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.]

credit: Marvel

So, this is going to be one of those posts where I talk about being thankful. If you've had enough of that today, then I'll understand if you move along.

I woke up this morning and as I laid there in bed, trying to decide if I should roll over and go back to sleep, I realized that it was Thanksgiving morning. Now, you have to understand that there is little that I cherish more than the "weekend feel" of being able to go back to sleep. But, as I sat there looking at the ceiling, I thought about the year that has been.

Later on in the morning, once I had a couple of cups of coffee in me and the kids were both up, we were sitting at our kitchen table and discussing the things for which we are thankful. As The Girl was listing her items, it occurred to me that our family has done a LOT of cool stuff this year (e.g. our trip to NYC two weekends ago).

I'm not going to be so pretentious as to list all of the things for which I'm thankful. Because, there's a lot on that list. What I will say is I'm most grateful to be surrounded by love. Whether I'm at home, or whether I'm at work, I feel like the thing that always picks me up when I'm down is the realization that I am continually in the presence of awesome people. I absolutely recognize that not everyone can say that, and I appreciate the fact that there aren't too many a-holes in my day-to-day life.

So, here's to hoping that you don't have too many a-holes in your life, and that you don't have to deal with any of them today. Gobble, gobble!

Absolutely brilliant. A recounting of the entirety of the Star Wars saga (so far) in hip-hop form.

If you're curious, here are the lyrics:

Said a long time ago in a galaxy far far away a
Guy named Vader tried to kidnap a Rebel Princess Leia
So she employed a droid to record her a quick note, she said
"Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope." Go!

Hyperspace zoom, sent off some battle plans in an R2
C-3PO’s saying they’re doomed, until they’re bought by a farmer named Luke
His Force is strong
Obi-Wan hasn’t heard that name in long
Solo shoots first, don’t say that I’m wrong
It took him twelve parsecs for his Kessel Run

Well, sure. Chewie was charting the course
Luke learned the way of the Force
Blew up the Death Star, he had no remorse
He got a medal, he’s ready for more

Strike back, Rebels on Hoth are attacked
Yoda shows up and talks backwards
Battled with Boba Fett, put up a fight but then Han got froze in carbonite, burr
Wasn’t the plan, suddenly Luke is in need of a hand
Lando Calrissian led them to slaughter
And Darth Vader said to Luke
I am your father

What?! Jabba the Hutt, gotta admit that bikini was hot
Yoda is dying, yes that’s why I’m crying
Take this any longer I simply cannot
Hey Sidious
You were quite hideous
Vader protected his kid, I’m not kidding, I’m serious
Blew up a Death Star, ‘cause it was a trap
Shout out to Ewoks, ‘cause they had our back

Back in the day
Little boy Anakin loved to pod race
Padmé escaped, Darth Maul went ape
The ending for Qui-Gon Jin wasn’t so great

Attack of the clones
Ten years pass, Anakin’s grown
He falls in love but his master is captured
His mother is killed and then that spells disaster
Ooh!
Mace Windu
Anakin loses an arm to Dooku
Secret marriage
Twins in the carriage
Palpatine’s savage
And Vader breaks through!

I’m trying to think… Who’d I forget? What’s his name?
Meesa called Jar Jar Binks!

Now to today
Jumping ahead to a scrapper named Rey (Hey!)
Teamed up with Poe and a Stormtrooper Finn
Who betrayed the First Order, so we let him in
BB-8!
Solo vs. Solo, Han met his fate
Rose got to work
Kylo won’t put on a shirt
Kylo is kind of a flirt
Tracked down Luke he was giving me hate
Until he saved the Resistance on Crait

Now Skywalker's gone
But faith in the Force remains strong
Skywalker always lives on
Wooh!

You can't stop me, I'm a Jedi from Jakku
Fight the Dark Side from Tatooine to Naboo
Let go of everything that you fear to lose
Be the spark the lights the fire and May The Force Be With You

So, a little while ago I posted the trailer and a short snippet about the upcoming premier or The Mandalorian on Disney Plus. Needless to say, I have been excited ever since I heard that all of the Star Wars, Marvel, and Disney universes/franchises would be in one place. Additionally, the prospect of original programming in the Star Wars universe has been bandied about for some time.

Then, seemingly forever ago, news broke that the first original Star Wars series on the fledgling streaming service would be The Mandalorian - and I flipped out! As a long-time fan of Boba Fett (as many Star Wars fanboys are), the opportunity to see the backstory and culture of the Mandalorians come to the screen was VERY exciting!

...and so far the show has NOT disappointed.

In fact, my expectations were extremely high and I felt that Dave Filoni (director) and Jon Favreau (writer/creator) exceeded them.

