After receiving Linfield’s Campus Outstanding Service Award for three consecutive years and achieving 2,000 plus hours of service last year, Linfield’s Kappa Sigma Fraternity has begun to build a reputation it is proud to uphold.

“Community service is important to us,” said sophomore Dylan Ruef, grand master of Kappa Sigma.

Service is one of the four pillars for Kappa Sigma, a pillar it is proud of having represent its fraternity.
The other three pillars include scholarship, leadership and fellowship.

Kappa Sigma has collaborated with McMinnville Wastewater Services division to help protect local rivers and streams.

The group has put up “no dumping” signs around McMinnville in an effort to stop pollution, as well as, to give back to the community.

By doing this, the group hopes to encourage McMinnville residents to avoid dumping in the water, as well as, to remind residents that storm water; continues to go untreated into the rivers.

In addition to aiding the community with water safety and awareness, Kappa Sigma is also known for its community service to the Special Olympics with bowling during the fall and with aiding them with track and field in the spring.

The men also spend a lot of their volunteering time at soup kitchens.

So far this year, they have reached a little more than 1,000 hours of community service and plan on gaining even more by the end of the semester.

“[We are] always looking
for stuff to do [and] ways to give back,” Ruef said.

Kappa Sigma plans to continue with its good
service reputation and always encourages others in Greek life, as well as those in the Linfield
community, to come join in with volunteer activities.
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Samantha Sigler/News editor
Samantha Sigler can be reached at linfieldreviewnews@gmail.com

A Pacific University professor was invited to discuss how manifolds are constructed and explained the different aspects of surfaces. Students, faculty, and visiting professors filled the audience. The event was a part of the weekly science colloquium series.

Bill Breslin, assistant professor of Mathematics, focused his presentation on “What Are Those Surfaces Doing in My Hyperbolic 3-Manifold?”

Topics discussed included 3-manifolds, Heegard surfaces, surface bundles and fibers, hyperbolic 3-manifolds and principal curvatures.

He began by describing what 2-manifolds are and how they are constructed.

“You can’t wander off into infinity in a compact 2-manifold,” Breslin said.

Breslin then explained how to construct a surface by using the example of cutting an octagon in half.

Breslin decided to go into topology due to liking the visualization of it and the pictures. He even displayed an image of the doodles in his research journal and also those that his 6-year-old son composed.

Before going more in depth, Breslin discussed why people study 3-manifolds. One of the reasons he included was that we live in a 3-manifold.

Breslin discussed how mathematicians like cut-and-paste topology. This idea comes from the concept of cutting these objects apart and pasting them back together.

He said that by drawing
where the loops are in a surface will help determine where the 3-manifold is.

He gave an explanation of what a 3-topus was given and shown why it is a part of 3-manifolds.

“If I looked up at the top of the ceiling, I would see my feet,” Breslin said.

The main topic that Breslin covered was hyperbolic 3-manifolds. He then described principal curvatures and how they can be changed. Breslin stated that flat curvatures equal zero and that you can change the principal curvature by isotaping it.

With this information, he began to discuss his own personal results to his research.

The main question that he tried to answer was, “What can you say about the geometry of typological important surfaces?”

Breslin found that it is possible to flatten Heegaard surfaces and fibers in hyperbolic 3-manifolds to a certain extent.

During his first year teaching at the University of Michigan, Breslin decided to figure out how close to one the constant C can be. His results found that the closest it can get is to the interval [-1,1]. He received his doctorate from University of California in Davis.

“That’s what I want to do all day is draw pictures,” Breslin said. “It’s a very rich subject. A lot comes out of it.”
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Ivanna Tucker/Features editor
Ivanna Tucker can be reached at linfieldreviewfeatures@gmail.com

Graduating Gustavus Adolphus senior Resada Ward, 21, second from left, sits in a medical sociology lecture on the final day of class at the small liberal arts college, May 13, 2009, in St. Peter, Minnesota. David Joles/Minneapolis Tribune/MCT

Already inclined toward liberalism, college freshmen are leaning even farther left on key political issues, a nationwide survey of first-year students has found.

An all-time high of 71.3 percent of the new students support same-sex marriage, 6.4 percentage points higher than in 2009, according to the annual survey of more than 200,000 freshmen conducted by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute.

Nearly 43 percent of conservative freshmen said gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry.

Opinions on abortion, marijuana legalization, immigration and affirmative action also grew more liberal in 2011, according to data released Wednesday. The 270-school survey—the country’s largest sampling of college students—was first used in 1966.

“It’s not so much that liberal students are becoming more liberal,” said Linda DeAngelo, one of the report’s authors. “It’s that students who describe themselves as conservative are becoming more progressive.”

