Word: tending
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...towards the former; in 21 of the 26 Harvard Summer School Programs for 2009, participants will live with other students either in dorms or in a hotel. Students mostly attend classes at a local university. In this setup it is hard to get maximum exposure to another culture. Students tend to become friends with the people they associate with the most: their classmates and housemates. These are usually other Americans or foreigners who can speak English and are familiar with American norms. In effect, students create an American bubble in another country. They live, study, and socialize within a group...
...existing mainly within this safe social space, students studying abroad drastically reduce their ability to understand another culture. Whenever they experience something significant, it is filtered and interpreted by several different like-minded perspectives. Such experiences themselves are limited because, in another university environment, students tend to drift toward a lifestyle similar to the one they practiced at home. The standard class-study-party triad rebuilds itself with a more interesting background. There is little opportunity for interaction with locals and local culture, other than with shopkeepers and teachers—relationships that will always be one-sided...
...Even if a student doesn’t become close friends with his or her co-workers, he or she would still benefit from the exposure to the daily lives of a broad cross-section of a foreign society. Demographics in a university or college tend not to reflect the demographics of a society at large. This is more significant in poorer countries where the university population tends to include more and more of the upper classes. However, all universities are unnaturally homogenous with respect to age. In the workplace, your boss, your receptionist, and your colleagues would...
...from our fear of the awkward, from our internet obsession to our political preferences. Consider college social culture. Relationships are awkward. Hookups? Like relationships, but without the awkward parts where you go bowling and talk about your feelings. Calling people on the phone? Awkward. Texting? Less awkward, unless you tend to type in complete sentences with proper capitalization...
...praise for Shinseki, 66, needs to be calibrated. While he believed that more troops were needed in post-invasion Iraq, he didn't believe it strongly enough to lay down his four stars and resign. His supporters tend to overlook just how meek his public challenge to Rumsfeld was. He never volunteered it. Senator Carl Levin had to extract it from him, slowly and painfully, during a Senate hearing. That's when, in February 2003, Shinseki said he felt that "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed. Forty-eight hours later, it was the derisive...