Part II: Professional Development Activities and Professional Learning Community in the Mid-America Region of the Association of Christian Schools International

Current trends in the education literature currently point to school leadership as responsible for the professional growth of the faculty (Fullan, 2010; Reeves, 2006) leading to the desired academic growth of the students. The Christian school community, however, has limited resources compared to those in the public sector. Unfortunately, the literature rarely includes the 400,000 teachers or the school leaders who have chosen to work in private education and their influence on the lives of over 5 million children (Broughman & Swaim, 2006). By examining effective professional development and its relationship to the development of professional learning communities specifically for Christian schools, this study’s findings provide much needed research for leadership in the private school community. Because participating in professional development is important to continued teacher growth and quality as well as student achievement (Darling-Hammond, 2004; Haycock, 1998; National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996), it is hoped this study will lead to improved teacher and student performance under the guidance of school leadership. While Headley’s (2003) work surveyed 60 ACSI schools, providing an overview of professional activities most commonly provided for teachers in those schools, additional knowledge is needed about which activities are of most value to professional learning community development, leading to teacher growth and student success

The Music of Borgesian Destiny in Saura\u27s El Sur

Carlos Saura’s El Sur was aired on Spanish television in 1993 as part of a series of six programmes based on selected short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. The entire set of these hour-long productions has recently been released on video by the Films for the Humanities, thereby granting easy availability to what thus far has been one of Saura’s most difficult to acquire, and consequently least known, films. Described in its opening credits as an ‘adaptación libre’, Saura’s El Sur differs considerably from Borges’ short story of the same name. This is not surprising given Saura’s long-standing refusal to serve as what he calls a mere ‘ilustrador’ of an already written text. A self-proclaimed auteur, Saura places his own personal stamp on all of his films, recasting original material to conform to his own vision of what it should be. Indeed, in a 1996 interview with Antonio Castro, Saura stated that his El Sur had been designed ‘para hacer un ensayo sobre Borges a través de un personaje interpuesto’, explaining that ‘a veces, he querido hacer una especie de ensayos cinematogra´ficos sobre un determinado personaje. Por ejemplo Lope de Aguirre, San Juan de la Cruz, Borges, Goya’. For each of his cinematic essays Saura extensively researches his subject’s life, but the resulting film does not take the form of a biography. Rather, as Saura goes on to say, ‘siempre es, más que un ensayo de toda su vida, un fragmento de su vida, que a mí me parece esencial, y que de algún modo explica su vida’. For El Dorado it is Lope de Aguirre’s expedition to Peru, for La noche oscura it is San Juan de la Cruz’s nine months of imprisonment in a convent in Toledo, for Goya en Burdeos it is the artist’s period of exile in France, and for Saura’s latest cinematic essay, Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón, it is the friendship forged between Buñuel, Dalí and Lorca as university students

The Narrative Premise of Galdos\u27s Lo Prohibido

In their critical study of Lo prohibido most scholars make only casual mention of its memoir format, and the fictitious circumstances of its composition are all but ignored. yet this narrative premise has an overall impact on the novel. In addition to determining the discourse order of the text, it is instrumental in establishing the narrator\u27s authorial autonomy as well as permitting him varying degrees of unreliability. Furthermore, it affects the different narrative voice techniques employed in the novel. The following discussion will examine the implications of this neglected facet of Lo prohibido

Emilia Pardo Bazan, Cronicas en La Nacion de Buenos Aires

Over the twelve-year period immediately preceding her death, Pardo Bazan regularly contributed articles to the prestigious Argentine periodical La Nacion. Surprisingly, these pieces have not been reproduced in previous collections of her works, and few references have ever been made to their existence. Cyrus DeCoster rectifies this omission by bringing together fortysix of what he considers to be the most interesting of the articles. The vast majority of those selected deal with literature and the other arts. Some are eulogies to eminent figures either recently deceased or being honored by centennial celebrations (e.g., Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, Aure-liano de Beruete, Teofilo Gautier, and Jose Zorrilla). Others are reviews of theatrical productions by such writers as Benavente, Echegaray, Galdos, and Oscar Wilde. Pardo Bazan also comments on the operas of Wagner and discusses the merits of El Greco, Velazquez, Murillo, Cervantes, and Shakespeare. A strong critique of Futurism is included among her observations concerning literary movements. Overall, Pardo Bazan\u27s greatest praise is reserved for literary and artistic works that capture the realism of life in all its complexity. This preference even extends to erotic literature when it is well written and portrays human sexual desire realistically

Antisplit Supersymmetry

I explore the phenomenology of Supersymmetry models in which the gauginos are much heavier then that scalar particles of the MSSM. In these models, the gauginos are inaccessible to colliders while the scalar spectrum is compressed. I give several examples of models which exhibit this phenomenology built in the class of General Gauge Mediated Models. I explore possible LSP and NLSP candidates in these scenarios including Higgsino, stau, and sneutrino candidates. Collider signatures for these models include multi-particle decay chains, many taus in the final state, and possible displaced vertices with semi-long lived sparticles. I enumerate the most likely collider smoking gun collider signatures for each general LSP/NLSP scenario.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures, 6 table

Lou Carnon-Deutsch, Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth Century Spanish Fiction by Women

A review of Lou Charnon-Deutsch\u27s Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women

Selective Screening of Type 2 Diabetes for Washoe County’s Hispanic Population

Hispanic Americans with unrecognized, asymptomatic diabetes are more likely to experience poor quality of life and diabetic complications such as heart, eye and kidney disease than non-Hispanic whites of similar age. Multiple factors, such as cultural beliefs, lack of knowledge and limited access to health care, contribute to the fact that one-third of total diabetes among Hispanic Americans is undiagnosed. For Washoe County, Nevada, the actual percentage of adult Hispanics with diabetes may be almost 12%. In 2003, the Defeat Diabetes Screening Project provided three screenings targeting the Hispanic population in Reno and Sparks. Seventy-one percent of 348 screened were Hispanic. The purpose of the screenings was to identify and provide persons at high risk for diabetes with early diagnosis and health care. Defeat Diabetes identified 11 new cases of diabetes, a 32% yield that is within the historical range of 5 to 40% for selective screening

Latent Narratives: Sideshadowing in Fortunata y Jacinta

In his book, Narrative and Freedom, Gary Saul Morson uses the term sideshadowing to identify a set of devices-operating in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky-that are used to counter the closed view of time associated with another term, foreshadowing. According to Morson, this temporal closure is the result of the backward causation of foreshadowing. That is, in foreshadowing something happens because something else is going to happen. Instead of being caused by a prior event, it is caused by a subsequent one. That means that the future is already set, at least to the extent that it can send signs backwards. Thus, options are closed off and time becomes a single line leading to that existing future. Of course, in a novel-unlike in real life-the future is, in fact, already set, but by calling the reader\u27s attention to the already written nature of narrative, foreshadowing conveys temporal openness by approximating the multiplicity of possibilities and potential resolutions inherent in real life