A little more than 22 percent of respondents described themselves as conservative or “far right.” About 30 percent said they were liberal or “far left,” while 47.4 percent called themselves “middle of the road.”

Despite the apparent liberalization, political advocates hoping to recruit students to their causes need to realize the survey is more reflective of young people’s tolerance on social issues, not enthusiasm, said Ange-Marie Hancock, a political science professor at the University of Southern California.

“They’re not like ATMs, where you can just withdraw their support,” she said. “You have to cultivate them as voters.”

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Matt Krupnick/Contra Costa Times

Teachers have been under a hot spotlight in recent years, blamed for public education’s shortcomings. Now the colleges that train them are feeling the heat.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is calling for reforms in the nation’s education schools, arguing too many are “mediocre” and send out graduates who aren’t ready to teach.

In a speech last month, Duncan noted 62 percent of new teachers reported feeling unprepared. He called that figure from a 2006 study “staggering.”

The Florida Department of Education has crunched student-test-score data and tied results back to teachers’ education schools, looking to tease out which institutions are best. That effort could ramp up into a more-detailed rating system for all Florida’s education schools.

The most intense, and controversial, scrutiny likely will come when teacher colleges find themselves graded A to F next year, with the results posted in U.S. News & World Report.

Florida’s college and universities, which produce about 7,000 teacher candidates a year, chafe at the criticism and object to the new efforts to grade, judge and rank them. They are confident they do a good job preparing new teachers, noting most school districts happily snap up their graduates.

Sandra Robinson, dean of the University of Central Florida’s College of Education, thinks the broad-brush complaints aren’t fair to her school, which produces
more teachers than any other in the state.

“Certainly, there is a sense of frustration with regard to that,” she said, as UCF graduates leave ready for the classroom.

“Our students—absolutely, no question in the 95th percentile or the 98th percentile—feel not just prepared but well-prepared,” she added.

Elizabeth Brumer, a UCF education major, would agree—to a point.

Brumer, in her last semester of college, is a confident student-teacher at Grand Avenue Primary Learning Center in Orlando.

But she wonders how her strong skills will seem when she is a full-fledged teacher with a classroom of her own. Without the support of an experienced teacher, one of her friends went from “star intern” to “struggling” teacher after graduation.

“I feel like they prepare us very well,” she said of her UCF professors, but they should probably provide students more opportunities “to take on their own class and develop their own methods.”

That is one of the key concerns prompting the new focus on education schools: that would-be teachers do not get enough practice teaching before they start full-time work. Some worry that fuels high turnover in the field. In Florida, after five years on the job, 40 percent of new teachers have left the profession, state data show.

Other complaints: Teacher
colleges are not selective enough in whom they admit—elementary education teachers have average SAT scores below the national mean—and don’t give would-be teachers sufficient skills to teach their curriculum or instruct diverse groups of students.

Florida has begun preliminary work on a detailed rating system for its teacher programs, one that would encourage better “field experiences” for education students, said Kathy Hebda, the Education Department’s deputy chancellor for educator quality.

The state’s 2-year-old effort to tie student growth on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test to teacher programs is a “first step” in that effort.

“Teacher preparation is a vital part of having the best teachers in our classroom,” she added.

Florida’s teacher-education schools, though working with the state, are not willing participants in the U.S. News review. The state’s public-records laws, however, mean that these institutions will be graded in the magazine’s first-ever rating of the nation’s more than 1,000 teacher-preparation schools.

“There’s definitely a quality issue with teacher-preparation programs in this country,” said Arthur McKee, the council’s managing director of teacher-preparation studies. “We’re not where we need to be.”

The review, due out in fall 2012, has the support of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of large, urban school districts that includes Orange County and five other big Florida school systems.

The group sent a support letter in August saying “too many Colleges of Education are graduating students who are poorly prepared academically and not ready to provide quality instruction in our urban classrooms.”

Many educators accept that education schools don’t provide new teachers everything they need to do well on the job.

Volusia County schools, in partnership with its teachers union, this year devised a new mentor program for beginning teachers, seeking to bridge the gap between college and classroom.

Many new teachers struggle to manage their classes, said Michele McCoy, a veteran teacher who works in the new peer-assistance program.

“That’s common across new teachers since the beginning of time,” she said.

McCoy said colleges could do more to help students with practical skills instead of spending so much time teaching about educational theories.

“That’s a background piece,” McCoy said. “What new teachers need is, ‘What is it supposed to look like in a modern classroom?’ “

Lindsey Roseboom is a new first-grade teacher at Pride Elementary in Deltona. McCoy is her mentor and her “go-to professional friend.”

McCoy’s regular classroom visits and constant advice have made Roseboom’s year easier, she said. “It’s great to have someone that’s on your side, walking with you.”

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Leslie Postal and Denise-Marie Balona/The Orlando Sentinel