The term hunker down has appeared in 99 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on April 10 in “Couples Quality Time, All the Time” by Ronda Kaysen:
Until a few weeks ago, Jo Cipolla had no idea that she was married to a pacer, the type of office worker who struts back and forth across a room during business calls, shouting into his AirPods.
“He’s a fairly soft-spoken person, but when he’s conducting business, he’s not,” said Ms. Cipolla, who spends nearly 24 hours a day inside the 800-square-foot Murray Hill apartment she shares with Luke Rossiter, her husband of five years, as they hunker down during the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr. Rossiter, 32, who works in finance, is used to spending his days in an office in Connecticut, one with a door that closes, where he can pace in peace. And Ms. Cipolla, 32, a marketing director for SquareFoot, a commercial real estate company, usually works out of an office in Midtown.
Throughout the coronavirus outbreak, my mom and I have cooked numerous dishes for older people we know. We made lasagna, cake, soup, various treats, vegetable plates, and more. We do so to promote them to quarantine and eliminate any reason for them to leave the house. My mom also buys groceries for her parents and older friends. I try to lighten up my grandparents by calling them. I do other types of community service within my girl scout troop, including fundraisers, making blankets and for animals in shelters, and caroling to elders. On our own, my mom and I hand out water and granola bars to homeless people. The quote “it’s better to give than to receive” does have some truth. If you are in a place to give, then give, so someone in need gets help.
As the world is going through a pandemic, our school decided to send a care package to three different hospitals in South Korea (that is where I live). We donated snacks, drinks, shampoo, soap and handmade cards. I am also growing my hair so I can donate it to make wigs for children with cancer. During easter our family and some other people brought masks and gave it to others in need.
Recently, my sister and I realized that our bookcases were full of books we had not read in years, either because we had already read them, or because they were children’s books. With all the free time we had over the weekend, we decided to sort through our books and decide which ones to donate. We each ended up with huge piles of books, and we organized them into categories. At this point, we could have donated all of the books to some organization. However, we wanted to know exactly where our books were going so we could feel the effect of the deed more. My mom posted pictures of all of our books on the “Moms of New Rochelle” Facebook group with the caption “free books.” She instantly began receiving messages from mothers who said their children were running out of books to read since the libraries are now closed. We messaged back and forth with some of the mothers, suggesting books for their children based on their ages and interests. Every mother expressed gratitude; one even asked how she could repay us, telling us she could send us gloves if we wanted. We refused, partly because we did not need gloves, but also partly because the good feeling we got from doing the deed was sufficient pay.
During the coronavirus epidemic my church has supported homeless people by giving them food and items like a mask, hand sanitizer, and blankets to stay safe. Homeless people right now need as much help as possible to stay healthy during the pandemic. They don’t have the money or the resources to stay afloat. I believe with everything that my church does can help them.
Since I can remember, my family’s value system has been based on volunteering and helping others. I don’t remember a season where my temple congregation was running an annual charity drive that my family did not help execute. Throughout my life I have renovated parks, run food donation trips, and organized clothing drives. Not only were these roles expected of me, it felt natural to spend my time giving to others. During the high holidays, I had the opportunity to donate over 500 bags of food to our local food kitchen with my youth group. Giving to others helped me realize that life was much bigger than what was right in front of me. The action of providing help, health and happiness to others filled me with a joy I had never experienced. I am lucky enough to be able to give onto others and it is one of the most valuable gifts one can achieve.
One of my friends has an upcoming Bar Mitzvah. Many kids do a mitzvah protect for their Bar/Bat Mitzvah. A mitzvah project is a project that helps other people. My friend chose to do his at the Jewish Relief Agency (JRA). At the JRA, once a month, people come to a warehouse and help pack boxes with food. Then people deliver the boxes to people who need the food. I often went to help him pack and deliver boxes with him. I think that the act was incredibly beneficial to me because It helped me realize how many people need help in this world. This experience was also really fun. That made me realize that helping others can be as exciting for you as it is for the person you are helping sometimes
I haven’t really been able to do too many things for people other than texting and calling people to let them know I’ve been thinking of them. I have been trying to make an effort to talk to people I don’t normally talk with, just offering a fun conversation to distract from the world. An act I have experienced is people I don’t normally talk to reaching out to talk to me, and that meant a lot, and that is what inspired me to start doing the same.
