Senior Bucket List: The Perlman Teaching Museum

Historically, Carleton has been a diverse campus with a wide range of activities and events for both students and the Northfield community. There are several traditions that every Carl ought to complete to get a full Carleton experience. But the list is so long that it’s impossible to get to all of them.

To make it easier for Carls to choose, two seniors—Charlotte Duong and Jennifer Kwon—have compiled a Senior Bucket List of activities that students should complete before graduation. First up: Visit the Perlman Teaching Museum.

“Independent of Thought” celebrates the 150th year of Carleton’s history. (photo by Charlotte Duong)

Camille Sanchez ‘17 (Cinema and Media Studies) remembers her first time visiting the Perlman.

Her dad came to campus spring of her freshman year, so Sanchez took him to the museum inside the Weitz Center for Creativity to show off Carleton. Her dad enjoyed the Perlman because of how varied the art was.

Since then, Sanchez has been visiting the museum each term to see new exhibits or simply appreciate amazing art so close by.

“I really like how diverse it is—different artifacts and completely different exhibitions,” Sanchez says. “The exhibit last spring had rocks and a huge video projection on the background. It was really cool because it used such different methods of art.”

Sanchez is not alone. Many seniors who have discovered the museum usually come back for other exhibits. Suhail Thandi ‘17 (Cinema and Media Studies/Political Science/IR) is a regular because “there’s so much stuff.”

“There are new and exciting exhibits all the time, and it’s free,” he says. “It’s just a fun place to be because it’s so quiet.”

According to the museum’s website, the Perlman—as a teaching museum—values the function that art plays in raising questions about life. To raise multiple questions, the museum changes its exhibition every school term.

 This fall’s exhibits are “MICHI—Distinctive Paths, Shared Affinity,” and “Independence of Thought: An Unfolding Story, 1866-2016.” MICHI displays sixteen Japanese and Japanese-American ceramic artists who are all living and working in the United States. By introducing contemporary ceramics to new audiences, the exhibit shows the individual artistic paths converging in a common link of Japan. 

“Independent of Thought” celebrates the 150th year of Carleton’s history through five main eras, with a focus on how Carleton students lived, grew, and expressed themselves throughout time. It showcases objects, photographs, texts, and voices from each era. The exhibit was curated by members of visiting professor Gary Vikan’s spring 2016 “The Art of Exhibitions” class.

Although the museum is a popular attraction to many members of the Northfield community, a significant number of seniors still haven’t been inside. The Weitz is located only two blocks from the main part of campus but can easily be missed by students who don’t see it every day while rushing to class.

But students who have walked into the museum enjoy coming back for more. Sonia Lee ‘18 (Studio Art/Sociology/Anthropology) already had the Perlman checked off her list during freshman year.

“I had a class in Weitz. I knew it was here, but I never noticed it,” she says. “The museum was so quiet and nobody was there, so I enjoyed the quietness and being able to immerse myself in the artwork. I come at least once a term now.”

The Perlman Teaching Museum is open Monday to Sunday during the academic year, and museum hours vary each day. Mon-Wed: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Thu-Fri: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sat-Sun: noon to 4 p.m.

This article was published on the Carleton's website. 

https://apps.carleton.edu/now/stories/?story_id=1487751 

[Al Jazeera] Morocco's colonial heritage in higher education

Morocco's colonial heritage in higher education

Students from underprivileged backgrounds suffer as universities continue to teach courses in French rather than Arabic.

by Jennifer Kwon

See the original article here written by Jennifer Kwon published in Al Jazeera: 

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/06/morocco-colonial-heritage-higher-education-160605103948305.html 

Teaching in Arabic was appealing to many Moroccans, a sign of their independence from France. But Arabic never reached the university level, especially in math and science [Jennifer Kwon/Al Jazeera]

Rabat, Morocco - When Widad Houmaid, 20, earned good marks in high school, she decided to enrol in a biology class at Hassan II University in Casablanca.

