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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Colleges and universities often donate infrastructure to the towns in which they reside as a way to contribute to their community and offset their tax exempt status. Providence recently created a new position, filled by Jenn Steinfeld, director of strategic partnerships and economic advancement, who will work with colleges and universities and hospitals to ensure that all […]
As a theater performance major at Rhode Island College (1988-1992), I was fortunate enough to experience part of what many feel were the “golden years” of the program. Given the choices to attend Emerson or NYU, I chose RIC, not just as a financial fallback, but also because RIC had the reputation as one of […]
Wampanoag means “People of the First Light.” Having lived in Cape Cod for at least 10,000 years, they are one of the longest continuous cultures in the Americas. In 2015, the Obama administration placed 321 acres of land in Taunton, Mass, into the trust of the Department of the Interior (DOI) for the development of […]
Take a Nike, Kaepernick Since the cloudy dawn of humanity, snot-nosed children have been stomping their feet and smashing their toys when petulance gets the better of them. And since the rainswept twilight of humanity, exasperated parents have been tearing out their hair as the little feckers run amok, refusing to listen to reason or […]