We know that the COVID crisis has dramatically affected many lives around the world. Codecademy is committed to doing what we can to help. We started last month, pledging to give away 10,000 student scholarships. To date, we’ve actually given away 100,000 scholarships and heard inspiring stories from learners around the globe. The response has blown us away, which is why we’ve decided to turn our attention to workers impacted by COVID-19 — and we want to give our customers the opportunity to help, too.
We know that students are not the only group that has been affected by this pandemic. Millions of people have lost jobs or been furloughed. We plan to do our part to help these affected workers too — and involve our community of learners along the way. That’s why, for a limited time, we’ll be matching every single Pro membership purchase with five Pro memberships for affected workers. We plan to give up to 100,000 Pro memberships to workers in need.
Learning something new can provide a welcome distraction and sense of empowerment during this challenging time. We’ve been so inspired by early feedback from membership recipients who are taking this time to learn new skills and develop their careers.
Alan from Tupelo, Mississippi tells us, “Pro is helping to give purpose to my days during this time of uncertainty. I’ve always had a desire to learn more about coding and to expand my skills; having the time and access to Codecademy is giving me hope.” And Tyanna from Georgia says, “I think this pandemic has inspired me to learn how to code more because now is the perfect time to use technology to combat this.”
We’ll be tracking the progress towards our 100,000 Pro membership donation goal right here, but we need your support. Learn how you can help us give Codecademy Pro to 100,000 impacted workers.
For an illustrated feature in The Times Book Review, the artist Will Sutton took childhood favorites like “The Snowy Day,” “Charlotte’s Web” and “Curious George” and recast them in a “brand-new, contemporary light.” The image above is just one example.
What are your favorite childhood books? Choose one and describe for us in the comments how you might update or reimagine the plot, characters, setting or conflict in some new way that reflects our contemporary world.
Then, take a look at the related article to see how this artist has reimagined five other famous books.
Find many more ways to use our Picture Prompt feature in this lesson plan. You can find all our Picture Prompts in this column.
2. uninterested because of frequent exposure or indulgence
3. very sophisticated especially because of surfeit; versed in the ways of the world
_________
The word blasé has appeared in 41 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Feb. 25 in the Opinion essay “Wall Street Gets Worried About the Coronavirus” by Ruchir Sharma:
The big surprise was not that global markets fell sharply this week on fears of the coronavirus, but that it took so long for them to wake up to the threat. Before Monday, Wall Street was full of instant experts in epidemiology predicting — on the basis of widely circulated charts showing that the number of new cases had peaked in China — that “it’s over.”
…. Until last week, Wall Street was unusually blasé about the coronavirus too, and had reacted with far less alarm than it did during any of the eight global contagions since World War II. Not only had market players been lulled into complacency by easy money and the long calm of the bull market, but they also began this year in a state of unbridled optimism. The buzzword on Wall Street was “melt-up,” suggesting stocks could rise as fast in 2020 as they normally fall in a meltdown.
Above is an image related to one of the news stories we followed over the past week. Do you know what it shows? At the bottom of this quiz, you’ll find the answer.
Have you been paying attention to the news recently? See how many of these 10 questions you can get right.
Are you the kind of person who makes goals, plans and resolutions? What do you tend to do if they don’t work out?
Would you say you’re more likely to learn from what went wrong and try again — or do you tend to give the whole idea up entirely?
In “Tear It Up and Start Again,” Harry Guinness writes about second (and third and fourth) tries, in writing and in life:
I’m a big fan of awful first drafts. All of my writing (even this article) starts with an incriminatingly bad first draft, riddled with typos and clichés, grammatical errors and half-finished sentences. No one else sees those drafts. I tear up that awful first draft and start again — and that’s when things start to click. That’s when sentences start to flow coherently, when ideas and themes make sense, and when the real work gets done.
Too often, when it comes to self-improvement, we create idealized, top-down systems with unnatural rules and regulations. We naïvely assume that we will somehow stick to our rigid plans when life gets random and hard, throwing unavoidable chaos and crises into the mix. Monday might be leg day in the gym, but if your kid falls off her bike and needs stitches, your carefully calibrated eight-week squat plan isn’t going to get a look.
It’s not just sudden shock events that bring our optimistic plans and productivity systems crashing down; it’s also the inevitable creep of time and clutter that gets most of them. It sounds like a great idea to keep your inbox empty, responding to or archiving every email as soon as you’ve read it, but as soon as one message lingers for a few days, the whole thing can start to collapse. One email becomes two becomes 10. The strict rules you’re now ignoring, rather than freeing you to be productive as planned, just stress you out. Within a few weeks, your inbox is back to being as bad as it ever was — if not worse.