If you haven't watched yet, or don't want things to be spoiled, get out now.

The show opens on a bar that feels like the (in)famous Mos Eisley Cantina scene - sans the bouncy John Williams score. The camera pans around a hive of scum and villainy and centers on a blue alien being roughed up by a couple of bad dudes. Then, in walks our (anti)hero:


The Mandalorian proceeds to dispatch the baddies with little effort (read: badass), then take our blue fellow (ably played by SNL alum Horatio Sanz) into custody, after displaying his bounty token.

The story line continues to develop as Pascal's Mandalorian embarks on a quest to retrieve a bounty that is "over 50 years old" for a paltry down payment of a bar of Beskar steel.

For those uninformed, Polygon has a fantastic write-up about Beskar steel, Mandalorian armor, and the yet-to-be-revealed signet for the title character here. The money:

Mandalorian armor is famous in the Star Wars universe. The armor plates themselves can withstand blaster shots, as we see in The Mandalorian, and can even protect the wearer from the glancing blow of a lightsaber — which can be seen in the Legacy of Mandalore episode of Star Wars: Rebels when Gar Saxon is disarmed. Despite this impressive protection, the armor also remains surprisingly light, allowing the wearer to remain agile and maneuverable. In some cases, the strength of the metal could lead to sets of Mandalorian armor that lasted hundreds of years. In Star Wars: Rebels, Sabine Wren’s armor is 500 years old.

The unique properties of the armor are due in large part to the Beskar metal that it’s made with. Beskar, also known as Mandalorian iron, is one of the toughest and rarest metals in the galaxy. In The Mandalorian’s first episode, we get a brief glimpse of Beskar in the form of the metal bar that the Mandalorian hands the Armorer. The Armorer takes the bar and turns it into a new pauldron for the Mandalorian. With Beskar more rare, and many Mandalorians spread out across the galaxy, it seems that not even the Mandalorian’s armor is quite complete.

Beskar is extremely rare. While we don’t have the details in the official canon anymore, the pre-Disney “Legends” stories explained that it could only be mined on Mandalore, the home planet of the Mandalorians, or its moon, Concordia. According to the Armorer, the metal was likely taken during the Great Purge — also known as Order 66, Chancellor Palpatine’s directive to the clone army to kill all Jedi.

The mystery! The intrigue!

I told you that it was awesome!

And much like the doorway image above, much of the cinematography reminds me of old western films. The Mandalorian really feels like a gunslinger movie. Is he good? Is he bad? Is he ugly? By the end of the first episode, we're still not sure (though there are definite leanings toward good-ish).

Episodes two and three are equally fantabulous. I'm not going to go into any details on them, just know that the final five minutes of the third episode (titled, "The Sin") had me cheering on my couch.

Here's to a great start for Disney+, and the continued awesomeness that is The Mandalorian.

So, we've been thinking a lot about how it won't be long before our kids (now 16- and 13-years-old, respectively) are leaving the house for whatever post-secondary experiences await them. As such, we have been having conversations with them about the types of family adventures that they would be interested in having in the next couple of years.

Based on their feedback, last weekend we packed up the car and made a family getaway to New York City. This was the first time that either of my children had been to the Big Apple.

Hitting the road, with the 16-year-old driving! YIKES.

We got the kids just as they finished school on Friday afternoon and drove to Hoboken, New Jersey. We spend the night in a Holiday Inn Express (because, free breakfast), then took the NY Waterway ferry from Port Imperial/Weehawken into Manhattan on Saturday morning. The ferry was great, but even greater was the NY Waterway bus that drove us into mid-town (so that we didn't have to drop money on a taxi/Uber).

Our reservation was at the Crowne Plaza Times Square, but we couldn't check-in to our room until later in the afternoon. So we stowed our luggage with the reception desk and hit the city!


It was a chilly weekend in the city, as evidenced by our "bundled" appearance.


After walking through Times Square, [getting me some coffee: priorities] and seeing all of the sights, hearing all of the sounds, and smelling all of the smells, we made our way across 42nd Street to the New York Public Library. None of us had ever been there, but Melissa thought that it would be cool to see. AND. IT. WAS.


Honestly, the Library felt more like a museum than a library. But as we walked around and snapped pictures and marveled at the ornate nature of the building, sure enough there were people at tables and in alcoves absorbed in their reading. We saw one young woman wearing a Stuyvesant shirt studying at a table behind a political sticker-laden Macbook - as if this was just another library.

But does your everyday town library have the original Winnie The Pooh plush characters - on which the famous stories were built?

Tigger doesn't look very bouncy...

Yeah, probably not.

