March 10, 2012

An Interview with Anna McConnell

Anna McConnell is a sophomore majoring in Human Biology. Originally from the town of Boothbay in Maine, she has long been an advocate for global public health and socioeconomic equality. After graduating high school, she spent a year doing volunteer work in both Uganda and India. Here on campus, she writes for the Stanford Journal of Public Health and is recognized as one of the leading organizers of the Occupy Stanford movement. Like on many other campuses, Occupy Stanford emerged last fall as a group hoping to mirror and amplify the sentiments of Occupy protests happening around the world. For the past few months, she has also been involved with the nascent Occupy Education movement. Its goal is to bring attention to the problems within California’s public education system, specifically: rising tuition costs, skyrocketing student debt, and increasing privatization. Last week, Occupy Education California held a ninety-nine-mile march from Oakland to Davis and then on to the state capitol building in Sacramento. She talks to us about her work with these organizations, her experiences with the marchers, and her views about activism and civil disobedience.

CARDINAL DIRECTIONS
Episode 107: “Anna McConnell”
March 10, 2012
8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.

March 3, 2012

An Interview with Arun Prasad

Arun Prasad is a senior majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Originally from the nearby town of Los Gatos, he has devoted much of his time outside of class to learning and studying the Sanskrit language. Not only has he mastered its phonology, morphology, and grammar, but he has also read and analyzed a remarkable amount of Sanskrit’s vast corpus of literature and poetry. Since the first quarter of his junior year, he has been independently working on several computational projects to help facilitate the study of Sanskrit. Using his knowledge of web design, natural language processing, and machine learning, he has built two exceptionally comprehensive websites. His first website – a step-by-step grammar guide – has already been used by thousands. Of the 23,000,000 results returned by a Google search for the phrase “Learn Sanskrit,” the grammar guide has been ranked at number one for the past year. His second website is an annotated reading library. Its goal is to make some of most daunting works of Sanskrit poetry and drama accessible to the most inexperienced of students. The annotations are not done by hand. Instead, they are generated automatically by a part-of-speech tagger and grammatical parser that he has been programming for the past several months. He talks to us about his various computational projects, his ideas about web-based approaches to classical pedagogy, and the importance of the Sanskrit language.

CARDINAL DIRECTIONS
Episode 106: “Arun Prasad”
March 3, 2012
8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.

February 25, 2012

An Interview with Charmaine Mangram

Charmaine Mangram is a doctoral student in the School of Education. Originally from the neighborhood of Watts, in Los Angeles, she did her undergraduate work at Williams College, where she majored in Mathematics Education. Upon graduating, she was selected to be a Teach For America corps member and taught high-school math in Mercedes, Texas. A year later, she returned to Southeast L.A. to work at Locke High School as both an instructor of Algebra and AP Calculus as well as a Guiding Teacher. After three years with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), she began working at Ànimo Inglewood Charter High – a school operated by the Green Dot network of public charters. While continuing to teach math in Inglewood, she also served as a Mentor Teacher and completed a master’s degree in Education at Mount St. Mary’s College. Later, while studying to clear her Teaching Credential, she returned to LAUSD in a more advisory role. Under the direction of the Urban Education Partnership, she worked as a Math Literacy Coach, first at Samuel Gompers Middle School, in Southeast L.A., and then at the King Drew Medical Magnet High School. In addition to doing this work for the city, she founded the Parents’ Academic Support Network – a nonprofit seeking to empower parents and students by providing them an inside look at the Los Angeles school system. Here at Stanford, her research focuses on the often-overlooked areas of Curriculum Studies and Teacher Education. She talks to us about teaching, learning, and innovating in our nation’s public schools. 

CARDINAL DIRECTIONS
Episode 105: “Charmaine Mangram”
February 25, 2012
8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.