An Education Focus in the Latest Issue of The Flame

The Spring 2013 edition of The Flame, the magazine of Claremont Graduate University, is another terrific look at what is happening within the institution that includes The Drucker School. I previously wrote about the Fall 2012 issue shortly after my visit to campus in Claremont, California last year. The current issue – as usual with an attractive layout and design — features education-related themes.

“Why They Stay” spotlights a dilemma: many of the math and science teachers who leave the profession each year are not retiring, but leaving for new careers. Several successful teaching fellows from a CGU Teacher Education special program to develop STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) teachers are profiled. For instance, Tristan Hann, in his third year teaching math at a high school in San Bernardino, is quoted on the realities of teaching a subject many people can’t stand: “You see a movie like Freedom Writers, where a teacher goes into an inner-city classroom and bonds with her students, and they all become like a family. And you’re like, I wanna be that teacher! That’s gonna be me! But of course that doesn’t happen, and that’s when you need that support group.”

The teaching theme continues in “A Good Teacher is Hard to Find,” about CGU Associate Professor Tom Luschei, and his global quest (with Michigan State University assistant professor Amita Chudgar) to improve the level of teaching for children in developing countries. The project has funding from UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund).

“The Educator” is a compelling profile of Jack Scott, a CGU Ph.D. alumnus who has had a long, fascinating career; including, among other things, being unanimously selected as the 14th chancellor of the California Community Colleges in 2008. He became chancellor in January 2009, after completing his second term in the California State Senate. He was president of Pasadena City College from 1987-1995, and holds a Master of Divinity degree from Yale University.

And “Two ways of thinking, one quest for truth,” describes the art installation created by CGU student Leslie Love Stone as a tribute to the children killed in the Newtown mass shooting last December. The article points out that “Stone’s art represents the intersection of the analytical and the metaphysical.”