went live. Check it out: Think­ing About Acad­e­mia Like An Economist

"great books": de jure or de facto?

I recently began read­ing Louis Menand’s The Mar­ket­place of Ideas: Reform and Resis­tance in the Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity, picked up on a whim from the library. Menand makes an excel­lent point in pass­ing about so-called “great books” cur­ric­ula (aka “gen­eral” or “lib­eral” edu­ca­tion, and pos­si­bly “com­mon core”), a point which I had not pre­vi­ously seen made