Really, the problem isn’t that plans fail, it’s what we do when they fail. When we miss a day or two at the gym, or order takeout when we meant to cook, most of us just shrug, give up entirely, and say, “Well, there’s always next year,” or we find another milestone to look forward to, and we repeat the whole embarrassing process over again.
He continues:
When a plan or resolution fails, the solution isn’t to dismiss it and try a new, equally rigid prescription next year or next time. It’s to build on what worked, ruthlessly cut what didn’t and start straight away on a much-improved second draft. Trying to run three miles every day while eating nothing but raw vegetables might be a terrible idea — but running a few days a week isn’t.
Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
What kinds of personal-improvement goals and resolutions are you most likely to make? How often do they go according to plan?
Do you tend to abandon an idea that hasn’t worked, or do you go back, improve it and try again?
Tell us about a time when you tore up a plan, a draft or a resolution of some kind and started again — but this time found a better way. Why didn’t the first plan work? How did you tweak it? What happened as a result? What did you learn from the experience?
In what aspects of your life have you built a system that works for you, one that “fits in to your life and excites you, and that can handle both the mundane and the madness of daily living”? What advice can you offer others?
Though this article uses the concept of “first drafts” as a metaphor for any kind of initial attempt, it also focuses on how allowing yourself literal “awful first drafts” in writing can free you up. Have you ever had the experience the piece describes in which, thanks to a second draft, “You learn what the essay you were writing was really about, what points you were trying to make and the conclusion you were reaching toward”? How often do you do second — or even third or fourth — drafts of written work?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
By Emily Glassberg Sands, VP of Data Science at Coursera, and Marianne Sorba, Data Scientist at Coursera
Since we launched the Coronavirus Response Initiative on March 12, more than 2,600 colleges and universities around the world have activated Coursera for Campus programs to take learning online and minimize student disruption. We’re humbled by the global response and are working hard to be even more useful to universities who need to move online quickly.
As universities go live using our offering, they urgently need an easy solution to help identify courses on Coursera that most closely match each course in their on-campus catalogues. Manual curation is too slow when it’s to be done across thousands of universities and millions of on-campus courses, especially when faculty and staff are already stretched thin. Two weeks ago, the Data Science team at Coursera started developing a natural language processing solution to automate the matching and minimize the need for human curation.
Today, we are announcing CourseMatch, a machine learning solution that ingests a school’s on-campus course catalogue and matches each course to the most relevant courses in Coursera’s catalogue of 3,800 courses. It can ingest catalogues in more than 100 languages and map them to the most relevant courses in English or in any of the 50+ languages (translated and subtitled) available on Coursera. This enables universities in the US and internationally to quickly deliver relevant courses to their students.
The solution has already matched more than 2.6 million on-campus courses across 1,800 schools to courses on Coursera — from Johnson C. Smith University in the US to Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona in Spain to the AICTE curricula in India.
Here are a few examples of mapping for institutions based on publicly available information:
CourseMatch returns up to five most relevant courses on Coursera for each course in the on-campus catalogue. It also returns the relevance score, which is normalized within college or university with higher scores representing stronger matches.
We are excited to see that the solution is already helping schools respond to students’ needs. According to Terik Tidwell, managing director of the Smith Tech Innovation Center, Johnson C Smith University, “Coursera is helping us to quickly take our programs virtual while maintaining program integrity and quality.”
Colleges and universities can access the solution directly at CourseMatch and search for their institution’s catalogue. If your catalogue is not yet among the 1,800 available, email a CSV of your offerings to coursematch@coursera.org and your catalogue will be mapped and included on CourseMatch within 2 business days.
Our goal is to help every college and university in the world move online as quickly and easily as possible. This is our first iteration of CourseMatch, and we look forward to refining our machine learning models based on your feedback. We invite you to try this solution in your efforts to quickly scale programs online during the COVID-19 crisis.
We’re passionate about our community of learners, including students that use Codecademy in the classroom and at home. At the beginning of March, we started to hear about school closures in the United States and around the world due to COVID-19. As we closed our offices and shifted to remote work ourselves, we knew we wanted to do something to continue to make education more accessible.
On March 14, we launched a scholarship program with a goal of giving away 10,000 Codecademy Pro scholarships to students affected by the pandemic. We were blown away by the response. We hit 10,000 within the first 3 days. One month later, we’ve awarded over 100,000Pro scholarships to students at 15,000 institutions in 147 countries around the globe.