There was only one problem; Moroccan university professors teach science in French. Houmaid, a graduate of Moroccan public schools where maths and science are taught in Arabic, does not speak French.

She is now struggling in her biology class. "You have to speak French to get the professors' respect, and to get their attention," she said.

Moroccan science professors, she added, are failing their Arabic-speaking students. 

For help, Houmaid relies on YouTube videos like this one in which a science course on thermodynamics is taught in Arabic.

The language debate in Moroccan education dates back to the 1980s, when public schools switched from French, the teaching language established since Morocco was under French colonial rule, to Arabic.

Despite the switch at school level, Arabic did not become the teaching language at universities, particularly for maths or science. This was mainly due to a shortage of qualified teachers who spoke Arabic.

The switch was not without hurdles. According to Mohamed Melouk, a professor of research methodology and curriculum development at Mohammed V University in Rabat, the abrupt switch from French to Arabic caused problems for pupils.

"Students can work with any mathematical formulas, they can break down any computers or computer programme. But in terms of communication, the mastery of language, they are still poor," said Melouk. "If you give them the means, the instruments to communicate, they would go further."

Last December, Rachid Belmokhtar, the national education minister, made a controversial proposal to a go back to French for the teaching of maths, science, and physics studies in secondary schools. 

The move was vetoed by Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane, whose moderate Islamist political party strongly supports continuing teaching in Arabic.

However, Belmokhtar's proposal, which got the backing of the Moroccan King Mohammed VI, was approved in February by a council of ministers. Accordingly, the switch back to French for maths and science will be implemented over the next 15 years. 

Mohammed Ait El-Maati, 22, studied geology in Mohammed V University and is training to be a high school science teacher at Centre Pedagogique Regional, or CPR, a teacher-training school in Rabat. He recalls having trouble understanding the lectures and had to translate terminology from Arabic to French. But Ait El-Maati gradually figured it out and excelled in school.

Now, in yet one more language reversal, he will be using Arabic once again to teach in high school since the new decision will not be effective before 2030.  "I did 12 years in Arabic, three years of French, and now I have to go back to teaching people in Arabic. You need to have 'Google translate' in your head," said Ait El-Maati, laughing.

"I don't have problems teaching students, but I only have a problem understanding this system. Why are they doing this?"

According to Mohammed Ait El Maati, right, there are four students from African countries in his geology department and some have never spoken a word in French [Soukaina El Ouaai/Al Jazeera]

Moroccan education officials blame students' language difficulties on big class sizes and teachers who lack skills. According to a UNESCO report published in 2015, during the period from 2011-2014, the average student/class ratio for primary level was around 28-29 students per class. It has been increasing steadily at university level from 33 in 2001 to 38.4 in 2014.  

"In Morocco, more than 1,600 hours of French is offered [through high school] so students should be good in French," Lahcen Daoudi, the minister of higher education, scientific research and training, told Al Jazeera. "That is not a problem of hours of language learning, it is a problem of quality of work that is put in."

Two years ago, the Faculty of Science at Mohammed V University in Rabat started offering a beginner French class for students lagging behind in the language. Many students need the help, according to Asmaa Badhadi, 18, who is studying journalism at Institut Superieur de l'Information et de la Communication in Rabat. "The test made for students who don't speak good French was so easy. It was like choosing 'la maison' or 'le maison', but people still didn't pass the test," said Badhadi.

Nationwide, there were about 185,000 students enrolled in science programmes, according to government figures. But 85 percent of the students at the University of Hassan II Mohammedia - the country's most prestigious engineering school - said they struggle to be fluent enough in French to succeed in their studies, according to a 2014 study published in the Journal of Research & Method in Education.

A quarter said they have a lot of trouble understanding the French language, and 60 percent reported some problems with understanding the language. Only 5 percent of all Moroccans obtain university degrees and one reason, university professors say, is challenges with language proficiency.

