Test 2

This is a very cool video from StarWars.com (via Nerdist) on the evolution and design of the Storm Trooper in the Star Wars universe.

In case you were riveted by the Congressional hearings yesterday and missed it, a U.S. Senate amendment was proposed that would help simplify the FAFSA and assist HBCUs around the country:

Leaders of the education committee of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday released a bipartisan proposed amendment that would make permanent $255 million in annual funding for historically black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions, simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), and eliminate paperwork for income-driven student loan repayment plans.

The compromise amends an HBCU funding bill the U.S. House passed in September. It follows months of wrangling over a package of bills proposed by Senator Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the education committee. Those bills would have served as a stripped-down version of a reauthorized Higher Education Act and included proposals for extending Pell Grant eligibility to short-term programs and incarcerated students.

FAFSA simplification was also part of that package, which was tied to the HBCU funding extension. In an apparent nod to Democrats, last month Alexander backed a bill aimed at for-profit colleges and their recruiting of veterans and active-duty service members.

[...]

The amendment would eliminate up to 22 questions from the FAFSA, which currently includes 108. It also would reduce paperwork for 7.7 million federal student loan borrowers on income-driven plans.

Huge. Elimination of that many questions on the FAFSA alone is newsworthy. Throw in the permanent funding for HBCUs and you've got some full-blown awesomeness.

Now, if only the measure could get the full support of the Senate...

NICE. The new trailer for No Time To Die, the 25th installment in the James Bond series, dropped today!

I've been a life-long James Bond fan, as it was a tradition for my dad and brother and I to binge Bond films around the holidays. "Bond-a-thon" is what we dubbed it, and I have very fond memories of that time in front of the television at our house.

I have simply adored Daniel Craig as the titular British spy - despite some less-than-stellar writing in some of the more recent Bond films. No Time To Die has been generating buzz about the possibility of a female version of 007, and given the trailer Screenrant dives into that notion:

Arguably the biggest theory about No Time To Die is that Lynch's character is the new 007. That's not to say the movie is introducing a female James Bond, but simply that she has taken on the codename in his absence, since he was very much on the outs from MI6 at the end of Spectre, and that's a gap that needs filling. While it's very much been in the theory/rumor bracket for a while, the No Time To Die trailer supports this notion by directly calling attention to the fact that Nomi is a 00-agent, but not telling us her full number.

Whomever the franchise decides to play the infamous spy is irrelevant. Daniel Craig's version ushered in a darker, more brooding version of James Bond (as opposed to the snarky, chauvinistic tendencies of previous versions) and was met with much success. If the creators/writers were to cast a female actress in the role, there would be naysayers for sure - but in the end if the writing and film-making is good fans will turn out anyway.

I know that I'll be there.

What a great first-look at the long-awaited full-length feature for Marvel's Black Widow!

And David Harbour as Red Guardian looks both funny AND badass at the same time!

According to new research published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, "helicopter parenting" is bad. Positively shocking, I know! (he says with a healthy dose of sarcasm)

The survey of 427 college students suggests that self-control skills may be hindered by overly involved parents:

The current study examined the relations among helicopter parenting, self-control and school burnout, which have not been directly examined in the context of helicopter parenting. Helicopter parenting behaviors are displayed out of care for offspring success, but the results from our study highlight how these behaviors could be detrimental to college student adjustment. This is especially important as higher education institutions in the U.S. have implemented parental programs that facilitate increased parental involvement during the transition to college (Savage and Petree 2015). Additionally, this research further advanced the current understanding of helicopter parenting as evidence revealed self-control as a mediating mechanism and differences in parental gender, both of which have not been thoroughly addressed in the context of this parenting phenomenon.

Although previous research addressing the relation between helicopter parenting and academic-related outcomes has been mixed, some suggested that higher levels of perceived helicopter parenting were associated with lower levels of school engagement (Padilla-Walker and Nelson 2012). The findings from the current study supported these results by suggesting an association between perceived helicopter parenting and school burnout. Exposure to helicopter parenting may put emerging adult children at risk of developing the psychological and physiological symptomatology that has been linked to school burnout.

