Teacher Vital Signs: A Two-Country Study of Teacher Vitality

Defining teacher vitality as the vigor, energy, passion, and joy teachers bring to their classroom, students and colleagues; this article describes an international, comparative, qualitative, phenomenological study of teachers’ lived experiences to determine the elements influencing teacher vitality. This is a two-country, multiple-case study of twenty-one middle and high school teachers who had taught ten to twenty years. In order to serve as a confirmation of the universality of the elements of teacher vitality, the study was not only conducted in two different schools in Idaho, but also was replicated in two different schools in Austria. In each of the four participating schools, both high and low-vitality teachers were matched for similarities, then investigated to determine why—in the same school, with the same administration and colleagues, and with the same struggles and challenges—some teachers maintain their vitality while other teachers lose their vitality and may even want to leave the profession. Data in the form of field notes, interview transcripts, categorized relevant information, composite comparisons, and anecdotal stories are analyzed to isolate patterns in teachers’ perceptions of their vitality in the classroom. The goal of this analysis is to identify common themes and to develop principles to help teachers receive life, vigor, and enjoyment from their work. “If I could make the same amount of money doing something else, I would leave teaching,” said the teacher sitting next to me on the last day of a high-energy, informative teachers’ conference. Nicole and I visited for several minutes and her statement continued to bother me, particularly as she described dragging herself throughout each day. I thought about her students who are missing that special passion and vitality in the classroom. Based on my conviction that students need teachers who are passionate about helping students learn, I probed further, only to discover that the only thing that kept this teacher in the profession year after year in her deflated condition was retirement benefits. As I reflected on our discussion, I was saddened to think that she had been at a three-day conference and had experienced no personal renewal, no spark of encouragement, or new connections to reenergize her for her role in the classroom. If I could have taken Nicole’s vital signs that day, what would I have measured? Using the analogy of physical vital signs that doctors and nurses take to analyze health, I began a search to determine the elements of teacher vitality“If I could make the same amount of money doing something else, I would leave teaching,” said the teacher sitting next to me on the last day of a high-energy, informative teachers’ conference. Nicole and I visited for several minutes and her statement continued to bother me, particularly as she described dragging herself throughout each day. I thought about her students who are missing that special passion and vitality in the classroom. Based on my conviction that students need teachers who are passionate about helping students learn, I probed further, only to discover that the only thing that kept this teacher in the profession year after year in her deflated condition was retirement benefits. As I reflected on our discussion, I was saddened to think that she had been at a three-day conference and had experienced no personal renewal, no spark of encouragement, or new connections to reenergize her for her role in the classroom. If I could have taken Nicole’s vital signs that day, what would I have measured? Using the analogy of physical vital signs that doctors and nurses take to analyze health, I began a search to determine the elements of teacher vitalit

UA12/2/14 The Delt Letter

Electronic newsletter created by the Epsilon Xi chapter of Delta Tau Delta

DWT/PCA face recognition using automatic coefficient selection

In PCA-based face recognition, there is often a trade-off between selecting the most relevant parts of a face image for recognition and not discarding information which may be useful. The work presented in this paper proposes a method to automatically determine the most discriminative coefficients in a DWT/PCA-based face recognition system, based on their inter-class and intra-class standard deviations. In addition, the eigenfaces used for recognition are generally chosen based on the value of their associated eigenvalues. However, the variance indicated by the eigenvalues may be due to factors such as variation in illumination levels between training set faces, rather than differences that are useful for identification. The work presented proposes a method to automatically determine the most discriminative eigenfaces, based on the inter-class and intra-class standard deviations of the training set eigenface weight vectors. The results obtained using the AT&T database show an improvement over existing DWT/PCA coefficient selection techniques

How Māori precariat whānau navigate social services : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University, New Zealand

Rates of poverty and hardship are a persistent social concern in Aotearoa with far too many people, particularly Māori, vulnerable to insecurities in work, income, housing, food, and other essentials. In order to ‘make ends meet’, many people seek support from the welfare system, which has become less responsive to their needs. This has resulted in the need for advocates to support whānau to navigate services and access their entitlements for support. To understand such issues, it is useful to consider the concept of the ‘precariat’ or emerging social class of people who often find themselves rotating between insecure employment, unemployment and reliance on charity to survive. The purpose of this study was to investigate experiences of two precariat whānau in navigating welfare and social services in the context of the global rise of the precariat. I also explore the experiences of two service advocates who help precariat whānau in navigating the welfare system. The design and conduct of this study was guided by Kaupapa Māori Theory (KMT) and Kaupapa Māori Research (KMR) and utilized qualitative methods, including repeat semi-structured interviews. My approach enabled participants to share their experiences of how the present welfare system operates, their strategies for accessing resources, and the broader implications for precarity within everyday lives. Findings confirm the punitive nature of contemporary welfare provisions for whānau who find the system degrading and unresponsive. Despite the obstacles my participants face, they demonstrate considerable agency in navigating services themselves and in assisting others to access resources. In doing so, they demonstrate the enactment of core cultural values such as whanaungatanga and manaakitanga. The advocates in particular undertake their work in culturally-oriented ways as they support, teach, speak for, and protect whānau in navigating the welfare system. Such Kaupapa Māori-oriented support raises the possibilities of anti-oppressive welfare

A simple microcontroller based digital lock-in amplifier for the detection of low level optical signals

Traditionally digital lock-in amplifiers sample the input signal at a rate much higher than the lock-in reference frequency and perform the lock-in algorithm with high-speed processors. We present a small and simple digital lock-in amplifier that uses a 20 bit current integrating analogue-to-digital converter interfaced to a microcontroller. The sample rate is set to twice the reference frequency placing the sampled lock-in signal at the Niquest frequency allowing the lock-in procedure to be performed with one simple algorithm. This algorithm consists of a spectral inversion technique integrated into a highly optimised low-pass filter. We demonstrate a system with a dynamic range of 103dB recovering signals up to 85dB below the interference