"There are a lot of people who, after the first week, drop out of university because of this issue," said Nabila Guennouni, a second-year student in the computer science department at Hassan II University.

Wealthier parents have the privilege to enrol their children in private primary schools, that grants them much more exposure to the French language. In private schools, science and maths are taught both in Arabic and French, and French as a language class is taught from first grade.

"I think it would be better if the whole system was in English for scientific studies," said Oumayma El-Jahsani, an engineering student at CPGE Moulay Youssef, a school in Rabat. "Because even after you study in French, when you do research, sometimes you find books only in English." Complicating matters even further is a new government plan to give English a larger place in education. English will now be introduced starting in the fourth grade.

Students are studying for chemistry exams in the science library of Hassan II University in Casablanca. The library doesn't have any books, only rows of tables [Jennifer Kwon/Al Jazeera]

In public schools, however, students start learning French in fourth grade."You mess with the linguistic policy, you create a private system … What's the rationale behind this policy?" said Nabil Belkabir, the co-founder of UECSE a student-led movement to improve education.

According to Ben Saga, the director of the information and orientation division of the higher education ministry, the priority now is to have English language in higher level education, especially for PhDs and master's students. "It is very important for us to have this for scientific research, since the majority of it is in English," he told Al Jazeera. "Our PhD students find it difficult to have direct access to scientific research in the world if we only have Arabic or French. So for us, it is very important to have this."

Many Moroccan students say they like the new English language requirement, as they view fluency in the English language as an advantage, not only in school but also in the job market.

"English will be helpful for all because it’s easy and we can work with it," said Nassim El Garni, a third-year mathematics and computer science student at Mohammed V university

Others aren't so sure, seeing it as merely the continuation of the problems that have arisen with making French so necessary. 

"Is it possible for a country to develop if it speaks the language of another country or if it not capable of speaking its own language?" asks Hamza Alioua, spokesman for the UECSE and a second-year student at the Hassan II University.

Jennifer Kwon spent several months in Morocco as part of an SIT Study Abroad programme. This story was produced in association with Round Earth Media which is reclaiming international news. Soukaina El Ouaai contributed reporting. 

According to Mohammed Ait El Maati, right, there are four students from African countries in his geology department and some have never spoken a word in French [Soukaina El Ouaai/Al Jazeera]

Students are studying for chemistry exams in the science library of Hassan II University in Casablanca. The library doesn't have any books, only rows of tables [Jennifer Kwon/Al Jazeera]

Sarah Abdel-Jelil ’16 experiments with time-lapse photography

Sarah Abdel-Jelil '16 presents her senior comps. (Photo by Jennifer Kwon)

Passionate about dance and film, senior Sarah Abdel-Jelil, a cinema and media studies major from Northfield, incorporated both of these interests by using time-lapse photography for her Senior Comps project. Her film, titled "kerkethen," is approximately five minutes long and features multiple strings of photographs of students dancing from sunrise to sunset in the Arb. Fragments of a calm, female voice speaks about creation and process in a sonic backdrop complementing the visuals. Though separate from the scenes, the voice gently seeps in.

"I love videos of flowers and plants growing because you realize they really have a life of their own, but our perception of time doesn't allow us to see the movement of these things," explains Abdel-Jelil. "So I wanted to explore how the world is moving around us and how place is living in a way like it has its own life. The world breathes on its own."

She first got the idea of using time-lapse photography on a Carleton-funded trip to the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas last spring. There were multiple booths of companies advertising their products, and a GoPro brand stand had a display on time-lapse photography. Looking at the collection of their work, Abdel-Jelil was inspired to put meaning and intentionality onto seemingly impressive but empty motions.

“Time-lapse photography is a really original idea, especially since that I had never seen other Comps projects similar to this one,” says Camille Sanchez ‘17, a fellow CAMs major from France and one of the featured dancers in Abdel-Jelil’s film. “The way Sarah edited the photographs worked really well and gave an impression of continuity. Even the broken dance moves looked continuous since Sarah made sure of continuing the motions steps by steps.”

