Why We’ve Had Enough
“Did you hear about the shooting down the street from your school?” My heart dropped. A waitress at my job broke the news to me that a few streets over from my school, The Met High School, another shooting took place after school hours. I was shocked; I still am actually. Not only was this […]
Brown Students Put a Satellite into Earth Orbit
“The flashing is what we use to get people excited about” the satellite, designed and built by Brown University undergraduate students, that was launched into earth orbit from the International Space Station (ISS) in July, said Jacob Leiken, one of the project directors with Brown Space Engineering (BSE). “Our primary mission is to make space […]
This Ain’t No Party: Lessons from the primaries
As polling places closed in RI on the evening of a rainy primary election day, there was a 50-minute period of relative calm before news outlets began to report the early returns. This political hurricane’s eye provided a moment to assess the situation at hand, and after a months-long campaign season, ramped-up in intensity in the […]
Immigration Enforcement and Public Schools
As RI settles into another school year, the nation continues to deal with a summer marked by news stories of detention camps, family separations and protests in response to the Trump administration’s immigration policies. According to the American Immigration Council, RI has a large immigrant population, including many immigrants from the Dominican Republic — 30,000 […]
If You See Something, Say Something: Our writer has something to get off his chest
Last place aversion is the heuristic bias in which people support measures that ensure they don’t fall to last place, even if that means acting against the greater good and their own best interests. It happens when uncomfortable is confused with unsafe. Americans’ growing inability to differentiate between real danger and discomfort is an invasive cancer […]
Shooting Our Mouths Off
After the recent shooting of William Parsons, Motif‘s writers had a lot to say about gun violence in our state. Check it out and send us your thoughts. Jonathan Jacobs explains his belief that guns are just part of our culture: Opinion: If You See Something, Say Something Staff writer Mike Bilow is Team Motif‘s dissenting […]
About Our Cover
As we were preparing our annual education issue, shots rang out and 15-year-old William Parsons became the victim of gun violence in the shadow of a Providence school. For weeks, we’d prepared stories on innovative education concepts, higher ed trends and places to find the all-important late-night slice, but none of these concepts in modern […]
SkillsUSA Helps Students Take Ownership of Their Education
When you picture high school, generally a barrage of John Hughes movies come flooding in: cheerleading, football games, debate club, prom, pep rallies. And when I made the switch from teaching middle school to high school, those events were the ones I expected to see. So imagine my surprise when during the second week of school we […]
RI Writing Project: Providing a lifeline for teachers
If you walk into any high school during the first few days of a school year, you’ll probably encounter some form of professional development. Often, it’s representative of the newest, flashiest thing in education, and the program only gets fancier once you upgrade to the premium version. The Rhode Island Writing Project’s (RIWP) professional development trainings […]