Making Classrooms Culturally Sensitive

It is felt by many that as American schools and educators become more and more sensitive to the diversity of their community, their students can be guided to appreciate and respect these differences and to coexist peacefully. Various combinations of cultures such as African-Americans, Irish and German-Americans, Hispanics, Chinese-Americans to name a few, are learning how to work and live together while maintaining their own cultural heritage. The students of today who embrace their cultural heritage are trying to keep the values of their parents and grandparents, and still fit in with the students and cultures surrounding them. This dual search often confuses students and causes anxiety as they seek their own identity but attempt to live with other cultures. School systems and individual schools themselves can be extremely powerful agents in this process by providing insights to difficult cultural questions and issues facing students. Of course, a diverse school faculty can help by modeling behaviors that encourage classrooms to be settings where differences can be observed and studied. These same classrooms can help students begin to share, respect, and learn how to work with others. But it all starts by discovering and acknowledging individual and cultural differences and then by focusing on those things common to the group. To get a better picture classrooms that strive to be sensitive and aware four steps/stages for investigating cultural differences in classrooms have been developed and will now be discussed

Facility Targeting, Protection and Mission Decision Making Using the VISAC Code

The Visual Interactive Site Analysis Code (VISAC) has been used by DTRA and several other agencies to aid in targeting facilities and to predict the associated collateral effects for the go, no go mission decision making process. VISAC integrates the three concepts of target geometric modeling, damage assessment capabilities, and an event/fault tree methodology for evaluating accident/incident consequences. It can analyze a variety of accidents/incidents at nuclear or industrial facilities, ranging from simple component sabotage to an attack with military or terrorist weapons. For nuclear facilities, VISAC predicts the facility damage, estimated downtime, amount and timing of any radionuclides released. Used in conjunction with DTRA's HPAC code, VISAC also can analyze transport and dispersion of the radionuclides, levels of contamination of the surrounding area, and the population at risk. VISAC has also been used by the NRC to aid in the development of protective measures for nuclear facilities that may be subjected to attacks by car/truck bombs

Porous silica spheres as indoor air pollutant scavengers

Porous silica spheres were investigated for their effectiveness in removing typical indoor air pollutants, such as aromatic and carbonyl-containing volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and compared to the commercially available polymer styrene-divinylbenzene (XAD-4). The silica spheres and the XAD-4 resin were coated on denuder sampling devices and their adsorption efficiencies for volatile organic compounds evaluated using an indoor air simulation chamber. Real indoor sampling was also undertaken to evaluate the affinity of the silica adsorbents for a variety of indoor VOCs. The silica sphere adsorbents were found to have a high affinity for polar carbonyls and found to be more efficient than the XAD-4 resin at adsorbing carbonyls in an indoor environment

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