Abdel-Jelil additionally wanted to talk about time, specifically about the theme of change, as she looks forward toward graduation. She aimed to bring attention to how space changes after time; sometimes even when the space remains the same, we assume that the space has also changed since we changed ourselves.

“I wanted to bring attention to all these levels of time and how we perceive time in a certain way. Time lapse speeds up things, so you see movement in things you normally perceive as still, like plants growing,” said Abdel-Jelil.

She invited her friends and family to be the part of the process. Her friends were featured in the film as dancers and the anonymous female voice in the background is, in fact, her mom. Though she edited the sounds to make it more ambiguous and fragmented, the content remains the same.

“You know time has changed and have to embrace it, but sometimes you don’t want time to change and you resist it, so I wanted to show the hesitancy by repeating her voice and the flow by blocking it,” she explains.

Featuring her mom in the film was purely coincidental, and also perfect timing. When Abdel-Jelil was on crunch time with her rough cut and did not have any sound yet to work on, her mom happened to telephone. 

Since Abdel-Jelil had her sound equipment on-hand, she asked her mom to simply talk about what she loved and recorded the conversation. Her mom talked about being a parent, and as luck would have it, her words fit well with the footage that had been filmed. Their discussion of parenting also resembled the process of creating art and the importance of letting it off to grow on its own.

Though she does not have concrete plans after college, Abdel-Jelil hopes to pursue both dancing and film. One of her plans is to get a grant to further work on the theme of time-lapse photography in dance and another is to teach after she gets more experience in film.

“There are a lot of options,” Abdel-Jelil says with a smile.

This article is published on the Carleton website https://apps.carleton.edu/now/stories/?story_id=1388890

Marks '16 examines personality traits, identity styles, altruism

Brandon Marks ‘16 and his mother posing in front of his comps poster on Super Friday. (Photo: Brandon Marks)

Super Friday, an annual event at Carleton where senior psychology majors present their year-long comps project, took place April 22 this year. A psychology major with a concentration in educational studies, senior Brandon Marks (Chicago) presented the results of his study focused on the relationship between altruistic behavior, personality, and identity styles.

Marks began his research by conducting three surveys (utilizing Amazon Mechanical Turk, also known as Amazon MTurk, a crowdsourcing internet marketplace) aimed at identifying commonalities amongst personality traits, identity styles, and pro-social behavior.

In measuring personality, he focused on the “Big Five” personality traits -- openness to experience, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness. To consider identity styles, he categorized people into three groups -- informational style, normative style, and diffusive-avoidant style. To scale altruism, he asked questions such as how often the respondent held the door for someone or would be likely to push a car out of gas to the nearest gas station. The higher the likelihood, the more altruistic the person would be.

In the MTurk surveys, Marks restricted his demographic domestically, to avoid any confounding variables like culture or nationality. He also restricted the age of participants to between 18 and 25, approximately college age, although he did not collect any data from students at Carleton. He believed that college age students are confronted with more opportunities to learn about themselves and interact with pro-social behavior than other age groups.

“It’s different from what I intended to do in the beginning, but what I figured was that I should broaden the scope of my research to look at things more nationally and to not limit [my research] to the college campus,” explains Marks.

To his surprise, Marks discovered that normative style people, those who relied on the opinions and attitudes of their family and loved ones in forming their sense of identity, displayed the highest inclination in pro-social behavior. He originally thought informational style people would most likely to help people, since they are more proactive in seeking information about themselves than others.

“I think it’s because these are probably the values that [normative style individuals] were raised with within their homes. They were taught to help other people, and they might actively do charity or volunteer work with their loved ones,” reported Marks in his comps presentation.

Marks have been interested in pro-social behavior since he read an article in 2010 about a homeless man named Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax, who was stabbed while assisting a woman that was being mugged. Even though many people walked past by him, only three showed enough interest to report the incident to the police. The incident made Marks question what led this particular stranger to decide to help the woman, while others avoided engagement.