After we left the NYPL, we headed next door to Bryant Park. I don't know what it's like in the non-winter/non-holiday season, but this time of the year the park is a beautiful oasis filled with vendors, shoppers, and an ice-skating rink. The only picture that I got of the location was the whimsical sign at the entrance:


We grabbed some lunch, did some people watching, and The Boy made a friend:


After getting some grub we headed back down Fifth Avenue to Rockefeller Center, where we found the Christmas tree behind scaffolding.


...and of course, more ice-skating:


As we walked around the Plaza, we stumbled into FAO Schwarz - the famous toy store. Given that the holiday shopping season is upon us, the place was simply packed.


But when in Rome, you do as Tom Hanks does in Big:


(For those uncivilized, you're hearing The Boy's attempt at "Seven Nation Army" by The White Stripes. Also a fight song that is heard often at Penn State home football games.)

While at Rockefeller Plaza, we did the NBC Studios tour. We saw the news studio (where Lester Holt does the Evening News each night), as well as studios each for Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. No cameras were allowed on the tour, so the only picture I got was of The Girl at a mock desk from The Office.


After 30 Rock, we went back to the hotel where we relaxed until it was time to head back out. For dinner, we went to the Times Square Diner and Grill (which, ironically isn't actually in Times Square). A great art deco spot on 8th Avenue at 49th Street.


After dinner, we walked over to the Gershwin Theatre for the focus of our trip: Wicked.




Perhaps unsurprisingly, the show was excellent. In particular, Ginna Mason's portrayal of Glinda stole the show. This was my first time seeing Wicked, and I was impressed. The story is quite unique, and the production was what you would expect from a real Broadway show. If you've never seen a show in New York, I would highly recommend it as an entree into that world. It's family-friendly, entertaining, and quite the spectacle - all with characters that are familiar.

After a busy day, we headed back to the hotel where we we able to get a pretty good night's sleep. This is remarkable because we had to share two double-beds between the four of us. Not the most ideal of sleeping arrangements. But, getting two rooms in a Times Square hotel was out of the question for fiscal reasons.

Sunday morning we woke up and I texted a friend of mine who lives a few subway stops away from Times Square. I mistakenly believed that he and his family lived in Brooklyn, so we got a metro card and hopped on the train to 36th Street. As we were crossing the bridge into Brooklyn, I got a text from him that read, "NO! 36th Avenue! In Queens! You're on the wrong train! Turn around!"

Yup.

So, after doing some mental gymnastics, we figured out which train we needed to get back through mid-town and out to Astoria/Queens. Eighty minutes later we were greeting my friend and his wife and daughter at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria. There is a splendid Jim Henson installation there, which I highly recommend. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures.

After walking through the museum for a bit, we decided to grab lunch at a local pizzeria called Sak's Place, and catch up. A couple of hours of great food and conversation later, we got back on the train into mid-town, picked up our luggage at the hotel, and caught a bus back to the NY Waterway ferry. Five-plus hours later, we were back home and simply exhausted.

The kids had school the next morning but the Wife and I were smart; we took the day off.

While seeing new sights & sounds and old friends was great, there was a much larger take-away for our family on this trip.

Living in a small town in central Pennsylvania can be something of a bubble. My kids have a relatively narrow world view. I don't say this to sound belittling of their experience, but outside of trips to Disney World in Orlando, they haven't traveled to places where they can experience a diversity of people.

As we were walking around the city we saw people from all backgrounds, cultures, religions, sexual orientations, gender identities, and socio-economic situations. My kids' eyes were opened to how other people live outside of the bubble in which we live. They were also shown precisely how fortunate we are. This is a learning experience that no museum or library could ever display.

That makes a great trip, an excellent trip!

It's true. Comic Sans font gets me triggered, even though it has just celebrated a birthday:

If you think Comic Sans looks immature, child-like something a teacher would use, well, that's sort of the point. Back in 1994, Vincent Connare was working at Microsoft. And he was working on software that would teach people how to use a computer through cartoon characters who spoke in speech bubbles, including a yellow dog named Rover.

Okay, okay. So I didn't know the history of the font. So I have a little less of a distaste now.

But maybe the root cause of my disdain for Comic Sans stems not from the typeface itself, but rather the (in my opinion) improper usage of it. When reading a professional communication (email, memo, etc.) I have an expectation that the sender uses proper grammar and punctuation. Forgive me for sounding a bit fuddy-duddy, but with the advent of texting and the language that was invented to make texting more convenient (e.g. TTYL, LOL, etc.), people have become less professional in their communication.

So, when you couple that unprofessional communication with a font that looks like something that my middle schooler would put in a PowerPoint presentation, I lose my mind.

And geez, don't even get me started on Papyrus...