In fact, we were so inspired by our efforts to help students that we’ve now turned our attention to helping affected workers — many of whom reached out to us to share stories of how COVID-19 has affected them.
During our student scholarship campaign, it was exciting to see how teachers and students, empowered by our scholarship program, were able to use Codecademy to continue learning during this challenging time.
Today my students met via @BlackboardK12 Collaborate where I was able to check in w/them and share modules on @CodeHS and @Codecademy. 22 students logged in, happily interacting with one another via chat/audio/video and responding to polls, shared files, etc. #EnterToLearnpic.twitter.com/yL4tlcVDt1
It’s also been inspiring for us to see just how quickly this program grew — and how global it became. So, to celebrate our 100,000 scholarship learners, we thought we’d share some of the data and insights from the program that we were most excited about.
Reaching 100,000 scholarships
When we launched the scholarship program one month ago we set a goal of giving away 10,000 scholarships. It seemed like an ambitious goal, and we were hopeful we’d meet it — or at least come close.
The Codecademy team wanted to get something out by Monday, March 16 to support the students and teachers impacted by school closures. We banded together and, within 48 hours, launched the scholarship program on a Saturday afternoon.
The following Monday, we found ourselves constantly refreshing our data to check how many learners had signed up for the scholarship. When we saw 50 students from the same organization in Argentina sign up within the same hour, we were seeing an example of good network effects. Students and teachers were sharing resources on how to continue learning.
By the end of Monday, three days from our initial launch date, we were shocked to learn there were 5,000 scholarship sign ups — already halfway towards the goal we initially set for ourselves. We were faced with a decision: we could cap our scholarship program at 10,000 or keep going. We decided to keep going and, one month later, we’ve given away 100,000 scholarships.
Connecting with students around the globe
The most surprising part for us is how international our learners are. Two out of three scholarship learners come from outside of the United States. At times, the top city for scholarship sign ups can be as near as New York City, where Codecademy HQ is located, and as far as Lagos and the Maldives.
Today, we have scholarship learners coming from 147 countries, 11,000 cities, and 15,000 organizations around the world. These learners join the 45 million other learners using Codecademy. Together (but apart), our learners are taking courses on web development, data science, game design, and more.
We are living through strange and scary times. Being able to support our learners during this time has given the team at Codecademy something to rally around. Rather than nerve-inducing charts projecting the growth of virus, it’s felt comforting to see network effects, community clusters, and growth rates contextualized in a positive light.
Support for learning from home
While we’ve now turned our attention to supporting unemployed and furloughed workers affected by COVID-19, we still have a growing collection of resources for students. Our Learn From Home hub features a variety of programs and resources for learners. Plus, we’ve partnered with a number of partners on the Learn From Home Club, offering resources and special programs.
Here at Codecademy, we’re doing what we can to ensure that learning doesn’t stop during this challenging time. Thanks for joining us!
Before you read this article, take a look at a screenshot from this shark’s Twitter account. (Yes, the great white shark, Katharine, has a Twitter account. We’ll get to that later.)
Image
Credit…Twitter.com
What do you notice? What do you wonder?
What can you infer about this shark and why she is important just from the information on her Twitter account?
1. What facts do you learn about Katharine in the first six paragraphs of this article? How many of them were you able to glean from the image of her Twitter account?
2. What happened between May 12, 2019 and April 4, 2020? What does it tell scientists?
3. What are some possible explanations for Katharine’s silence?
4. What is the least likely explanation, according to an expert interviewed in the article? Why?
5. How, according to Chris Fischer, the founder of Ocearch, does the popularizing of ocean research, via Twitter accounts, T-shirt sales and the like, contribute to a serious campaign?
6. Do you agree? Do campaigns like this one make you feel a sense of ownership, or stewardship, for the ocean? What other campaigns like it, focused on nature, animals, the environment or science have you come across?
Going Further
How do scientists tag these sharks? The Times has reported on Ocearch many times in the past, including in this 2012 piece, and in the related video above.
Once you see how it’s done, take a look at the Ocearch tracker, via which you can see not only sharks but also whales, seals, dolphins and turtles as well. Spend some time studying it, zooming in and out, and perhaps choosing some of the individual animals featured in the “recent pings” list and following their paths.
Then, ask yourself the questions we pose weekly in our What’s Going On in This Graph? activity: What do you notice?What are you curious about that comes from this data?
Finally, if you could tag something, whether in the natural or the man-made world, the way these scientists do to sharks and other sea creatures, what would you tag? What would you hope to learn from the resulting data? Why?