Following graduation, Marks plans to work at College Possible in St. Paul. He will be helping low-income students to transition successfully into college and provide assistance as they begin their academic career. Having served as a peer leader himself at Carleton, Marks enjoys forming relationships with first-year students and assisting them in making their experiences meaningful.

“I’ll be doing what I did, now but full time,” he remarks.

This article is published on the Carleton website https://apps.carleton.edu/now/stories/?story_id=1420988

Erwin Swaray ‘16 examines how odor impacts memory

Erwin Swaray ’16 (psychology major and neuroscience concentrator) vividly remembers the time he ran at a track tournament at University of Minnesota when he was younger, and had been outrun by a girl. But what unforgettable of that moment is not the fact that he lost, but the particular odor of a tree with pink flowers that he saw and smelt before the race. Since then, whenever he smells that odor, it takes him back to that time.

“It got me interested in how odor affects memory so I was thinking that my comps should be [on] how odor impacts what you remember,” explained Swaray. “By doing that, I’ve been able to create an experiment on how well you are able to recall according to which odor you smell.”

The topic of his comps is to examine the influence of an odor’s emotional salience when it acts as a retrieval cue for semantic memory. In other words, he intends to see if “emotional” odors influence, possibly enhance, a person’s memory when recalling a specific event. For example, in Swaray’s case, whether the smell of that tree did, in fact, help him recall his race at U of M more easily or not.

To find out the results of his hypothesis, he conducted mainly two separate experiments: a pilot study and the main study. He first tested 10 people on which scents evoked their strongest memory, meaning what smells proved to be the most emotional one, based on its familiarity, intensity, and pleasantness. Then he tested 40 people in his main study by making them recall pairs of words that they have seen while being exposed to different odors. The more pairs the subjects would remember, the more memory-evoking the odor proves to be.

One of his main study subjects, Khuaten Maaneb de Macedo ’16 (Biology) thought that memories of different words impacted how she recalled the incident but didn’t expect it had anything to with scent before the experiment.

“I feel like it may have hindered my memory a little bit because I was trying to figure out what exactly the smell was,” she said. “I know and I love coconut fragrances, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.”

Through his pilot study, he found out that despite individual differences, the smell of peppermint tended to evoke the most emotions from people while coconut being the least. His most emotional odor was the smell of popcorn. Through his main study, he discovered that the most emotional odor (mean value of the data was 9.5) led to a greater recall than the least emotional odor (mean value was 8.7), but the difference between the memory recall of the odors were not big enough to draw any significant conclusions.

However, Swaray believes that if his study was conducted in a larger scale, involving over 50 participants, he would have been able to see a greater trend and do further research on how odors impact memory. He hopes that it could even help students to study better and more effectively.

“If those odors can be used as a cognitive device when you are studying for a test, maybe you smell a particular odor and that’s going to help you recall the questions for the test better,” said Swaray.

After graduation, he wishes to work as a pharmacy technician and enroll in a pharmacy school, after taking more courses in chemistry and biology, to study about drugs and their effects.

This article was published on the Carleton website
https://apps.carleton.edu/now/stories/?story_id=1385350

From a national delicacy to common street food, the transformation of Pastillas

by Jennifer Kwon

The mini pastillas are significantly smaller than normal pastillas in size but the savory flavor remains. (Photo by Jennifer Kwon) 

RABAT, Morocco — Pastilla is one of the most beloved dishes in Morocco’s already renowned cuisine, but many Moroccans cannot afford to regularly eat the 16 inch diameter layered phyllo dough stuffed with meat, which can cost 450 dirhams (about 45 US dollars) in a country where minimum wage is $250 dollars a month..  That’s where Imane Allawi, 20, comes in — offering 3 inch diameter mini pastillas that she sells for just 8 dirhams each, less than one US dollar.

