The Absolutely Relevant Remedy for Part-time Readers: Pairing Classic and YA Literature

Overview: During seventh and eighth grade, I read seventy-six young adult novels aside from required reading, with book logs from middle school to prove it. But, ask me what I enjoyed reading in high school, and I would have to think for a while. High school curricula forced me to read Shakespeare and classic novels without a hint of modern young adult literature involved. Not only did the uninteresting and outdated novels make classroom reading and assignments excruciating, but the distance between my life and the books that I was required to read discouraged my willingness to read much more. Barbara G. Samuels, a professor at the University of Houston, reports in her article, “Young Adult Literature: Young Adult Novels in the Classroom?” that, based on a 1975 study of English classrooms, the most commonly used novels were A Separate Peace, The Scarlet Letter, Lord of the Flies, and To Kill a Mockingbird (86). Now, these titles are from 1975, but they were the staples of my English curricula from 2010 to 2014. Thirty-five years later, I was a student sitting in a classroom still reading, analyzing, testing, and writing essays on the same old characters, the now historical context, and the unfamiliar language and syntax that required decoding. As Junior from Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian would say, “I couldn’t believe it. How horrible is that?” (31). I still can’t believe it, it’s still horrible, and I’m still not much of a reader. Author\u27s Reflection: My name is Claire Sauter and I am a Media Management major with an Ethics minor at St. John Fisher College. I am also a Service Scholar, the marketing chair for Students Who Advocate Volunteering (SWAV) club, a Peer Colleague for an English 101 course, and a member of the Teddi Dance for Love committee. I grew up in the small town of Carthage, NY, but my family is moving to the Adirondacks in the coming year. Professor Barry began the Young Adult Literature RW course by asking the class questions about our favorite books, discussing novels we read in middle school and high school, and helping us to define YAL. I found that one of my challenges was shared among other students in my class – the high school English curricula did not help to inspire reading outside of school work. Turning my experience into a thesis, I argued that integrating modern and relevant young adult novels into the instruction of the English canon may help students continue to read for pleasure or curiosity even after their class is over. Developing the structure of this argument and balancing it with examples was difficult. However, the 199 course emphasized different outlining processes that greatly helped me and my peers. The freedom of the course allowed me to practice different writing styles, which is something that I never thought would be flexible within research writing. I enjoyed taking a risk and creating a conversation between characters within The Absolutely True Diary of Part-Time Indian and my own voice. The 199 Research Writing course is integral to a college student’s development of writing skills. As part of the Fisher Core goals, the course has taught me how to develop an argument, navigate libraries and databases for relevant research, read critically for quality information, and compose long-form pieces of writing. Each skill is applicable to all educational programs at St. John Fisher and has helped me to analyze readings and write for classes ranging from Ethics and Multimedia Writing to Public Relations and Business Communications. Mrs. Barry\u27s Summary: Claire came into my class with the skills of a good writer. What this class enabled her to do was couple those skills with her research skills to produce a writing that is not only worthy of 3690 but worthy of the attention of high school English teachers struggling to get their students to read the Classics. As far as my role in her writing, it was more of a conversation about her paper - where she wanted to go with it, how she went with it and what she might need to do more to make her argument solid. These conversations could be compared to what an editor might do with any good writer because Claire, herself, edited, re-edited and edited her work again before even coming to see me. So, in our meetings, we actually talked. It was truly a pleasure “talking” with Claire

Talking Trade: Language Barriers in Intra-Canadian Commerce

This paper tests for one mechanism that can explain the existence of a language barrier to trade. Specifically, I ask if those industries that require more cross-border communication in order to export their products trade more between Canadian provinces that know the other's language(s). I find that trade in industries with a need to communicate directly (orally) with importers increases with the probability that people in another province speak the same language. This finding can fill a missing link in the empirical trade literature, which lacked convincing arguments for the observed correlation between language commonality and the total volume of trade.Language, Trade cost, Gravity model, Canada

Stability estimate for the Helmholtz equation with rapidly jumping coefficients

The goal of this paper is to investigate the stability of the Helmholtz equation in the high- frequency regime with non-smooth and rapidly oscillating coefficients on bounded domains. Existence and uniqueness of the problem can be proved using the unique continuation principle in Fredholm's alternative. However, this approach does not give directly a coefficient-explicit energy estimate. We present a new theoretical approach for the one-dimensional problem and find that for a new class of coefficients, including coefficients with an arbitrary number of discontinuities, the stability constant (i.e., the norm of the solution operator) is bounded by a term independent of the number of jumps. We emphasize that no periodicity of the coefficients is required. By selecting the wave speed function in a certain \resonant" way, we construct a class of oscillatory configurations, such that the stability constant grows exponentially in the frequency. This shows that our estimates are sharp.Comment: a) Added references, b) rewritten the introduction with a summary of the results/techniques of the paper, c) Corrected typo

Fast and stable contour integration for high order divided differences via elliptic functions

In this paper, we will present a new method for evaluating high order divided differences for certain classes of analytic, possibly, operator valued functions. This is a classical problem in numerical mathematics but also arises in new applications such as, e.g., the use of generalized convolution quadrature to solve retarded potential integral equations. The functions which we will consider are allowed to grow exponentially to the left complex half plane, polynomially to the right half plane and have an oscillatory behaviour with increasing imaginary part. The interpolation points are scattered in a large real interval. Our approach is based on the representation of divided differences as contour integral and we will employ a subtle parameterization of the contour in combination with a quadrature approximation by the trapezoidal rule