Previous research also suggested an indirect association between perceptions of helicopter parenting and academic-related outcomes (Darlow et al. 2017). Both life course and socialization theory suggest that helicopter parenting may be associated with unwanted outcomes among emerging adult children because helicopter parenting behaviors do not facilitate the development of regulatory processes such as self-control. Therefore, the current study examined the indirect association between maternal/paternal helicopter parenting and school burnout through self-control. Findings from the current study revealed that self-control mediated the relation between perceptions of helicopter parenting and school burnout. These results supported the strength model of self-control, which suggests that a lack of self-regulatory skills (due to factors such as parenting behavior) may result in unwanted outcomes among emerging adult children such as, school burnout. Helicopter parenting behaviors may not allow for the development of self-control skills, as emerging adult children are taught that they are not entirely responsible for their own actions. Thus, students of helicopter parents may be unable to meet the many demands of higher education, as they have not developed sufficient self-control skills. Students, whose underdeveloped self-control skills are spread too thin, may likely begin to develop feelings of school burnout as a result. Further, self-control appeared to fully mediate the association between maternal helicopter parenting and school burnout, whereas only partial mediation emerged when examining paternal helicopter parenting and school burnout. The magnitude of the mediating effects seemed similar, but with the stronger bivariate association between paternal helicopter parenting and school burnout, this suggested that there were more left unexplained by self-control in the association between paternal helicopter parenting and school burnout, and more should be done to explore other possible mediating mechanism for such association (e.g., facilitation/interference; Burke et al. 2018; self-regulation skills; Cui et al. 2019; extrinsic motivation for learning; Ryan and Deci 2000).

Related, analyses revealed that the association between paternal helicopter parenting and school burnout was significantly stronger than that between maternal helicopter parenting and school burnout. Parental gender differences found in our study were consistent with theories and recent research that has shown a stronger relation between helicopter parenting and maladaptive college student outcomes for fathers than for mothers (Klein and Pierce 2009; Rousseau and Scharf 2015). Emerging adult children may experience higher levels of maternal helicopter parenting, but paternal helicopter parenting may play a more salient role in school burnout among college students. Due to the normativity of maternal display of involvement, care, and control, offspring may not negatively internalize maternal helicopter parenting as much compared to paternal helicopter parenting. In contrast, fathers displaying helicopter parenting behaviors are seen as less normative across the U.S. Such deviance from parental norms suggests that overly involved fathers may have a stronger association with emerging adult children’s school burnout. Furthermore, intensive fathering moves away from the previous normative practice of paternal absence or lack of involvement as children approach emerging adulthood and towards a positive direction that promotes the salience of fathering (Devault et al. 2015). Too much involvement during this stage of development, however, may have negative implications for emerging adult children regardless of whether these behaviors are displayed by mother or father.

School burnout results from students’ inability to meet the daily demands of higher education. Parenting behaviors should facilitate healthy college student adjustment, but behaviors that are characteristic of helicopter parenting may undermine developmental needs (e.g., self-control) critical for a healthy transition to adulthood. Our research also highlighted the important role that parents, especially fathers, continue to play in their offspring’s lives even when they move out of the house and enter emerging adulthood. Previous work examining the association between helicopter parenting and academic-related outcomes has not addressed the effects of parent gender

My emphasis.

So, that's a lot (and only a snippet of the research). In our work (and with just about everyone in higher ed), the generalization is that parents are everywhere trying to meddle in students' educational endeavors. That's a stereotype and not always true. But the stories are bad enough that the caricature becomes something of a reality.

Last week we had an irate parent call our office. They was upset that their student's application was hung up in our processes. (The student had spent a year studying in a foreign country and they were having difficulty completing the self-reported academic record for that country.) Through the heated conversation with the parent, it came to light that the parent had been filling out the student's application and self-reported academic record.

The parent made one of our staff members cry on the telephone. Then, just before hanging up, they claimed that they were going to drive to our office to get the matter settled. And, a few hours later, there they were in our office lobby.

The AWESOME people with whom I work were able to diffuse the situation without incident, and the parent was back on their way home within about 35 minutes (but not before grumbling about how they had so much difficulty completing the application).

The question that I'm left with is this: how did the parent handling this situation benefit the student? It doesn't! Even more concerning is scenario that will play out if/when the student enrolls at Penn State and they get a poor/failing grade in a class. Will the parent show up on campus (again) to berate the member of the faculty that is responsible for assigning the grade?


[A tip o' the hat to NACAC's Admitted blog.]