“Pastillas are very expensive because there is meat and so many spices. So not all Moroccans can afford them,” said Adnane Kiras, a regular customer of Allawi’s pastillas.

Situated in the alleyway off the bustling streets of the old Medina, or souk of Rabat, the capital, Allawi’s ten year old shop is crowded with children in the afternoon as they skip home from school, and adults in the evening as they finish up a long day at work. Every thirty minutes, Allawi fries a fresh batch of pre-made pastillas, which she carries to her storefront from her home kitchen every morning.

Along with pastillas, Allawi’s shop offers other cheap, convenient snacks that are filling enough to replace meals. (Photo by Jennifer Kwon)

The small pastillas are the size of a child’s palm. A dish of pastilla usually takes at least three hours to make and requires more than 10 different spices, according to Brahim El Ataoui, a chef and waiter at the Center for Cross Cultural Learning in Rabat.

“People used to kill 24, 25 to 30 small pigeons to make one dish of pastilla,” explained El Ataoui. “It is more common to make it with chicken now, but even then you need one and a half chickens.”

The sweet taste of toasted almonds, cinnamon, sugar and honey starkly contrast the salty flavor of shredded chicken pieces soaked in local spices, including turmeric, cumin, and saffron, and herbs, including coriander, wrapped in many layers of crisp, fried dough, known as phyllo.

Even in the eyes of a professional chef like El Ataoui, pastillas correlate with wealth and “spending money.” The street pastillas of Allawi attempt to break this barrier and bring this luxury dish to the tables of Moroccans from all walks of life.

This article was published in Reporting Morocco  http://morocco.roundearthmedia.org/from-a-national-delicacy-to-common-street-food-the-transformation-of-pastillas

CCC Administers the Auctions for Lloyd’s Credit Notes

Lloyd’s American Trust Litigation was a unique coupon settlement. Normally, coupons are for commodities or goods. Here the coupons were for liabilities and debt. Despite the complications involved, CCC again successfully handled the transactions and auctions of the certificates.

It all started in 2002 when Citibank was accused of violating its fiduciary duties and responsibilities as the trustee of the Lloyd’s American Trust Funds by the plaintiffs representing Lloyd’s of London class members who were damaged.

Citibank was held responsible of repeatedly transferring money from one trust fund to another without permission, engaging in commingling of different trust funds, and failing to maintain appropriate records of the fund’s transactions.

Even though Citibank denied the accusations, it settled by issuing $8,500,000 in cash and $11,500,000 in coupons to class members who were underwriting members of Lloyd’s. These coupons were called Credit Notes (“Notes”) and could be used to receive “equitas premium” credit to reinsure one’s liabilities for prior underwriting periods.

As a part of Lloyd’s Reconstruction and Renewal (R&R) plan, these Notes provided a means to compensate for losses during all periods before 1993, since the New York State Department of Insurance determined that Lloyd’s had not maintained the required minimum surplus.

Here, CCC stepped in as the broker and administrator of auctions for the Notes among class members. The court has granted CCC the authority to facilitate a secondary market for the Notes in order to increase the redemption rate.

These Notes were in effect coupons off of Lloyds services, in this case usable as debt relief. They were distributed according to each class members’ amount of debt: the more debt a class member held, the more Notes he or she received. The Notes could be used to pay for all or a portion of debt to Lloyd’s.

As a secondary market maker, CCC conducted auctions for class members who wished to sell a portion of their Notes or buy more Notes. The bargain price of the coupons was adjusted in each auction to accommodate the appropriate needs of the sellers and buyers of the coupons. 

In the end, CCC facilitated the transactions of approximately 67% of distributed credit notes. It was an impressively high rate, considering the fact that many class members had used their own credit notes to eliminate their debt. Through this case, it proved that CCC can not only successfully trade a good or a service but also accomplish trading debt relief.

This article was written during my internship at Chicago Clearing Corporation (CCC) in 2015.