Runner-up Project: Action Research Project

“Nearly one in five children come from a home where English is not the native language and more than one in four children are Hispanic where Spanish is the primary language spoken” (Correa, Mackiewicz, & Miller, 2017, p. 209). Classrooms are more diverse now than they ever have been before. Even though this diversity greatly enriches the culture of a classroom, many teachers are not equipped with the teaching techniques to engage children who have traveled from other countries to the United States. The world of English Language Learners (ELL) and the programs that exist to help these children acclimate to an entirely new environment and language is fascinating. After gathering information from a variety of peer-reviewed resources and articles, I discovered that most children who immigrated from other countries to America are often left behind in a general education classroom because they are overwhelmed with the move into a new country and cannot quickly pick up on the English language. Unfortunately, some teachers equate the child’s inability to grasp a new language to the need for special services. Instead of assessing where children are at using methods designed to test their knowledge base in their native language, the classroom teacher sends them off to someone else in special education. The problem with this sendoff is that most children with English as a second language need a different teaching approach and a heightened focus on visual cues as well as support from ELL interventions, not a referral for special education resources. For my Action Research Project, I will examine how general education teachers can use ELL interventions and different teaching techniques to help students with English as a second language participate more often in class and truly grasp the knowledge that is available to them. Some of these teaching techniques and interventions include increasing family participation within the classroom, incorporating read alouds, authentic conversations that discuss feelings or opinions, independent or guided writing opportunities, and small group instruction, as well as increasing vocabulary instruction and reading comprehension skills (Schmitt, Snyder, & Witmer, 2017). Of course, each student is unique and some interventions that are helpful for one child may not be as impactful for another. In my own future classroom, I would incorporate these various intervention methods and then determine how successful they are by observing student engagement. In order to determine how engaged these students are in the classroom, I will also be looking at student participation in class and how they communicate with others in group projects and in-class activities

Integral models of moduli spaces of shtukas with deep Bruhat-Tits level structures

We construct integral models for moduli spaces of shtukas with deep Bruhat-Tits level structures. We embed the moduli space of global shtukas for a deep Bruhat-Tits group scheme into the limit of the moduli spaces of shtukas for all associated parahoric group schemes. Its schematic image defines an integral model of the moduli space of shtukas with deep Bruhat-Tits level with favourable properties: They admit proper, surjective and generically \'etale level maps as well as a natural Newton stratification. In the Drinfeld case, this general construction of integral models recovers the moduli space of Drinfeld shtukas with Drinfeld level structures.Comment: Background material on moduli spaces of shtukas substantially rewritten and reorganised, main result slightly generalised, further minor corrections. 38 pages, Comments welcome

Days of the dim: the postmodern poetics and hope of Anne Waldman

Language defines the survival and persistence of the human species. Poetics has been one of the most revered forms of both oral and written languages. Over the ages, poetry in the English language has morphed and evolved into new shapes and forms. Most striking is the recent transformation from the high modernist ideals left over from the Victorian period into the new, variable, powerful style of postmodern poetics. One poet to command the dominion of the postmodern poetic style is the seductive and passionate Anne Waldman. She builds on all masters of language, particularly those closest to her, such as Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac. She inspires zeal among her mass audience, makes them thirst for more in both life and spirit, and she commands attention from those who fear her most

Knife edge skimming for improved separation of molecular species by the deflector

A knife edge for shaping a molecular beam is described to improve the spatial separation of the species in a molecular beam by the electrostatic deflector. The spatial separation of different molecular species from each other as well as from atomic seed gas is improved. The column density of the selected molecular-beam part in the interaction zone, which corresponds to higher signal rates, was enhanced by a factor of 1.5, limited by the virtual source size of the molecular beam.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figure

Comparing the carbon costs and benefits of low-resource solar nowcasting

Solar PV yield nowcasting is used to help anticipate peaks and troughs in demand to support grid integration. This paper compares multiple low-resource approaches to nowcasting solar PV yield, using a dataset of UK satellite imagery and solar PV energy readings over a 1 to 4-hour time range. The paper also estimates the carbon emissions generated and averted by deploying models, and finds that even small models that could be deployable in low-resource settings may have a benefit several orders of magnitude greater than its carbon cost. The paper also examines prediction errors and the activations in a CNN